TheAscentofMoney_AFinancialHistoryoftheW.epub - (EPUB全文下载)

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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
 
Chapter 1 - Dreams of Avarice
Chapter 2 - Of Human Bondage
Chapter 3 - Blowing Bubbles
Chapter 4 - The Return of Risk
Chapter 5 - Safe as Houses
Chapter 6 - From Empire to Chimerica
 
Afterword: The Descent of Money
Acknowledgements
Notes
List of Illustrations
Index
ALSO BY NIALL FERGUSON
Paper and Iron The House of Rothschild The Pity of War The Cash Nexus Empire Colossus The War of the World
Introduction
Bread, cash, dosh, dough, loot, lucre, moolah, readies, the where-withal: call it what you like, money matters. To Christians, the love of it is the root of all evil. To generals, it is the sinews of war; to revolutionaries, the shackles of labour. But what exactly is money? Is it a mountain of silver, as the Spanish conquistadors thought? Or will mere clay tablets and printed paper suffice? How did we come to live in a world where most money is invisible, little more than numbers on a computer screen? Where did money come from? And where did it all go?
Last year (2007) the income of the average American (just under $34,000) went up by at most 5 per cent.1 But the cost of living rose by 4.1 per cent. So in real terms Mr Average actually became just 0.9 per cent better off. Allowing for inflation, the income of the median household in the United States has in fact scarcely changed since 1990, increasing by just 7 per cent in eighteen years.2 Now compare Mr Average’s situation with that of Lloyd Blankfein, chief executive officer at Goldman Sachs, the investment bank. In 2007 he received $68.5 million in salary, bonus and stock awards, an increase of 25 per cent on the previous year, and roughly two thousand times more than Joe Public earned. That same year, Goldman Sachs’s net revenues of $46 billion exceeded the entire gross domestic product (GDP) of more than a hundred countries, including Croatia, Serbia and Slovenia; Bolivia, Ecuador and Guatemala; Angola, Syria and Tunisia. The bank’s total assets for the first time passed the $1 trillion mark.3 Yet Lloyd Blankfein is far from being the financial world’s highest earner. The veteran hedge fund manager George Soros made $2.9 billion. Ken Griffin of Citadel, like the founders of two other leading hedge funds, took home more than $2 billion. Meanwhile nearly a billion people around the world struggle to get by on just $1 a day.4
Angry that the world is so unfair? Infuriated by fat-cat capitalists and billion-bonus bankers? Baffled by the yawnin ............

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