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The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson

Not up to the standards of Ferguson's very good biography of Kissinger. A highly derivative (heh) history of money that jumps around, covers certain eras in depth, others superficially, and others by parroting what other historians have already done better. 

I'll share two glaring examples of "parroting": 

1) The latter part of the book (particularly the portions discussion the late 1990s tech boom, the failures of Enron and the collapse of Long Term Capital) read more like an airplane bookstore business book, summarizing other, better books (see "When Genius Failed" for example) and standard media stories from that era. 

2) Much of the discussion of market bubbles (France's Mississippi Bubble and John Law scandal, the 1929 bubble and crash, etc) contains no original work or research, just regurgitations of standard bubble history books like Mackay's "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" and Kindleberger's "Manias, Panics and Crashes." 

It strikes me that Ferguson did some meaningful original research on Dutch and Italian financial innovations as well as on innovations in insurance and actuarial science in Scotland, but he mailed it in on these other aspects of the book. 

Further, the reader gets the impression that Ferguson may understand many of the conventions of modern finance (eg: Black Scholes pricing models, CDOs, RMBS, interest rate swaps, etc.) but he doesn't understand them well enough to explain them in plain language. 

Finally, a thought about the overconfidence of historians when looking at the past vs their predictions about the future. This work contains many sentences like "It is wholly unsurprising" when event Y follows event X. This is the confident language of the historian who isn't "surprised" by what's going to happen next... because it already happened! It's narrative fallacy combined with epistemic overconfidence, both used to make a "postdiction." But when this author makes *pre*dictions (like the hilariously incorrect "bond insurance companies seem destined to disappear") we see that historians--even epistemically confident ones--know no more about the future than the rest of us.

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