Hacker Cinema
The Ascent of Money
2008 · TV series · documentary · 49 min episodes · 1 season
Historian Niall Ferguson tells the story of money and the rise of global finance. Bringing context and understanding to the current economic crisis, he reveals how the history of finance has been punctuated by gut-wrenching crashes.
7 positive1 negativefrom 8 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
Videos commenters linked
From YouTube links in the comments below. Most are clips and trailers; “Full” means the uploader says so.
8 comments on Hacker News
I'm assuming you mean that want to understand monetary policy, what makes money trustworthy/valuable, inflation, etc. Here are a few books that I thought were good, but I also wish I knew about a single better resource:
- The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson (This also has a documentary)
- Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed or Fail by Ray Dalio (not directly about money but does a good job at explaining reserve currencies, types of currencies, debt cycles, inflation, all of which are related)
- What is Money, anyway? [0]
[0] https://www.lynalden.com/what-is-money/
While I haven't read the book, the corresponding multi-part documentary "The Ascent of Money" is a really good introduction to what money is and how it evolved over the past centuries. It's also free on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAbVltqySrA
That’s exactly how I felt about a previous book of his, The Ascent of Money, which was released at the height of the financial crisis in 2008 and then rushed into production as a TV documentary. One review accurately called it “rushed and uneven”. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ascent_of_Money)
Neil Ferguson's "The Ascent of Money" (book and mini-series) is a good primer.
Since you mention studying the history of money, Niall Ferguson's Ascent of Money documentary is excellent: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Xx_5PuLIzc
Is it just me, or does he not actually make a case for austerity here? He makes a case for the government balancing its books, but there are other ways (such as higher taxes and defaults) which are hardly touched on here.
I've seen Niall Ferguson's TV series (the ascent of money etc.) which are quite good, but this article seems dangerously ideological to me.
I have been reading a lot about the history of money, finance and economics. It is a topic I find interesting. All of the biographies about money mention Fibonacci.
I would recommend the following (you can get most of these books in kindle edition and most of the documentaries are online in one form or another:
Web:
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibonacci
* Liber Abaci, his most famous book: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liber_Abaci
* History of money: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_money
* More on Liber Abaci: http://liberabaci.blogspot.com/
* More again on Liber Abaci: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/software/java/fibonacci/liber-abaci.html
* This American Life episode on the invention of money: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/423/the-invention-of-money
Books:
* The Ascent of Money: http://www.amazon.com/Ascent-Money-Financial-History-World/dp/0143116177
* The Origins of Value (hard to find): http://www.amazon.com/Origins-Value-Financial-Innovations-Created/dp/0195175719/
* History of Money (I haven't read this yet, but plan to): http://www.amazon.com/History-Money-Ancient-Times-Present/dp/0708317170/
Documentaries:
* NOVA's 'The History of Money': http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/history-money.html
* BBC's 'The Ascent of Money' series: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ascent_of_Money
* The Secret History of the Credit Card: this was PBS again, can't find it online but if you Google around I am sure you could find it somewhere.
There is a lot more out there - if you follow links, wikipedia, amazon recommendations and reviews etc. you will find a lot of good sources. A fascinating topic and fascinating characters involved in the creation of money (like the Rothschilds and their involvement in toppling governments and funding conflict).
Every financial instrument we use today - from bonds, stocks, notes, interest, credit, debit, trade finance instruments etc. have an interesting story around their origin.
Fibonacci bought over the Arabic number system, base 10 notation (which makes interest easier to calculate), and set formulas for conversion, standard units of weight etc. It was a bit like an early draft standard for merchant traders.
With the history, you soon realize that money is just a promissory note or a debt, and that all money is borrowed. With a wallet full of notes what you have is a promise from the US Government that the notes can be readily exchanged.
The more recent fascination with gold-backed currency seems a bit ridiculous if you understand the history and why we went into gold and then back out of it.
Currency (at least metal coins) was, at first, distributed and did not depend on banks for transfer. Banks came about later on, as an additional help in some business and private money handling. Currently banks are pretty much necessary for two reasons: network effect -- everybody has bank account and expects you to interface with it, and better loan rates -- banks can give loans at lower percent than small time lenders, thanks to pooling of risk and economies of scale of processing.
It is expected some Bitcoin users (be it private or institutional) will become quite bank-alike in some future (as per various posts on blogs and HN in discussions of Bitcoin).
In short, Bitcoin doesn't remove banks -- neither need for them, nor ability to operate them. They just haven't moved into this space yet.
EDIT:
first episode of ``The Ascent of Money'' [1], `Dreams of avarice', explains how banking, as we know it, came to be.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_ascent_of_money