Niall Ferguson's The Ascent of Money is a first-rate historical study of the growth of the modern financial system -- and a look ahead at what might happen now that banks like Lehman Brothers, Northern Rock and Bear Stearns literally went to the brink. In a step-by-step, chapter-by-chapter approach, he outlines how different foundations of the modern financial system - like the credit markets and the housing market - "evolved" over time in response to certain needs and conditions. In fact, Ferguson suggests that the entire modern history of the world can be viewed in purely financial terms.
For me, perhaps the most interesting part of The Ascent of Money was the Afterword, in which he lays out the fundamental features shared by any industry and a truly "evolutionary" system:
(1) Genes in the form of certain business practices that can be passed on to successive generations
(2) The potential for spontaneous mutation (i.e. innovation)
(3) Competition for scarce resources, leading to a survival of the fittest scenario
(4) A mechanism for natural selection (i.e. how the market allocates resources based on over- or under-performance)
(5) The potential for speciation, leading to new "species" of financial institutions
(6) The ever-present threat of extinction, as species die out altogether
If you'd rather not dig through (a best-selling) 350 pages of financial history, you can also watch a four-hour video series over at PBS. Or buy a DVD for $24.99... These days, Niall Ferguson is just about everywhere.
hiiiiiiiiii
dear friend's i read your comment's and post's they are nice and effective but i want to know more about something if you tell me some more imfo. or data about this it's very nice to me and thank's a lot dear.............
Just as some species become extinct in nature, some new financing techniques may prove to be less successful than others.
The remark was made to the US Congress in September by Anthony Ryan, assistant Treasury secretary. Only when we know the true magnitude of the current financial crisis will we be able fully to appreciate the significance of his words.
Analogies between finance and evolution are in themselves nothing new. "The survival of the fittest" is a phrase that aggressive traders like to use. "It's Darwinian out there" is a stock utterance by hedge fund managers after an especially tough week. Back in November 2005, a conference hosted by Goldman Sachs, the investment bank, was entitled "The Evolution of Excellence". Yet, as became clear at that gathering, when financial practitioners use such terms they seldom understand just how apposite they are. A long-run historical analysis of the development of financial services, going all the way back to the days of Charles Darwin, strongly suggests that evolutionary forces are as much at work in the realm of money as they are in the natural world.
====================
sam
====================
realestate-realestate
Posted by: praveen | June 17, 2009 at 10:48 AM