Niall Ferguson’s meditations on the function of monetary systems allow the reader to realize how relative the actual purchasing value of money is. From the back cover of the paperback: "Bread, cash, dough, loot: Call it what you like, it matters. To Christians, love of it is the root of all evil. To generals, it’s the sinews of war. To revolutionaries, it’s the chains of labor. But...Ferguson shows that finance is in fact the foundation of human progress...The evolution of credit and debt, in his view, was as important as any technological innovation in the rise of civilization." The book is loaded with a lot of factual detail so that the reader can follow the money in its long historical trail as an inscribed stone tablet, precious metal, a coin, as a paper currency, and as digital marker in cyber space.   posted Oct 25, 2012 at 1:49PM