Money? It’s only human

The Ascent of Money, by Niall Fergusson

New from Niall Ferguson: the book of the film, or rather, of the series. At any moment now his financial history of the world will take to the small screen and emerge on Channel Four. Programmers and publishers have learned to synchronise these things.

It will be a brave effort, all the same, because finance is not exactly popular just now and has always been unresponsive to film. When Bank Rate comes down, television news producers fall back on a stock picture of the Bank of England, looking like a cheese-mould with a graph imposed on it.

Ferguson helps them out by setting scenes. His book takes us to Chongqing, on the banks of the mighty earth-brown River Yangtse, to meet two of the new breed of Chinese billionaires — she is a property tycoon, he exports motor-bikes.

We move on to Betty’s coffee-stall in El Alto, Bolivia, and watch women in folkloric costume — bowler hats at jaunty angles — as they line up to make payments on their loans. In the Old Town of Edinburgh, Greyfriars Kirkyard is a picturesque setting for the Scottish widows whose mutual fund became a life assurance office and grew up to be taken over for £6 billion by Lloyds Bank. The widows turned out to be cannier than the bankers, and better-looking, too, to judge by the girl in the advertisement — whose father, so Ferguson tells us, is the actor, Roger Moore.

Forward to Memphis, Tennessee, famous for blue suede shoes, barbecues and bankruptcies. Memphis is where Americans go to go bust. One way to achieve this is to default on your mortgage. Another is to buy the worthless mortgage, temptingly wrapped up.