The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World

Neither dense enough to be an actual ‘history of the world' level work, but neither light enough that you can dismiss it out of hand.

This book's fundamental argument is that poverty is not due to rapacious investors always on the hunt for more money to line their pockets, but instead due to a lack of such investors and institutions. Pretty bold argument, I have to admit. How does Mr. Ferguson back it up?

TL;DR, he doesn't. He mentions an isolated tribe in South America that is used to subsistence farming and hunting-gathering, and when they roamed out to make contact with the ‘civilized' world for the first time in history, they became a tribe of beggars. I failed to realize how this argument of money creation made any sense, and it is passages like these which frustrated me immensely, which do not make any sense even in context.

This argument is never directly (or indirectly) answered in what was supposed to be a ‘complete history' of the financial world. In my opinion, the title is very misleading - the book is simply an elaborate history of the biggest bubbles and bursts of the financial world - including the Spanish defeat of the Mayan empires causing a crash in gold/silver prices in the 16th and 17th centuries, the Latin American defaults of the 19th and 20th centuries, the Great Depression of 1929, and the so-called ‘second depression' of 2007-08. Mr. Ferguson credits the existence of institutions such as hedge funds and the Federal Reserve (US) for exacerbating such crises, which doesn't necessarily help his argument of the existence of such vast amounts of virtual layers of money somehow helping the common man's survival. In the course of describing such crises, he writes up the only good parts of the book - where you can actually see the modern-day forms of bonds, equities, hedge funds and insurance claims being formed.

Above all, you are supposed to learn something new from a book which totes itself as a history book. The only things one can take away from the book is that property is not a risk-free investment, you should have a diversified portfolio in order to make more money, saving/spending in excess is bad, and that the stock market runs on human whims, so never take it too seriously. All of which I already knew.