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Tuesday, July 23, 2013

The ascent of hooey



January 6, 2010 by · Leave a Comment 

By Robert K. Landis, The Golden Sextant

On October 16, 1929, Irving Fisher, Professor of Economics at Yale University, made a famous prediction: “Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.” [1] The prediction, coming as it did less than two weeks before Black Tuesday, ultimately ruined the popular reputation of this celebrity economist. On November 13, 2008, some two months after the Federal takeover of Fannie Mae (September 7) and the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers (September 13), Niall Ferguson, Professor of History at Harvard University, published The Ascent of Money (Penguin Press, 2008). Only time will tell whether this book, a spirited defense of the monetary status quo directed at the general public, will do for this celebrity historian what his stock price prediction did for Professor Fisher.

The Ascent of Money bills itself as A Financial History of the World. A pleasant, undemanding read, it brilliantly, albeit unwittingly, demonstrates why the English speaking world is so stupid about money: our elites wish it so.

A Champion from Central Casting

The author, as the flyleaf of his book reminds us, is not just some academic hack. He is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard. He’s also a best-selling author whose titles include Paper and Iron, The House of Rothschild, The Pity of War, The Cash Nexus, Empire, Colossus and The War of the World. He “…writes regularly for newspapers and magazines all over the world. He has written and presented four highly successful television documentary series for Channel 4: Empire, American Colossus, The War of the World and, most recently, The Ascent of Money.”

In short, he is precisely the man to whom you would turn if you needed a credible voice to calm the mass mind and defend the basis of your power, if an unfolding crisis had conclusively revealed the fraud beneath it all, and was showing signs of getting out of hand. And The Ascent of Money is precisely what you’d get, if your man delivered the goods.

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