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  • The Price of Time

  • The Real Story of Interest
  • By: Edward Chancellor
  • Narrated by: Luis Soto
  • Length: 15 hrs and 35 mins
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars (23 ratings)

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The Price of Time

By: Edward Chancellor
Narrated by: Luis Soto
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Publisher's Summary

Brought to you by Penguin.

The first audiobook of the next crisis.

All economic and financial activities take place across time. Interest coordinates these activities. The story of capitalism is thus the story of interest: the price that individuals, companies and nations pay to borrow money.

In The Price of Time, Edward Chancellor traces the history of interest from its origins in ancient Mesopotamia, through debates about usury in Restoration Britain and John Law's ill-fated Mississippi scheme, to the global credit booms of the twenty-first century. We generally assume that high interest rates are harmful, but Chancellor argues that, whenever money is too easy, financial markets become unstable. He takes the story to the present day, when interest rates have sunk lower than at any time in the five millennia since they were first recorded—including the extraordinary appearance of negative rates in Europe and Japan—and highlights how this has contributed to profound economic insecurity and financial fragility.

Chancellor reveals how extremely low interest rates not only create asset price inflation but are also largely responsible for weak economic growth, rising inequality, zombie companies, elevated debt levels and the pensions crises that have afflicted the West in recent years—conditions under which economies cannot possibly thrive. At the same time, easy money in China has inflated an epic real estate bubble, accompanied by the greatest credit and investment boom in history. As the global financial system edges closer to yet another crisis, Chancellor shows that only by understanding interest can we hope to face the challenges ahead.

©2022 Edward Chancellor (P)2022 Penguin Audio

Critic Reviews

"The Price of Time is highly readable. The timing and telling of this economic horror story make it gripping and persuasive." (Emma Duncan)

"Is it possible to write a highly engaging history of the world going back to Hammurabi, unfolding along the way a bitingly comprehensive explanation for its problems today, all told through a single character? Apparently yes. Edward Chancellor has done it, an achievement all the more notable since his drama is built around a character so unheroic on its surface: his "price of time" is interest rates. This is a timely, vitally important and hugely readable book." (Ruchir Sharma)

"Edward Chancellor has produced not just a brilliant explainer of the value of money and time but a hugely engaging history of the greatest problem confronting markets today. The Price of Time is a must read - a copy should be on the desk of everyone who has anything to do with financial markets or wondered why things work as they do." (Merryn Somerset Webb)

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Top 10 favourite books

I read 6-8 books a month & have read just over 1,000 books mostly on economics & finance. This was such a well written book which brings together the history of interest rate theories from a range of economic thought/schools & economists over centuries.

Well done Ed!

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great insights

I found Part 1, on the early history of interest, a bit of a hard slog. Perhaps I should give it another listen.

I found much of the rest of the book thought provoking and insightful. What is a "natural rate of inflation"? In a world of technology driven productivity gains, why shouldn't deflation be the more natural norm? Is central bank dogma about what is "natural", having unintended consequences? Is a fixation on monetary price stabiliy driving financial and economic instability? What determines a "fair" interest rate? Are low interest rates actually stimulatory? Do they encourage economic growth, or do they promote financial shenanigans & speculative behaviour?

These questions and many more are contemplated here. This is a key book for anyone with an interest in monetary theory and macro economics.

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Quite dated

The financial history bits and the section on China is quite good. But just seems like a very dated anti-QE -goldbug-Austrian econ take of the world which probably would have been very successful in the early 2010s. But given how much the covid stimulus has shown that significant fiscal stimulus was actually the issue with low yields and low inflation in the post-GFC era it just seems very anachronistic to have a book long-windedly bemoaning QE policies and barely mentioning fiscal policy at all. Would prefer a bit more focus on the financial history rather than the Austrian economics ideology, might give his other books a go that are more focussed on that.

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