The Ascent of Money

The Ascent of Money

Niall Ferguson

Winning Coalition

Organizations minimize coalitions needed to maintain control.

But how much power did even large shareholders have? Little. When the Company’s directors petitioned the government to be released from their obligation to publish ten-year accounts in 1612 - the date when investors were supposed to be able to withdraw their capital if they chose to - permission was granted and publication of the accounts and the repayment of investors’ capital were both postponed.
Kronos Cycle

Open systems consolidate into monopoly, then repeat.

The fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion comes from the new consumers’ goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates … The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as US Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation - if I may use the biological term - that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.
Information Edge

Knowing what others don't creates competitive advantage.

The first is the role of what is sometimes referred to as asymmetric information. Insiders - those concerned with the management of bubble companies - know much more than the outsiders, whom the insiders want to part from their money. Such asymmetries always exist in business, of course, but in a bubble the insiders exploit them fraudulently.
Measuring Trust

Precise measurement creates infrastructure for distant trust.

What the conquistadors failed to understand is that money is a matter of belief, even faith: belief in the person paying us; belief in the person issuing the money he uses or the institution that honours his cheques or transfers. Money is not metal. It is trust inscribed.