The Price of Time
The Price of Time explores the history of interest and its essential function in determining how capital is allocated and priced. In this book, financial historian and journalist Edward Chancellor traces the history of interest and 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. He 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. 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.
PRAISE FOR THE BOOK
”You must read it. It is a masterpiece of history, analysis—and properly understated outrage.”
—James Grant, editor of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer
”I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it, and not only in agreement but in a deeply moved agreement.”
—William White, former Chief Economist, Bank for International Settlements
”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, Chairman, Rockefeller International and New York Times-bestselling author
”Besides being a first-rate economic historian, Chancellor is also a master wordsmith; almost unique among serious finance books, The Price of Time serves well as bedtime reading.”
—William J. Bernstein, author of A Splendid Exchange, in Enterprising Investor
“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, Editor-in-Chief, MoneyWeek
"Chancellor has done the nearly impossible: He has made a potentially dreary topic—interest rates—into a witty, philosophical and highly entertaining story crammed with historical anecdotes starting with the Babylonians and ending yesterday."
—Jeremy Grantham, Founder and Chief Investment Strategist, GMO LLC.
"I'm not sure I've ever read a book on finance where I have agreed with all of it but that time has now come."
—Russell Napier, investment strategist and author of The Anatomy of the Bear