The Price of Time

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the book is magisterial in its scope. He describes the reasons for the current distortion of the markets and why wealth and income disparity were so pronounced in the last 20 years. He lays blame on the Federal Reserve and central banks around the world distorting the markets with low interest rates. You'll want to buy this book and get it the first day available. 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. ... More than 20 years ago, Edward Chancellor's Devil Take the Hindmost supplied readers with one of the most engaging and incisive descriptions of financial manias ever written. That was a hard act to follow, but The Price of Time nicely fills the bill; it is a serious work of political economy that is part comprehensive guide to the world financial system's greatest peril and part literary chocolate torte. Well I'll be darned! 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. At the same time the obvious weight and breadth of his research leads us to his important conclusion: for Heaven's Sake leave interest rates to market forces; manipulation by Central Banks leads to chain linked disasters, another of which may well be imminent.

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.

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. Interest rates haven't simply fallen - they were pushed. And by their pushing, the world's central banks have constructed the hall of mirrors in which every investor has become, of necessity, a speculator. So argues Edward Chancellor in this brilliant chronicle of the most important prices in capitalism. You must read it. It is a masterpiece of history, analysis-and properly understated outrage. I wish The Price of Time were the book that I had written. I am reminded of Keynes' letter to Hayek after reading The Road to Serfdom where he said "In my opinion it is a grand book. We all have the greatest reason to be thankful to you for saying so well what needs so much to be said. .... I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it, and not only in agreement but in a deeply moved agreement" In Chancellor's terrific new book The Price of Time, he argues that well-meaning attempts by central bankers to manage interest rates have brought disaster ... It is no mean task to turn such a dry topic into a lively read, but Chancellor pulls it off. This is not just a worthy successor to his history of financial speculation, Devil Take the Hindmost, but an urgently needed warning. Rock-bottom interest rates were imposed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, and have now lasted so long that they have started to seem almost tolerable. To read this book is to be reacquainted with the bizarre, Alice-in-Wonderland condition of modern finance. ... Anyone who wants a fresh perspective on today's problems - and anyone in Westminster hoping to chart a new economic course as Boris Johnson's successor - needs this book on their summer reading list. The Price of Time is highly readable. The timing and telling of this economic horror story make it gripping and persuasive.

a scholarly perspective of the history of interest and credit since their known origins in ancient Mesopotamia ... a rollicking read in comparison with Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century ... The Price of Time is leavened throughout by touches of humour and an eye for historical curiosities drawn from a huge range of sources.

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