Edward Chancellor is the author of Devil Take the Hindmost- A History of Financial Speculation which has been translated into many languages and was a New York Times Book of the Year. After reading history at Cambridge and Oxford, he worked for Lazard Brothers and until 2014 he was a senior member of the asset allocation team at GMO. He is currently a columnist for Reuters Breakingviews and has contributed to the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, MoneyWeek and the New York Review of Books. In 2008, he received the George Polk Award for financial reporting for his article "Ponzi Nation" in Institutional Investor.
The Price of Time is highly readable. The timing and telling of
this economic horror story make it gripping and persuasive.
*The Times*
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.
*Chairman, Rockefeller International and New York Times bestselling
author*
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.
*Editor-in-Chief, MoneyWeek*
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.
*Sunday Telegraph*
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.
*editor of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer*
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"
*former Chief Economist, Bank for International Settlements*
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.
*Enterprising Investor, Chartered Financial Analysts Institute*
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.
*Jeremy Grantham, Founder and Chief Investment Strategist, GMO
LLC*
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.
*Spectator*
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.
*Thoughts from the Frontline*
Edward Chancellor argues that low interest rates, of the sort that
prevailed since the financial crisis and until this year, are a
catastrophic mistake because, as the great financial journalist
Walter Bagehot wrote, they lead people to "invest their savings in
something impossible - a canal to Kamchatka, a railway to Watchet,
a plan for animating the Dead Sea, a corporation for shipping
skates to the Torrid Zone". Cryptocurrencies are the Kamchatka
canals of today. Their collapse, in Chancellor's view, is just the
beginning of a great unravelling. The book is persuasive, perfectly
timed and, for a work on such a nerdy subject, gripping.
*Times Writers’ Favourite Books of 2022*
a blistering polemic against the evils of artificially low interest
rates. Right on cue, the gravy train of ultra-loose monetary policy
has come to a halt. Perhaps you should therefore not just buy this
book but sell all your stocks ... The Price of Time addresses the
biggest economic question of the past 15 years. Have the
experimental monetary policies pursued by the world's leading
central banks since the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008 been a
miracle cure or an epochal mistake? It situates this contemporary
dilemma in a rich historical context. For this is just the latest
instalment of an ancient debate over the nature and role of
interest in a well-functioning economy. ... Capital allocation has
been distorted; investment risk mispriced; pensions systems
destabilised; social mobility fossilised; and moderate investors
polarised into idle rent-seekers or you-only-live-once speculators.
Chancellor makes a compelling and disturbing case that excessively
loose financial conditions lie behind them all. ... The carnage
being wrought by even the modest increase in borrowing costs so far
in 2022 is not encouraging. At least if you've read this
scintillating book and heeded the infamous Chancellor signal,
you'll know what needs doing when we emerge from the wreckage.
*Reuters*
Chancellor's panoptic survey of the history of interest, and what
classical economists said about it, will not fail to dazzle
*Economist*
a sweeping historical analysis of how our financial system once
again became untethered from the world it is supposed to serve. At
the heart of such derangement, Chancellor argues, is a single
factor: artificially low interest rates. As he reminds us, interest
rates are the most important signal in a market-based economy, "the
universal price" affecting all others. Interest is best defined as
the time value of money, which Chancellor artfully renders as "the
price of time." It is the price that informs every key financial
decision-saving, spending, investing. Suppressing the rate of
interest is a powerful way to boost an economy otherwise bound for
recession, but it is a dangerous one. It is to finance what opiates
are to medicine, a distortion of perception disguised as a cure.
... Chancellor's learned and engrossing history concludes with a
somber warning. Compared with more heavy-handed forms of government
intrusion, central bankers' manipulation of interest rates may seem
rather innocuous, and it is much less likely to provoke howling
objections from ordinary citizens. But more than any other, it
threatens the efficiency and integrity of the free-enterprise
system. Behind the price of time is the priceless right of
freedom.
*Wall Street Journal*
every bit as gripping as any science fiction novel. It's an amazing
book ... truly magisterial in scope
*Thoughts from the Frontline*
Superb! A worthy successor to Devil Take the Hindmost.
*author of The Delusion of Crowds*
Praise for Devil Take the Hindmost
*---*
An admirably researched and very well written account of
speculative insanity from the earliest times to, let no one doubt,
the present.
*J.K. Galbraith*
Entertaining, useful, admirable scholarship... Chancellor seems to
have read everything.
*New York Times Book Review*
Praise for Crunch-Time for Credit?
*---*
There was no single, dominant, astonishing voice in the wilderness
in the debate on the credit crunch, but... Edward Chancellor, an
economic historian, foresaw almost everything.
*Daily Telegraph*
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