The Origins of Value The Financial Innovations that Created Modern Capital Markets

From the invention of interest in Mesopotamia and the origin of paper money in China, to the creation of mutual funds, inflation-indexed bonds, and global financial securities, here is a sweeping survey of financial innovations that have changed the world.
Written by a distinguished group of experts--including Robert Shiller, Niall Ferguson, Valerie Hansen, and many others--and wonderfully illustrated with over one hundred color photographs of landmark financial documents (including the first paper money), The Origins of Value traces the
evolution of finance through 4,000 years of history. Readers see how and why many of our most important financial tools and institutions--loans, interest rates, stocks, bonds, mutual funds, the corporation, and the New York Stock Exchange, to name a few--came into being. We see, for instance, how
ancient Rome developed an early form of equity finance that resembles the modern corporation and read about the first modern corporation--the Dutch East India Company--and its innovative means of financing the exploration and expansion of European business ventures around the globe. We also meet
remarkable financial innovators, such as the 13th century Italian Fibonacci of Pisa, whose mathematics of money became the foundation for later developments in the technology of Western European finance (and may explain why the West surpassed the East in financial sophistication). And we even
discover a still-surviving "perpetuity" dating from the Dutch Age of Reason--an instrument that has been paying interest since the mid-17th century.
Placing our current age of financial revolution in fascinating historical perspective, The Origins of Valuetells a remarkable story of invention, illuminating many key episodes in the course of financial history.

The essays in this volume are written by a distinguished and adventurous set of historians and economists who have been willing, in many cases, to step beyond their typical field of inquiry and explore the historical foundations of financial innovation. The essays are motivated by the need to place our current age of finanical revolution in historical perspective. The continuing process of financial innovation, as sophisticated as it may seem to most of the modern world, is in fact built on surprisingly few basic principles: the inter-temporal transfer of value through time, the ability to contract on future outcomes, and the negotiability of claims. This book traces the evolution of these basic principles of finance through 3,000 years of history - to the dawn of writing. The methodology that is used can be thought of as financial archaeology in the sense that the authors focus on primary survived financial documents to draw their conclusions such as clay tablets, notched sticks, sealed parchment and printed paper. The analysis of original documents is a means for economists to focus on the primary text, to analyze and interpret the object and to move interpretation and understanding of its relationship to modern financial instruments and markets. The result is a collection of interdisciplinary studies of the key innovations in finance from the Old Babylonion loan tablets, to the 1953 London Debt Agreement that span regions in Asia, Africa, North America and Europe.