Go to npr.org and click on Talk of the Nation. Email us and you can join the conversation on our website. So today we want to hear from financial historians in the audience, amateur and otherwise, what moments of history do you turn to provide insight into our current mess? Give us a call, 80. In a volume that traces the history of money from Mesopotamia to microfinance, Ferguson explains the circumstances that gave birth to critical institutions, the stock market for example, insurance, real estate and so on, and gives history a new spin by explaining that for example, the real turning point of the American Civil War wasn't the fall of Vicksburg or the battle of Gettysburg but the fall of New Orleans a year earlier. Writing his new book, historian Niall Ferguson said he learned three things: that poverty is caused by the absence of banks rather than exploitation, that money amplifies the human tendency to overreact, and that few things are harder to predict than the timing and magnitude of financial crisis.
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