The Financial Innovations that Created Modern Capital Markets

One of The Economists’ Best Books of 2005
One of Barron’s Best Books of 2005

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 Babylonian loan tablets, to the 1953 London Debt Agreement that span regions in Asia, Africa, North America and Europe.

Publisher Oxford University Press

Authors William N. Goetzmann and K. Geert Rouwenhorst

Publishing Date August 2005

ISBN 978-0-19-517571-4

Best Price $34.90 or Buy New $59.95 at Amazon

Source: Oxford University Press