In The Ascent of Money, historian Niall Ferguson paints the picture of capitalism as an evolutionary beast. From the creation of stock-issuing corporations to the opaque engineering of collateralized debt obligations and other derivatives, capitalism is a story of constant innovation. More to the point, that innovation is what – in his telling – accounts for periods of dramatic economic expansion and growth. It is as if economies reach a sort of equilibrium state, and that progress requires some modification of an internal element of the system – meaning, in Ferguson’s story, the leveraging of vast new capital flows – in the underlying mechanics of the process.
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