“Not so long ago, the dollar stood for a sum of gold, and bankers knew the people they lent to. This article charts the emergence of an abstract, even absurd world – call it Planet Finance – where mathematical models ignored both history and human nature, and value had no meaning”
In a recent issue of Vanity Fair author Niall Ferguson, who is a Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford, and also the author of The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, ties the financial crises to the historical perspective.