The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession » (Reprint)

PETER L. BERNSTEIN combines the zest of a historian with the meticulous analytical powers of an economist. He is the author of seven books in economics and finance, including the best-selling Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk and Capital Ideas: The Improbable Origins of Modern Wall Street. He is also President of Peter L. Bernstein, Inc., an economic consultancy to institutional investors, which he founded in 1973 after many years of managing billions of dollars in individual and institutional portfolios. He has lectured widely throughout the U.S. and globally and has received the highest honours from his peers in the investment profession.

This absorbing epic begins with the magical, religious and artistic significance of gold, progressing to the invention of coinage, the transformation of gold into money and eventually to the gold standard. The more important gold became as an economic tool, the more loudly it spoke of power - even more loudly than when it served as an entry to Heaven or a symbol of omnipotence. Finally, the book confronts the future of gold in a world where it appears to have been relegated to the periphery of financial sector.

From the Bible, through the Gold Rush era to modern day Fort Knox and beyond, unforgettable characters stride through these pages. Contemplate gold from the diverse perspectives of monarchs and money makers, potentates and politicians, men of legendary wealth and others of more plebeian beginnings: from Asia Minor's King Croesus, Rome's noted speculator Crassus, and Byzantine emperors, through Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus Francisco Pizarro, Richard I, Charlemagne and Isaac Newton to the Forty-Niners, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, John Maynard Keynes and Richard Nixon.

Whether it is Egyptian pharaohs, the luxury-mad survivors of the Black Death, the Chinese inventor of paper money, the pirates on the Spanish Main, or the hardnosed believers in the international gold standard, gold has been the supreme possession. It has been an icon for greed and an emblem of rectitude, as well as a vehicle for vanity and a badge of power that has shaped the destiny of humanity through the ages. As Bernstein muses, 'The joke is that nothing is as useless and useful all at the same time.’

Scotland on Sunday

The research is excellent.

A METAL FOR ALL SEASONS.
Get Gold at All Hazards.
Midas's Wish and the Creatures of Pure Chance.
Darius's Bathtub and the Cackling of the Geese.
The Symbol and the Faith.
The Symbol and the Faith.
Gold, Salt, and the Blessed Town.
The Legacy of Eoba, Babba, and Udd.
The Great Chain Reaction.
The Disintegrating Age and the Hateful Withered Hag.
The Sacred Thirst.
THE PATH TO TRIUMPH.
The Fatal Poison.
The Asian Necropolis and Hien Tsung's Inadvertent Innovation.
The Great Recoinage and the Last of the Magicians.
The True Doctrine and the Great Evil.
The Cursed Discovery.
The Badge of Honor.
The Most Stupendous Conspiracy and the Endless Chain.
THE DESCENT FROM GLORY.
The End of the Epoch.
The Transcending Value.
World War Eight and the Thirty Ounces of Gold.
Epilogue: The Supreme Possession?
Bibliography.
Index.