The Book on the Meltdown

“Are we on the brink of a ‘great dying’ in the financial world, one of those mass extinctions of species that have occurred periodically, like the end-Cambrian extinction that killed off 90 percent of Earth’s species, or the Cretaceous-Tertiary catastrophe that wiped out the dinosaurs?” So writes Niall Ferguson in his new book, The Ascent of Money, which is praised in The New York Times today. Ferguson examines the root causes of the meltdown in his usual digressive style. Michiko Kakutani notes, however, that The Ascent of Money is “less ideological and less tendentious” than Ferguson’s previous tub-thumping volumes. Perhaps, she speculates, the Iraq war and the financial meltdown caused him to ease up a little.