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In this exciting new book, Peter L. Bernstein,
who chronicled the evolution of risk in his recent bestseller,
Against the Gods, tells the story of history's most
coveted, celebrated, and inglorious asset: gold. From the
ancient fascinations of Moses and Midas through the modern
convulsions caused by the gold standard and its aftermath,
gold has led many of its most eager and proud possessors
to a bad end. Gold had them, rather than the other way around.
And while the same cycle of obsession and desperation may
reverberate in today's fast-moving, electronically-driven
stock markets, the role of gold in shaping human history
is the striking feature of this tumultuous tale. Such is
the power of gold.
This fascinating account begins with the
magical, religious, and artistic qualities of gold and progresses
to the invention of coinage, the transformation of gold
into money, and the gold standard. The more important gold
becomes as money, the more loudly it speaks of power --
even more loudly than when it served as an entry to Heaven
or a symbol of omnipotence. Ultimately, the book confronts
the future of gold in a world where it appears to have been
relegated to the periphery of global finance.
From the Bible to 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 moneyers, potentates and politicians, men
of legendary wealth and others of more plebeian beginnings;
from Asia Minor's King Croesus to Rome's noted speculator
Crassus, to Byzantine emperors and humble miners, Venice's
Marco Polo and Spain's Francisco Pizarro, to Charlemagne
and Charles de Gaulle, Richard I and Richard Nixon, Isaac
Newton and Winston Churchill, Britain's economists David
Ricardo and John Maynard Keynes, and Christopher Columbus
and the Forty-Niners. Perhaps most remarkable are the frantic
speculators who pushed gold to $850.00 an ounce in 1980
just as their counterparts twenty years later drove Internet
stocks to exorbitant heights.
Whether it is Egyptian pharaohs with depraved
tastes, 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 like the United States' President Herbert Hoover,
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."
Far more than a tale of romantic myths,
daring explorations, and the history of money and power
struggles, The Power of Gold suggests that the true
significance of this infamous element may lie in the timeless
passions it continues to evoke, and what this reveals about
ourselves.
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 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
abroad and has received the highest honors from his peers
in the investment profession.
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