Edward Chancellor - The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest

Wikipedia:

John “Edward” Horner Chancellor (born December 1962), is a British financial historian, finance journalist, and former hedge fund investment strategist and a former investment banker. In 2016, the Financial Analysts Journal called him “one of the great financial writers of our era”, and in 2022, Fortune called him “one of the greatest financial historians alive”. Chancellor is noted for his prescient warnings of the last three major economic bubbles in his published works: Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation (1999, the dot-com bubble), Crunch-Time for Credit? (2005, the credit bubble), and The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest (2022, the everything bubble).

. . .In 2022, he published The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest, which criticized the orthodox central banking policy of continually lowering interest rates, and using perpetual quantitative easing, to generate economic growth via asset price inflation. A policy that Chancellor predicted had resulted in an everything bubble in asset prices, extreme wealth inequality (particularly between the generations), and that would end in very high levels of price inflation.

Martin Wolf in the Financial Times described the book as “a polemic against everything [Ben] Bernanke stands for” when reviewing it alongside former Fed chair Ben Bernanke’s own 2022 book, 21st Century Monetary Policy. Martin Vander Weyer praised the book describing it as a more engaging read on the subject area than Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Emma Duncan in the Sunday Times praised the book and said Chancellor had a “gift for timing”, as his two earlier books had forewarned of bubbles in speculation – the dot-com bubble, and the credit bubble – that eventually burst. Finance author Felix Martin called the book a “timely warning” of central bank folly, and given the prescient nature of Chancellor’s previous two books, said that as well as buying the book, investors should “sell all your stocks”. In August 2022, the book was added to the list for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award for 2022.

The journalist John Tierney, in his comments introducing Chancellor at the 2023 Hayek Lecture, said the author possessed “an extremely rare gift” in the timing of his writings. Regarding The Price of Time, for which Chancellor received the Hayek Award, Tierney added, “His book is remarkable not only for its prescience, but also for its erudition and its flair”.

Video Title: Edward Chancellor. The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest. Source: LoM. Date Published: November 20, 2022.