Devil Take the Hindmost is a lively, original, and challenging history of stock market speculation from the seventeenth century to the present day. Edward Chancellor traces the origins of the speculative spirit back to ancient Rome and chronicles its revival in the modern world: from the tulip scandal of 1630s Holland, to “stockjobbing” in London’s Exchange Alley (where wine sold at auction by an “inch of a candle”), to the infamous South Sea Bubble of 1719, which prompted investor Sir Isaac Newton to comment, “I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.” Here are brokers underwriting risks that included highway robbery and the “assurance of female chastity;” credit notes and lottery tickets circulating as money; wise and unwise investors from Alexander Pope and Benjamin Disraeli to Ivan Boesky and Hillary Rodham Clinton.

In the beginning was the loan, and the loan carried interest. For at least five millennia people have been borrowing and lending at interest. Yet as capitalism became established from the late Middle Ages onwards, denunciations of interest were tempered because interest was a necessary reward for lenders to part with their capital. And interest performs many other vital functions: it encourages people to save; enables them to place a value on precious assets, such as houses and all manner of financial securities; and allows us to price risk.
Interest is often described as the “price of money,” but it is better called the “price of time:” time is scarce, time has value, interest is the time value of money.
Over the first two decades of the twenty-first century, interest rates have sunk lower than ever before. Easy money after the global financial crisis in 2007/2008 has produced several ill effects, including the appearance of multiple asset price bubbles, a reduction in productivity growth, discouraging savings and exacerbating inequality, and forcing yield starved investors to take on excessive risk. In this enriching volume, Chancellor explores the history of interest and its essential function in determining how capital is allocated and priced.
Bonus material: This audiobook includes supplemental material in printable PDF format.