Books
The Price of Time:
The Real Story of Interest
First published 7th July 2022. Paperback edition published September 2023.
Available to buy: UK Edition | US Edition
For bulk orders:
Penguin bulk orders (UK and RoW ex-US): penguincashsales@tbs-ltd.co.uk
Grove Atlantic bulk orders (US): Jhottensen@groveatlantic.com
Winner of the 2023 Hayek Prize
Longlisted for FT’s 2022 Business Book of the Year
All economic and financial activities take place across time. Interest coordinates these activities. The story of capitalism is thus the story of interest: the price that individuals, companies and nations pay to borrow money.
In The Price of Time, Edward Chancellor traces the history of interest from its origins in ancient Mesopotamia, through debates about usury in Restoration Britain and John Law ' s ill-fated Mississippi scheme, to the global credit booms of the twenty-first century. We generally assume that high interest rates are harmful, but Chancellor argues that, whenever money is too easy, financial markets become unstable. He takes the story to the present day, when interest rates have sunk lower than at any time in the five millennia since they were first recorded - including the extraordinary appearance of negative rates in Europe and Japan - and highlights how this has contributed to profound economic insecurity and financial fragility.
Chancellor reveals how extremely low interest rates not only create asset price inflation but are also largely responsible for weak economic growth, rising inequality, zombie companies, elevated debt levels and the pensions crises that have afflicted the West in recent years - conditions under which economies cannot possibly thrive. At the same time, easy money in China has inflated an epic real estate bubble, accompanied by the greatest credit and investment boom in history. As the global financial system edges closer to yet another crisis, Chancellor shows that only by understanding interest can we hope to face the challenges ahead.
What the World’s Top Investors say:
“A real tour de force”
— Stanley Druckenmiller, former chairman and president of Duquesne Capital
“A great read on why the world is in its current mess ”
— Bill Gross, co-founder and former CIO of PIMCO
“What I so enjoy about Chancellor's books is the way they illustrate the tendency of financial history themes to rhyme, as Twain would say, and thus how behavior that took place 200 or 400 years ago is being repeated today and is sure to reappear again and again in the future. What he tells is a never-ending story.”
— Howard Marks, co-founder and co-chair of Oaktree Capital Management
“Well, I’ll be darned! Chancellor has done the nearly impossible: he has made a potentially dreary topic - interest rates - into a witty, philosophical and highly entertaining story”
— Jeremy Grantham, co-founder and chief investment strategist of GMO
Reviews - The Price of Time
“Mr. Chancellor’s learned and engrossing history concludes with a somber warning. Compared with more heavy-handed forms of government intrusion, central bankers’ manipulation of interest rates may seem rather innocuous, and it is much less likely to provoke howling objections from ordinary citizens. But more than any other, it threatens the efficiency and integrity of the free-enterprise system. Behind the price of time is the priceless right of freedom.”
- Adam Rowe, Wall Street Journal
“Besides being a first-rate economic historian, Chancellor is also a master wordsmith; almost unique among serious finance books, The Price of Time serves well as bedtime reading. The book is well larded with amusing anecdotes… More than 20 years ago, Edward Chancellor’s Devil Take the Hindmost supplied readers with one of the most engaging and incisive descriptions of financial manias ever written. That was a hard act to follow, but The Price of Time nicely fills the bill; it is a serious work of political economy that is part comprehensive guide to the world financial system’s greatest peril and part literary chocolate torte.”
-William Bernstein, CFA Institute book review
“Every bit as gripping as any science fiction novel…It’s an amazing book. I highly recommend you read it.”
John Mauldin, Thoughts from the Frontline
“Is it possible to write a highly engaging history of the world going back to Hammurabi, unfolding along the way a bitingly comprehensive explanation for its problems today, all told through a single character? Apparently yes. Edward Chancellor has done it, an achievement all the more notable since his drama is built around a character so unheroic on its surface: his "price of time" is interest rates. This is a timely, vitally important and hugely readable book.””
-Ruchir Sharma, Chairman, Rockefeller International & NY Times bestselling author
“In Chancellor's terrific new book The Price of Time, he argues that well-meaning attempts by central bankers to manage interest rates have brought disaster ... It is no mean task to turn such a dry topic into a lively read, but Chancellor pulls it off. This is not just a worthy successor to his history of financial speculation, Devil Take the Hindmost, but an urgently needed warning. Rock-bottom interest rates were imposed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, and have now lasted so long that they have started to seem almost tolerable. To read this book is to be reacquainted with the bizarre, Alice-in-Wonderland condition of modern finance. ... Anyone who wants a fresh perspective on today's problems - and anyone in Westminster hoping to chart a new economic course as Boris Johnson's successor - needs this book on their summer reading list.”
-Marc Sidwell, Sunday Telegraph