Edward Chancellor

Examines stock market speculation since the seventeenth century, discussing the range of motivations of investors and the effects on economies throughout history.

A History of Financial Speculation

Devil Take the Hindmost

Interest, Capitalism and the Curse of Easy Money

Price of Time

This book uses numerous examples to demonstrate how the capital cycle approach to investments works, and how it has provided investors with market-beating returns over the past decade.

Investing Through the Capital Cycle: A Money Manager’s Reports 2002-15

Capital Returns

The first book of the next crisis. 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.

The Real Story of Interest

The Price of Time

A comprehensive and profoundly relevant history of interest from one of the world's leading financial writers, The Price of Time explains our current global financial position and how we got here In the beginning was the loan, and the loan carried interest. For at least five millennia people have been borrowing and lending at interest. The practice wasn't always popular--in the ancient world, usury was generally viewed as exploitative, a potential path to debt bondage and slavery. 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. All economic and financial activities take place across time. 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. The financial world now finds itself caught between a rock and a hard place, and Edward Chancellor is here to tell us why. In this enriching volume, Chancellor explores the history of interest and its essential function in determining how capital is allocated and priced.

Capital Account relates the story of the world’s greatest investment bubble from the perspective of professional investors. The book, comprised of selected reports from Marathon Asset Management, a successful global investment firm, explains how shareholder value - the notion that companies should be run in the interests of their shareholders - became corrupted in this era of frenzied finance. Senior managers, succumbing to the lure of stock option fortunes, took to manipulating their company’s earnings. Professional investors, interested only in maintaining their investment performance over the next quarter, were willing abettors. The ‘croupiers’ of Wall Street, also know as investment bankers, whipped up the euphoria and peddled to investors superficially plausible stories, ‘MacGuffins’, in order to generate huge fees for themselves. As a result, by the turn of the century almost the entire investment community had become fixated with chasing short-term profits at the expense of long-term returns for clients. By the end of 2002 this cynical game had ended in investment disaster- the world’s stock markets having produced more than $15 trillion of losses since their peak. Yet to a large extent, the outcome was predictable to those investors who had retained a disciplined approach to investment analysis throughout the bull market. This book introduces the ‘capital cycle’ approach to investment - an approach that brings together ideas from the fields of behavioral finance, economic theory and business analysis. Capital cycle analysis - based on the apparently simple insight that investor euphoria leads to excessive investment in the real world and subsequent poor returns for shareholders - enabled Marathon to identify at an early stage the inevitable collapse of the technology and telecoms bubble.

A Money Manager's Reports from a Turbulent Decade (1993-2002)

Capital Account

Vivimos en una era en la que estallan burbujas que provocan pérdidas de miles de millones a los inversores. Los economistas sostienen que éstas sólo pueden detectarse una vez han explotado y que los movimientos del mercado son impredecibles. Pero Marathon Asset Management, una firma londinense que gestiona 50.000 millones de dólares en activos, ha desarrollado un método sencillo para identificar y evitar las burbujas: seguir el rastro de la inversión. Para el inversor, sea grande o pequeño, la clave está en no invertir en sectores en los que el gasto inversor es excesivo y existe una competición feroz, y en su lugar colocar el dinero allí donde las condiciones competitivas son más favorables y, en consecuencia, los retornos de la inversión son más elevados. Este libro, que recoge los análisis del mercado de Marathon Asset Management, que le han permitido lograr grandes retornos en operaciones poco conocidas y al margen de las fuerzas destructivas del ciclo del capital, ofrece claves para comprender y desarrollar la estrategia del ciclo del capital. Y lo hace a partir de ejemplos reales en sectores que van desde fábricas de cerveza hasta la industria de los semiconductores.

Edward Chancellor

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