The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World

Ferguson deals with this theme in several sections, in terms of both individuals and countries. When he writes, in Chapter 1, about a poor neighborhood in his hometown of Glasgow being exploited by a loan shark, he touches on the former. His later passage, in Chapter 5, about microfinance deals with the latter. In both cases, his theme is that financial markets are a force for good much more than a cause of poverty. As he writes in the Introduction, “poverty is not the result of rapacious financiers exploiting the poor. It has much more to do with the lack of financial institutions, with the absence of banks, not their presence” (13). 

Simply put, the future will always be uncertain, and that fact injects the element of risk into financial dealings. Despite our best efforts to marshal mathematics, actuarial science, technology, and so on, we can never calculate the probability of something with utter certainty. The best example of this is the case of Long-Term Capital Management described in Chapter 6. Thus, the timing and extent of financial crises can never be accurately predicted.