Money

This book is the only officially authorized companion publication to CCTV's ten-episode major financial documentary Money, written by the core team behind major CCTV projects such as The Rise of Great Powers and Wall Street, with contributions from scholars including Wu Jinglian, Zi Zhongyun, Chen Zhiwu, Ba Shusong, Wang Wei, Zhu Ning, and Huang Ming, and published by CITIC Press in October 2012. The book follows the documentary's episode structure in ten parts: starting from "A Planet with a Price" and describing how money changed inventors' fates, built financial kingdoms, married into sports, and, through greed, triggered financial crisis after financial crisis; then returning to the origins of money, to see how Greek civilization and monetary history went hand in hand, how the Medici family acted as financial promoters of the Italian Renaissance, and how China's jiaozi became the origin of paper money. It then discusses in turn the fate of gold and the rise and fall of the gold standard, the journey of banks from goldsmiths' counters to modern corporations, central banks and the struggle over the right to issue currency, the erosion of empires by inflation, the three red lines of government financing (taxation, money printing, and government bonds), the contest of sovereignty along the path of exchange rates, the internationalization experiences of the pound and the dollar, and finally concludes with the euro and the European debt crisis, asking what the future of money holds. The book links the key junctures of world monetary history in accessible prose and includes color images, making it suitable as a paper-based open course on money.