China’s Financial Innovation through History

Date: Aug 5 — 10:30 am

Venue: Yale Center, Beijing Professor William Goetzmann will talk on China’s financial innovation through history and his book Money Changes Everything. Published in 2016 by Princeton University Press, the book was one of Bloomberg’s Best Books of 2016 and one of Financial Times Best Economics Books of 2016. In his book, he shows how finance was present at key moments in history: driving the invention of writing in ancient Mesopotamia, spurring the classical civilizations of Greece and Rome to become great empires, determining the rise and fall of dynasties in imperial China, and underwriting the trade expeditions that led Europeans to the New World. He also demonstrates how the apparatus we associate with a modern economy — stock markets, lines of credit, complex financial products, and international trade — were repeatedly developed, forgotten, and reinvented over the course of human history. The language of the event will be English.