In the instant case Ms. Kaminska is probably ahead of Mr. W-B but he is an equally enthusiastic polymath with a penchant for first class sources (and borderline hyperlink mania).
The hierarchy at the end of the piece is especially handy.
From Irving Wladawsky-Berger, June 23, 2015:
In 2010, the BBC and the British Museum collaborated in a project called A History of the World, based on one hundred objects from the collection of the British Museum, around which you can tell the history of humanity over the past two million years. The history was also presented in a series of fifteen minute podcast about each of the objects, written and narrated by British Museum Director Neil MacGregor and broadcast over the BBC.
Money was one of the themes in the exhibit, represented by four different objects: one of the world’s first gold coins produced over 2500 years ago; a 1375 banknote from the Ming Dynasty; a silver coin minted in Bolivia in the late 16th Century; and a plastic credit card exemplifying the changing role of money in the modern world. Why include money in such an exhibit? Because, as one of the podcasts noted, money, - along with sex and war, - has been one of the great constants in human affairs.
Transaction records actually pre-dated the advent of money. By analyzing the earliest recorded transactions, researchers believe that writing evolved in ancient Mesopotamia thousands of years ago, as an innovation to keep track of financial records. Money was later invented as a store of value and a medium of exchange to make commerce more efficient. For a long time, money was embodied in precious metals like gold and silver, but with the introduction of banknotes, money started to decouple from physical objects with intrinsic value.
“Today… we remain more or less content with paper money - not to mention coins that are literally made from junk,” wrote Harvard historian Niall Ferguson in The Ascent of Money: a Financial History of the World. “[W]e are happy with money we cannot even see. Today’s electronic money can be moved from our employer, to our bank account, to our favorite retail outlets without ever physically materializing. It is this virtual money that now dominates what economists call the money supply… The intangible character of most money is perhaps the best evidence of its true nature.”
Given its intangible character, it’s not surprising that advances in information and communication technologies (ICT) have in turn led to advances in the way we deal with money and payments, as well as with identity, trust and other key attributes of a well-functioning financial system. Financial services (FS) was one of the first industries to embrace ICT, automating their back-office and branch operations and developing innovations like credit cards and ATMs. The wide adoption of the Internet in the 1990s led not only to online banking, but paved the way for e-commerce.Possibly also of interest:
Smart mobile devices, broadband wireless networks, cloud-based services and big data are now ushering the next major phase in the evolution of FS. Money is continuing its centuries old transformation to being nothing more than information in our personal devices as well as out there in the cloud.
How is the FS industry likely to evolve into the into the future? This is the question addressed by ICT & the Future of Financial Services, a report published last year by Ericsson in collaboration with the Imperial College Business School and the UK’s Sustainable Society Network as part of a series looking at industrial transformation in the Networked Society....MORE
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