The Land Trap
A New History of the World's Oldest Asset
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5,0 • 1 Bewertung
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- 6,49 €
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LONGLISTED FOR THE FINANCIAL TIMES AND SCHRODERS BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD
"One of those books that changes the way you see the world. Gripping, urgent, important."
ED CONWAY
"This wonderful book is as welcome as it is overdue ... shines a much-needed light on this essential topic."
RORY SUTHERLAND
"A deftly written tale."
LEWIS BASTON
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Our obsession with land is the driving force behind human history. It has sparked revolutions and fuelled economic booms as well as financial crises. Land is the world's oldest and most important asset, and it governs the course of our lives more than any other form of wealth. But this immense power is also what makes it so dangerous.
In The Land Trap, The Economist's Wall Street editor Mike Bird reveals a sweeping, global history that shows how fortunes have been built - or destroyed - all on the bedrock of land. It has become the linchpin of the world's banking system and it affects everything from soaring housing prices to geopolitical tensions. From the speculative land grabs of colonial America to China's modern-day real estate crisis, this gripping narrative shows how the economics of land can make and break families, businesses, and even entire nations.
This is the book for anyone who wants to see beyond markets and money to the hidden game being played out on the ground beneath our feet.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Land is the indispensable collateral that makes the modern financial system work—and often crash—according to this eye-opening debut treatise from The Economist editor Bird. He traces the 300-year rise of land as the linchpin of the modern credit system, starting with banks in colonial America that loaned bank notes to landholders using their acreage as collateral. In the 20th century, Bird explains, the advent of mass homeownership made liquid mortgages and home equity loans dominant categories of bank lending, which could then be used to fund businesses. The downside, Bird contends, is that financial systems dependent on land boom when land prices rise and collapse when they dip. Bird autopsies several such episodes, including Japan's 1980s land bubble—at one point, a single square mile of Tokyo was worth more than all the land in California—whose bursting tanked the economy for decades; the U.S. subprime mortgage bubble that precipitated the crash of 2008; and China's real estate boom in the 2000s and 2010s, which resulted in tens of millions of apartments that now stand empty. Bird's shrewd analysis crackles with fresh insights that tie together material economics with financial abstractions. The result is a stimulating take on modern finance that shows investors' fates are rooted in the dirt beneath their feet.
