A History of Interest Rates

Rating:
Summary: One of the ten books every speculator should read.
Review: Financial assets grow in value with the passage of time. For debt, we call this "interest", and for equity, we call it "yield". Homer's book is the superbly recorded history of this phenomenon. Perhaps its greatest value is that when you hear or read a new theory, you can assess its validity by comparing the theory's implications with the historical evidence.

Rating:
Summary: One of the ten books every speculator should read.
Review: Financial assets grow in value with the passage of time. For debt, we call this "interest", and for equity, we call it "yield". Homer's book is the superbly recorded history of this phenomenon. Perhaps its greatest value is that when you hear or read a new theory, you can assess its validity by comparing the theory's implications with the historical evidence.

Rating:
Summary: Pure History, Little Insight
Review: Sidney Homer delivers what he promised - a lengthy and extremely detailed history of interest rates. Almost completely absent is any commentary on why interest rates have changed through history. Any observations of cause and effect are left up to the reader to discern. But as a pure history text, the book is readable and thorough both in breadth and depth.

Rating:
Summary: Opening a Window to Fixed Income Securities of Eras Past
Review: This exceptionally written, highly readable volume, written by a true pioneer in bond trading and fixed income research, covers interest rate trends and lending practices spanning over four millennia of economic history. Despite the paucity of data prior to the Industrial Revolution, the book manages to present a highly detailed analysis of money markets and borrowing practices in major economies. A History of Interest Rates seeks to provide a helicopter perspective of interest rate movements, avoiding anecdotal indications if possible and applying analytical tools such as yield curves and decennial averaging of the available data.

Homer asserts that "the free market long-term rates of interest for any industrial nation, properly charted, provide a sort of fever chart of the economic and political health of that nation." Given the unprecedented rise in asset price volatility and the emergence of extraordinary inflation rates during twentieth-century episodes of economic distress--occurrences which were nearly imponderable during the nineteenth century--it would seem that we are now living in times of eschatological excess, which is actually one of the understated themes in this book's third edition.

This book should be part of the library of every investment analyst, together with such finance classics as Graham and Dodd's Security Analysis and Lefevre's Reminiscences of a Stock Operator.