Some Thoughts on Improving Economic Statistics (Essays in Public Policy)

Book Description

The remarkable story of the Renaissance's preeminent financiers.

Their name is a byword for immense wealth and power, but before their renown as art patrons and noblemen the Medicis built their fortune on banking—specifically, on lending money at interest. Banking in the fifteenth century, even at the height of the Renaissance, meant running afoul of the Catholic Church's prohibition against usury. It required more than merely financial skills to make a profit, and the legendary Medicis—most famously Cosimo and Lorenzo ("the Magnificent")—were masterly in wielding the political, diplomatic, military, and even metaphysical tools that were needed to maintain their family's position.

In this brisk and witty narrative, Tim Parks uncovers the intrigues, dodges, and moral qualities that gave the Medicis their edge. Vividly evoking the richness of the Florentine Renaissance and the Medicis' glittering circle, replete with artists, popes, and kings, Medici Money is a brilliant look into the origins of modern banking and its troubled relationship with art and religion. 14 illustrations.

Customer Reviews:

The Birth of Renaissance.......2007-09-05

It is a very well-written book. Tim Parks has a golden pen, from which words flow easily and beautifully. The superb language makes it quite easy to follow the history of the Florentine Bank of Medici from 1397 to 1494.

And the history is thrilling. Medici is the most powerful family in Florence, one of the first modern states, with investment banks, international trading and a parliament. Parks focuses his analysis on the business and politics of Florence, and in particular on the different patriarchs of the Medici family.

The 15th century Florence was a keystone in the Renaissance, and the Medicis played an important role in the development. They were sponsors of new art and new architecture, at the same time translating the works of Aristotle and Plato to Latin. Some of the Medicis were important in defining the powers of the state and that of the church.

Parks story would be even easier to follow if the book had paid more attention to the chronology. I also missed a better bibliography. But in all: well worth the read.

Medici Lite.......2007-03-28

Entertaining, light-hearted summary of the Medici family fortunes at their height in Florence, in a most non-academic style. Definitely for anyone interested in the Renaissance and especially art patronage who doesn't want to plough through a heavy piece of work of the era. Also thought the book provided hints of other aspects of Florence and its personalities to explore, especially about business entrepreneurs turning their fortunes into art collections.

Informative book that also makes for a good read.......2006-07-26

Parks' book encompasses the lives of the five heads of the Medici family, and simultaneously through the history of the city of Florence. Through the eyes of the city of Florence, we see Italy, and through slightly foggier lenses, all of Europe.

Parks clearly has a deep love and respect for the more medieval (as opposed to Renaissance) parts of his tale. If you are expecting a hagiographical account of Lorenzo the Magnificent and his great contributions to art, architecture and learning, this isn't the right book.

I picked this book up because I had an interest in the economic side of the Renaissance. For me, one of the more fun sides of history is following the dollars and cents to find an alternative rationale behind the traditional story. And in the first half of this book, Parks provides the goods.

Without talking down to the reader, he makes VERY complicated financial transactions seem simple enough that with a little extra care and attention, they are not only able to be followed, but able to be understood. The multiple types of profitable banking transations are complicated enough for a non-finance major, but when added to the necessity of covering their tracks to avoid falling afoul of Florentine law, Church law, the laws of England, Germany (and even Poland!), personal ethics and morals, and even the taxman, it is amazing that I finished the book, nonetheless enjoyed it and remember it.

The book is more or less chronological. He concentrates on five Medicis, and the chapters covering the first two, Giovanni and Cosimo, are by far the best. And if you are going to study the Medicis as bankers and politicians, rather than as art patrons, poets, and humanists, this makes sense; but it does mean that the book ends weakly. It does read a bit like "The Rise and Fall of the Medici Family", and he spares little when describing the fall. Much of the blame is placed on Lorenzo's unwillingness to learn the family trade (banking), considering it almost beneath him.

A surprise bonus in this book is the detailed account of Florentine politics during these 100 years. Parks is almost as gifted describing the complicated nature of a republic illegally ruled by an autocratic family as he is a bank illegally profiting from interest bearing loans. He falters slightly when inserting his personal opinions and when unable to refrain from making occasional comparisons to modern politics, but all-in-all, his description of the political situation is just as fascinating (and complicated) as the economic portions.

Brilliant History of the Rise and Decline of the Medici.......2006-06-23

This is mainly a history of the Medici banking enterprise, and it is fascinating to learn just how the bank declined. The problem was the passing of generations of bankers who loved banking. Their successors, unfortunately, were more interested in the social aspects of belonging to the Medici banking family. This lead to their spending more time being friends with royalty and other high potentates than on the bank itself. Consequently, the Medici banking house went into decline that ultimately proved terminal.

The fate of the Medici bank has been repeated over and over in history as there are all too often cases of virtuous and hard working founders whose creations were ultimately wasted away by relatively lazy successors.

In event, this is a great book that sheds new light on a subject that had already been heavily written about.

All In The Family.......2006-05-03

I read this book the same week I watched the fifth season of the Sopranos. The combination was serendipitous. Cosimo Medici has more style and class than Tony Soprano, but in many other ways they are remarkably alike. They're such family guys!

Tim Parks is an excellent writer, a witty and companionable guide to a time and place not nearly as remote from our modern age as we would like to imagine.

Parks successfully and succinctly portrays the Medicis, their contemporaries, their passions, and their flaws. Medici Money has everything: money, power, religion, war, politics, even a little sex.

You'd have to attend a Washington, D.C. power prayer breakfast with a herd of hungover lobbyists, a few calculating Pentagonistas, some self-satisfied lawyers and several jackleg congressmen to find a similarly fascinating and amusing engagement of these themes.

Yes, in many ways we're really not that different from those Florentines of five centuries ago. Sadly, some of the ways in which we are different do us no credit.

The art in the meeting room of the Marriott where these modern notables meet to pray and greet will consist of risible facsimiles of real paintings produced by an assembly-line gallery incorporated in Delaware. The breakfast itself will feature chewy scrambled eggs, unconvincing croissants and mock-designer coffee. Later, they'll go to work in boxy offices in boxy triumphalist buildings, and at night they'll drive their boxy SUVs to their boxy lairs in boxy D.C. suburbs. Their dinners will come out of (you guessed it) boxes.

One of the delights of this book is the author's loving depiction of some of the extraordinary works of painting, tapestry, sculpture, and other art commisioned by the Medicis and their contemporaries and rivals. And aaaah! The food of 15th century Florence! The architecture! The music!

The rich we have with us always. But they're far more tolerable when they choose to display their wealth and power with great works of art instead of Hummers, plasma TVs, and McMansions.

One of the charming sub-themes of Medici Money is that if you're going to hell, you might as well go in style and enjoy the good things of life along the way.

Happily, those of us who not only lack the financial resources to go to hell in fabulous style but can barely afford to indulge our book addictions are able to enjoy a few good things of life, too.

This book is one of them.

Ba-da-bing!

Zecca: The Mint of Venice in the Middle Ages (Published in Association With the American Numismatic Society)

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A Masterful Work for Historians and Numismatists

Zecca: The Mint of Venice in the Middle Ages (Published in Association With the American Numismatic Society)
Alan M. Stahl
Manufacturer: The Johns Hopkins University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 080186383X

Book Description

Within a few months of assuming the position of curator of medieval coins at the American Numismatic Society in 1980, Alan M. Stahl was presented with a plastic bag containing a hoard of 5,000 recently discovered coins, most of which turned out to be from medieval Venice. The course of study of that hoard (and a later one containing more than 14,000 coins) led him to the Venetian archives, where he examined thousands of unpublished manuscripts. To provide an even more accurate account of how the Zecca mint operated in Venice in the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries, Stahl commissioned scientific analyses of the coins using a variety of modern techniques, uncovering information about their content and how they had been manufactured. The resulting book, Zecca: The Mint of Venice in the Middle Ages, is the first to examine the workings of a premodern mint using extensive research in original documents as well as detailed study of the coins themselves.

The first of the book's three sections traces the coinage of Venice from its origins in the ninth century as a minor, and unofficial, regional Italian coinage to its position at the dawn of the Renaissance as the dominant currency of Mediterranean trade. The second section, entitled "The Mint in the Life of Medieval Venice," illustrates the mechanisms of the control of bullion and the strategies for mint profit and explores the mint's role in Venetian trade and the emergence of a bureaucratized government. The third section, "Within the Mint," examines the physical operations that transformed raw bullion into coins and identifies the personnel of the mint, situating the holders of each position in the context of their social and professional backgrounds.

Illustrated with photos of Venetian coinage from the world's major collections, Zecca also includes a listing of all holders of offices related to the medieval Venetian mint and summaries of all major finds of medieval Venetian coins.

Customer Reviews:

A Masterful Work for Historians and Numismatists.......2006-12-30

Zecca is an impressively researched historical work focusing adeptly on its subject: the Venetian mint in the middle ages. The narrative is very readable and the presentation uses footnotes to annotate the voluminous amount of source material that went into the creation of this work. The book focuses first on the coinage itself, the medieval penny, the grosso, the ducat, and finally the soldino. Each era goes into great detail on the weights, the fineness, and the people making the decisions to have the coins made. The book then goes back and examines each of the roles of the mint employees in additional detail. From the mintmasters and engravers to the smiths and weighers the duties of each position are laid out. In addition salaries and legal documents help flesh out some of the actual persons and the work done at the mint.
The book left me with a thirst for more knowledge about Venice's history. There is little background in the book on some of the external reasons that caused some of the decisions presented in th work. I think this is definitely a must read for those people who have a strong interest in both history and numismatics. It is not so well suited for the casual reader who will undoubtedly get bored by the finer details of how many pennies are in a mark, and which minor noble filled the role of mintmaster. But if the reader is interested in medieval coinage, even if it is not Italian, than this work will provide a ton of insightful information on mint practices and medieval monetary policy.

The Dynamics of the Price Structure and the Business Cycle: The Italian Evidence from 1945 to 2000 (Contributions to Economics)

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The Dynamics of the Price Structure and the Business Cycle: The Italian Evidence from 1945 to 2000 (Contributions to Economics)
Cristina Nardi Spiller
Manufacturer: Physica-Verlag Heidelberg
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 3790800635

Book Description

By exploring the price dynamics and business cycle of the Italian economy with reference to the most important international events, this text sheds new light on the country's current situation. Using a long-term analytical framework underpinned by principal theoretical approaches, the analysis places particular emphasis on price dynamics. The text begins with the country's post-war difficulties and then covers the boom-and-bust period of the "Italian miracle", before moving onto the lasting inflationary process of the 70s and 80s, and finally the financial crisis of the 90s and the beginning of the new century. The book also investigates the positive and negative aspects of policy measures. An important implication of this approach is that it assesses the different evolutionary aspects of the Italian economic structure, which in turn gives way to an analysis of the dynamic behaviour of policy makers and social partners.

Money and Banking in Medieval and Renaissance Venice

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Money and Banking in Medieval and Renaissance Venice
Frederic Chapin Lane , and Reinhold C. Mueller
Manufacturer: The Johns Hopkins University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Money in Sixteenth-Century Florence
Carlo M. Cipolla
Manufacturer: University of California Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Book Description

Drawing on the extraordinary wealth of the Florentine archives, Carlo Cipolla reconstructs the monetary system and its development in sixteenth-century Florence under the impact of the massive inflow of silver from Mexico and Peru via Spain and Genoa. His study allows us at last to chart the movements of this American silver after it reached Spain and to assess its impact on the economy and the monetary structure of a European state.
Cipolla also reveals the role of the Ricci family of Florence--a great banking family hitherto virtually ignored by historians--in first fueling a credit boom and then provoking a credit crisis in the Florentine economy of the 1570s and 1580s. Cipolla relates this situation to the economic downturn that characterized the economies of southern Europe in the last three decades of the sixteenth century.
Money in Sixteenth-Century Florence is a major contribution to early modern monetary history.

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The Crisis of Liberal Italy
Douglas J. Forsyth
Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0521416825

Book Description

Professor Forsyth provides an important new interpretation of the crisis of democracy in Italy after World War I. He argues that liberal governments after 1918 failed to balance the conflicting claims of great power conflicts, social welfare, economic growth, and macroeconomic stability in a harsh economic environment. Postwar liberal leaders put stability ahead of the redistributive social policies that would have been necessary to secure broad electoral support: this failure led to parliamentary deadlock and Mussolini's seizure of power.

The Italians in Europe.: An article from: The Australian Journal of Politics and History

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The Italians in Europe.: An article from: The Australian Journal of Politics and History
G. Federico Mancini
Manufacturer: University of Queensland Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital

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Book Description

This digital document is an article from The Australian Journal of Politics and History, published by University of Queensland Press on March 1, 2000. The length of the article is 6437 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

From the author: Given Italy's reputation for fiscal profligacy, the zeal with which Italians strove to meet the strict budgetary and other criteria to qualify for full participation in European Monetary Union might be in need of explanation. On a wider front, Italy has displayed an enthusiasm for European integration which has been largely free of the reservations occasionally shown by member-states of comparable size and importance. This paper considers explanations which have been advanced for Italians' pro-European attitude, such as Catholic universalism and Roman imperial traditions, but rejects them as insufficient, in order to argue that the modern experience of the nation-state in Italy has failed to produce a strong sense of allegiance to a national identity, encouraging Italians to look to the European level of supranational institutions. Furthermore, it is argued that this lack of strong national allegiance in Italy is not simply a negative characteristic, but has allowed for the preservation of traditions of localism, federalism and social partnership in Italy which are potentially valuable contributions to a future configuration of the European Union.

Citation Details
Title: The Italians in Europe.
Author: G. Federico Mancini
Publication: The Australian Journal of Politics and History (Refereed)
Date: March 1, 2000
Publisher: University of Queensland Press
Volume: 46 Issue: 1 Page: 21

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A Monetary History of Italy (Studies in Macroeconomic History)

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Good source of information for coin collectors.

A Monetary History of Italy (Studies in Macroeconomic History)
Michele Fratianni , and Franco Spinelli
Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0521443156

Book Description

This volume deals with the monetary history of Italy from independence in 1861 to 1992. It provides the first complete analysis of a country that has experienced diverse and often dramatic monetary conditions. The book contributes in a novel way not only to the monetary debate, but also to fiscal and institutional questions. The authors combine economic theory, statistical data, and history in an accessible way that should prove useful to both economic historians and monetary economists.

Customer Reviews:

Good source of information for coin collectors........2000-01-17

In depth look at Italy's monetary policy, including historical account of events that shaped monetary policy. Verbatim translation of Mussolini's speech on foreign exchange rates of particular interest. Covers financial scandals, reforms, etc. Somewhat academic approach, but still a readable book without too much latin chest thumping by the authors.

The Monetary Policy of Fourteenth Century Florence (Publications of the Ucla Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies)

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The Monetary Policy of Fourteenth Century Florence (Publications of the Ucla Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies)
Carlo M. Cipolla
Manufacturer: University of California Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Why did the Italian stabilization of 1947 succeed?: An article from: Finance & Development

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Why did the Italian stabilization of 1947 succeed?: An article from: Finance & Development
Carlo Cottarelli , and Erich Spitaller
Manufacturer: International Monetary Fund
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital

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Book Description

This digital document is an article from Finance & Development, published by International Monetary Fund on June 1, 1990. The length of the article is 1796 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

From the supplier: The Italian stabilization of 1947 is an example of a successful economic policy bringing about disinflation. The stabilization effected a deceleration in the expansion of money and credit as a cure to high inflation in order to promote stable growth based on structural adjustment polices. The disinflation was accompanied and supported by investment activity and output growth. Price stability was brought about by output growth fostered by strong real investment throughout 1947. Financial stabilization measures were not strong, but their effect on prices was strengthened by political stability, a commitment to liberalization, and massive foreign assistance in the form of the Marshall Plan, all of which improved the credibility of the economic policy, bolstered the expectations of economic agents, and fostered the response of supply.

Citation Details
Title: Why did the Italian stabilization of 1947 succeed?
Author: Carlo Cottarelli
Publication: Finance & Development (Magazine/Journal)
Date: June 1, 1990
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
Volume: v27 Issue: n2 Page: p36(2)

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Customer Reviews:

A helpful starting point.......2003-03-07

As a Post-Doc in the sciences, I found this guide helpful in giving me a better picture of my options. I've specifically been wondering about whether consulting is the way to go (i'm sick of being poor!), and after reading this guide, I'm much more inclined to try to move into that industry. Certainly, I have a better idea of what my plan of attack will be as well as which of the top players I think will be most open to my expertise and background. I recommend this to other folks such as myself, tired of living the life of a poor student and ready to start bringing in the big bucks.

Not much info for the buck.......1999-09-27

This book has a promising title, but fails to deliver. Only useful to the absolute novice. I am an MD interested in transferring my skills into consulting but this book was of little value. Use the general consulting guides: WetFeet or Naficy.

Customer Reviews:

Good review of all phases of managing your business.......2000-01-18

This is a compilation of a few dozen Journal of Light Construction articles on managing your business. It covers advertising, estimates, bidding, profit/overhead, contracts, etc, with many examples and reviews of different systems. A good book to get a quick look of all phases of the management cycle.

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