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GnSEconomics/Thomas Malinen/7-7-2021
“Finance has always been a crucial feature in the development of human civilizations, and it has been guided by freedom. It has spurred people, merchants and households, to borrow from the future to pay for something today. The first financial interactions were driven by the free will of people to develop financial contracts to liberate themselves from the slavery of time and the arbitrariness of rulers.”
USAGOLD note: Malinen offers an interesting and little known history of finance going all the way back to its very beginnings in third millennia BC Sumeria. “A likely first-ever personal loan was made in the mid-twenty-fourth century BCE in Ancient Mesopotamia,” he writes, “between Puzur-Eshtar and Ur-Garima for “40 grams of silver and 900 liters of barley”. The most intriguing point he makes, though, is that financial markets may have been the most important innovation of all time making possible all other innovations.
Image: Black and white photograph of a cuneiform tablet ca. 20-19th century B.C. documenting a loan of silver from the Metropolitan Museum of Art
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