The “Introduction” opens with Zannoni’s confession that he is a banker, and thus has biases towards the flaws of this industry. He explains that it has been part of his job to study the history of banking to make wise investing decisions in our present. He briefly summarizes that he abandoned academia after completing a Yale education to work at Fiat in 1979, rising to “run Fiat head office” by 1985. Then he was “president of Fiat USSR in Moscow” during “the collapse of the Soviet Union.” This collapse must have gotten him fired, as he was then employed by Goldman Sachs. Though he has now left direct administration of banks to serve “as Chairman of the Board of Prada”, while still helping as the “International Advisor” of Sachs. The rest of the intro summarizes the book’s chapters. “Chapter 3” is about the founding of the Bank of England in 1694: this was the beginning of banking in general in England, as this was the only bank for a while, until rules were loosened. “Chapter 4” describes how the Kingdom of Naples developed “banking charities… to help the poor”. This seems to be a misnomer because banking is also unfavorable to the lender, like a casino. The guy who developed micro-loans has been given a peace prize recently, but these loans are really designed to drain funds out of the poor, just like typical high-interest short-term loans. I turned to this chapter to learn more. Zannoni begins this history with the story of a Pope: “Franciscan charities would collect coins from the wealthy and pious and would lend them, free of charge, to the deserving poor, those who had fallen on hard times, the old, the disabled and the sick.” When demand for these charitable loans was greater than the supply, “the Fifth Lateran Council… allowed to charge the borrowers of the coins a small fee.” This began the Catholic Church’s legalization of lending, which continued to be termed as semi-illegal usury across the following centuries. The Franciscans created a loophole initially by terming these fees as a “rent paid by the borrower to the Monti for the temporary use of the coins”, and not the illegal “interest”. I explained in my BRRAM study, that during the British Renaissance these loopholes were taken to the extremes as the ghostwriting of plays became a vehicle for making high-interest loans that were labeled as “payments” for writing services, and investments.
Turning to a random page in the middle of this book, I found curious information as well. A section on “The House of Hancock” briskly and thoroughly summarizes how the Revolution was banked. “In 1775, John Hancock” became the “president of the Continental Congress” in Boston, and then used what he “had learned as” a merchant “dealing with English banks” to turn this knowledge to Americans’ favor. There were no banks in the Colonies at this time. Nations hostile to Britain were used by Hancock and his supporters to find lenders other than Britain for the rebels during the Revolution. They sent one of the Founding Fathers, Silas Deane, to France in 1776 for this purpose. Then, the more famous Franklin showed up to push this effort over the finish-line.
This is just a great book. If I had not already finished my re-attribution study, I would search these pages for some useful information. Though it might not have been of any help, as it does not only fail to mention Banks and 19th century ghostwriters, but also the giant Barings Bank or the members of that banking family. Though these ghostwriters had a subversive influence on British and international banking. If any of them were mentioned in textbooks such as this one, they would have been failing in their tasks of keeping their personal names out of incriminating histories.
This is a book that should be in most libraries, as such thorough information about the facts of banking is very rare. Too many books brush over the philosophy or theory of banking without diving into these types of specifics that truly explain how we arrived at the present dramas. This history is exactly what helped this specific banker rise to the top of this profession, so others who want to reach this goal should probably read it cover-to-cover.
--Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Summer 2024 issue

The book had no numbers they were placeholders and every paragraph had multiple words that were missing complete words. This was hard to read and give adequate feedback on

Paolo Zannoni knows a lot about money. A former partner at Goldman Sachs and currently the Executive Chairman of Prada, Zannoni is the author of Money And Promises. This book traces the history of banking and debt through seven key periods. Zannoni is Italian and start in 12th-century Pisa with merchants who had a simple problem—they needed to exchange goods when coins were in short supply.

Zannoni traces the early usage of ledgers, loans, and banking, showing how banks supported the growth of civilized society, enabling everyone from war-mongering kings to idealistic explorers to fund their dreams. Along the way, we get treated to a few banking crises, the rise of banking charities in Naples, and the evolution of Lyon as a financial hub where all manner of debt was traded through the use of a unique international currency, the ecu de marc.

Exchanges serve a purpose. They allow for expansion beyond the limits of currency production, and they create a way for the value of different types of goods to be understood on a broader scale. Giovanni di Verrazanno could piece together bills of exchange and sale off in search of Cathay. The fact that he instead ended up exploring the coast of what would eventually be the United States is a little reminder that a lot can happen between an idea and its execution. Today, loans make it possible for businesses to bet on their future growth. We have new financial instruments and new kinds of risks, but the fundamentals of risk remain the same.

For U.S. readers, the story of early banking attempts is a reminder that our United States started off being far from united. Navigating those early colonies financially involved a complicated mix of payment systems, one of which was debt. We were a nation of merchants and farmers, not rulers or politicians, a country built on commerce. While the world’s financial history informed the early attempts at banking, it did not fully define them. Creating a nation out of whole cloth instead was a patchwork quilt of exchanges and loans, and the new nation was forged on promises and relationships with deeper-pocketed countries. The book’s final tale takes us to Russia’s curious mix of capitalism and communism and the bizarre hybrid known as Bolshevik banking.

What can reading about early attempts at banking teach us? Each system succeeds and fails in its own way. Whether it’s government-sponsored, private, for-profit, or for public benefit, a bank of some sort is created by every civilization. It happens over and over again because each culture needs to find ways to trade goods and services. Debt exists to fuel growth beyond simple exchanges. As Zannoni puts it, “debts of banks are the currency of nations.”