Welcome back to 10 blocks. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal. This

week's special episode

features Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow and City Journal contributing editor James Miggs and

journalist Richard Davies interviewing financial historian Edward Chancellor. They discuss the

history of money lending and the dangers of manipulating interest rates. We hope you enjoy.

Edward Chancellor is the recipient of this year's Hayek Prize.

Our guest today is financial analyst and historian Edward Chancellor. He specializes in

understanding financial crises, whether you call them bubbles or crashes

or my favorite word, panics. In the late 1990s, his book, Devil Take the Hindmost, anticipated the big dot-com crash.

And now Edward Chancellor's latest book is called The Price of Time, the Real Story of Interest, and it looks at how our system of charging interest

on loans developed a very long time ago.

Edward joins us in New York. We're recording this podcast in the offices of the Manhattan Institute

where I'm a senior fellow, and we're pleased that this conversation will also be released as part of City Journal's 10 Blocks podcast series.

Welcome to How Do We Fix It?

Well, thanks for having me.

The core of your book is looking at the sometimes underappreciated importance of time in economic affairs.

Benjamin Franklin famously said that time is money.

Explain.

Every economic activity, every financial activity takes place across time.

We have a tendency to assume time away, to forget about the importance of time in our economic

activities. I think that's particularly pronounced by modern economics that assumes equilibrium

and doesn't really dwell upon the issue of time. Now, the invention of interest has been described by the Yale

...