All economic and financial activities take place across time. Interest coordinates these activities. The story of capitalism is thus the story of interest: the price that individuals, companies and nations pay to borrow money. In The Price of Time, Edward Chancellor follows the development of interest from its beginnings in ancient Mesopotamia to the worldwide credit booms of the twenty-first century, passing through arguments about usury in Restoration Britain and John Law's disastrous Mississippi scheme. We typically assume that high interest rates are bad, but according to Chancellor, financial markets get unstable whenever money is made too easy. He brings the story up to the present, when interest rates are the lowest they have ever been in the five millennia since they were first noted, and he emphasises how this has led to extreme economic insecurity and financial fragility. He also discusses the extraordinary appearance of negative interest rates in Europe and Japan. Chancellor explains how historically low interest rates are largely to blame for the lacklustre economic growth, rising inequality, zombie enterprises, high debt levels, and recent pension crises that have plagued the West. These are conditions that are incompatible with the growth of any economy. A massive real estate bubble has risen in China at the same time that there has never been a greater credit and investment boom. Chancellor demonstrates that the only way we can hope to meet the problems ahead is by comprehending interest as the global financial system approaches yet another crisis.