En 1863, en Newcastle, el doctor James Hunt había dejado consternada a la audiencia de una reunión de la British Association for the Advancement of Science, al afirmar que los «negros» eran una especi...
Credit was, quite simply, the total of banks’ assets (loans).
Buying a 100,000 yen bond keeps the capital sum safe while also providing regular payments to the saver. To be precise, the bond pays a fixed rate or ‘coupon’ of 1.5 per cent: 1,500 yen a year in the...
«Consideramos evidentes estas verdades: que los hombres son creados iguales; que han sido dotados por el Creador de ciertos derechos inalienables; que estos derechos son la vida, la libertad y la búsq...
When set in its proper historical context, the present time appears less unnervingly unprecedented and more familiar.
Valley of the clueless
Tranches
There are now two kinds of people in the world: those who own and run the networks, and those who merely use them
The secret of our success as a species ‘resides . . . in the collective brains of our communities
The pairing instinct is the great remover of the limits between individuals,
The libel that Jews ritually murdered Christian children to mix their blood in the unleavened bread baked at Passover appears to have originated in twelfth-century England. By the fifteenth century it...
The first symptoms of decline. The collapse of nations, he argued, was due to internal rigidity coupled with a decline in the ability, both moral and physical, to shape surrounding circumstances. . . ...
The Japanese had won by being more European than the Russians; their ships were more modern, their troops better disciplined, their artillery more effective. To Leo Tolstoy, the titan of Russian lette...
The Japanese experience, when a conscious effort by the central bank to prick an asset bubble ended up triggering an 80 per cent stock market sell-off and a decade of economic stagnation.
The Dutch had improved on the Italian system of public debt (introducing, among other things, lottery loans which allowed people to gamble as they invested their savings in government debt). They had...
The Bank’s proper role in a crisis as the ‘lender of last resort’, to lend freely, albeit at a penalty rate, to combat liquidity crises.42
That investors should be able to take physical possession of the cotton which underpinned the bonds if the South failed to make its interest payments. Collateral is, after all, only good if a creditor...
Suppose they began to worry about the health of the Japanese currency, the yen, in which bonds are denominated and in which the interest is paid. In such circumstances, the price of the bond would dro...
Rumours can go viral without sophisticated information technology.
Relationships between debtors and creditors brokered or ‘intermediated’ by increasingly numerous institutions called banks. The core function of these institutions was now information gathering and ri...