This book is about the causes of our stationary state. It is inspired by Smith’s insight that both stagnation and growth are in large measure the results of ‘laws and institutions’. Its central thesis...
They’ve got the usual Socialist disease — they’ve run out of other people’s money.
They achieved this by learning a crucial lesson: in finance small is seldom beautiful. By making their bank bigger and more diversified than any previous financial institution, they found a way of spr...
There were no cheques; instructions were given orally and written in the bank’s books. There was no interest; depositors were given discrezione (in proportion to the annual profits of the firm) to com...
Their mission achieved, Princip and Cabrinovic both tried to commit suicide, but the cyanide in the capsules they carried had oxidized and failed to kill them.
The torrent of verbiage comes about because professional politicians are more concerned with spin than substance, the media never cease to howl for ‘something’ to be done after every mishap, the lobby...
The spirit of policy and that of bureaucracy are diametrically opposed,
The question was simply this: Would the world be French or British?
The possibility exists that information and computer technology could enable Beijing to build a system of ‘social credit’, analogous to financial credit in the West, that would (in official parlance)...
The only way to ensure that peasants handed over their grain to feed the Red Army, he insisted, was to order exemplary executions of so-called kulaks, the supposedly rapacious capitalist peasants whom...
The only way to ensure that Red Army recruits did not desert or run away, Trotsky had concluded, was to mount machine-guns in their rear and shoot any who failed to advance against the enemy. This was...
The more integrated the world’s financial markets become, the greater the opportunities for financially knowledgeable people wherever they live - and the bigger the risk of downward mobility for the f...
The liabilities of the bank thus became its deposits (on which it paid interest) plus its reserve (on which it could collect no interest); its assets became its loans (on which it could collect intere...
The imposition of British rule (as in Egypt in 1882) practically amounted to a ‘no default’ guarantee; the only uncertainty investors had to face concerned the expected duration of British rule.
The first ‘networked era’ followed the introduction of the printing press to Europe in the late fifteenth century and lasted until the end of the eighteenth century. The second –our own time –dates fr...
The financial world has been staggering under a series of blows such as the delicate system of international credit has never before witnessed, or even imagined… Nothing so widespread and so world-wid...
The dead outnumber the living fourteen to one, and we ignore the accumulated experience of such a huge majority of mankind at our peril
The S&Ls were simultaneously losing money on long-term fixed-rate mortgages, because of inflation, and haemorrhaging deposits to higher-interest money market funds.
The Rothschilds had decided the outcome of the Napoleonic Wars by putting their financial weight behind Britain. Now they would help decide the outcome of the American Civil War - by choosing to sit o...
The Crusades, like the conquests that followed, were as much about overcoming Europe’s monetary shortage as about converting heathens to Christianity.14