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...
American Empire- it is an empire that lacks the drive to export its capital, its people and its culture to those backward regions which need them most urgently and which, if they are neglected, will b...
They felt a genuine distaste for the institution of slavery. But of at least equal importance was a sense that the Confederacy was not a good credit risk (after all, the Confederate president Jefferso...
The state has to pay 50 per cent, then even reliable commercial borrowers are likely to pay some kind of war premium. It is no coincidence that the year 1499, when Venice was fighting both on land in...
The pairing instinct is the great remover of the limits between individuals,
The dichotomy between network and hierarchy is an ancient idea.
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...
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...
Striving to be a master of the universe
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...
Parece seguro que esta decadencia relativa continuará en un futuro inmediato. Para muchos estadounidenses, la principal importancia de Europa no es la de ser un rival estratégico sino un destino turís...
Money was commoditized labour,
Feckless
Constrained
An increase in the supply of paper money, and hence a decrease in the purchasing power of the currencies in which most bonds were denominated. A rational investor who anticipated a major war would sel...
According to Christakis and Fowler, we cannot transmit ideas and behaviours much beyond our friends’ friends’ friends (in other words, across just three degrees of separation). This is because the tra...
With good reason, Joseph Goebbels described radio as ‘the spiritual weapon of the totalitarian state’. Stalin might have added that the telephone was God’s gift to eavesdroppers.
When we speak of ‘populism’ today,1 we sometimes mean nothing more than a politics that is audible as well as intelligible to the man in the street – or, to be precise, the man and woman slumped on th...
We must pose the familiar question about how far our civil liberties have been eroded by the national security state… Somehow it is always a choice between habeas corpus and hundreds of corpses.
Vice President Nixon the following year: he was even prepared to use atomic weapons to shore up the French position in Indochina.63 The United States cannot afford to preclude itself from using nuclea...