By the second decade of the twentieth century the gap in living standards between London and Beijing was around six to one, compared with two to one in the eighteenth century.36
As inflation has fallen, so bonds have rallied in what has been one of the great bond bull markets of modern history. Even more remarkably, despite the spectacular Argentine default - not to mention R...
And ingenuous outsiders, like Groucho Marx.83
And growing need for fixed income securities, and for low inflation to ensure that the interest they pay retains its purchasing power. As more and more people leave the workforce, recurrent public sec...
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...
Achievement to create the first modern insurance fund, based on correct actuarial and financial principles, rather than mercantile gambling.
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.
Why exactly has social mobility declined in the United States in the past thirty years, so that the probability has more than halved that a man born into the bottom 25 per cent of the income distribut...
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...
What had begun as a system of large-scale insurance had simply become a system of taxation, with today’s contributions being used to pay today’s benefits, rather than to accumulate a fund for future u...
To demonstrate that Western institutions have indeed degenerated, I am going to have to open up some long-sealed black boxes. The first is the one labelled ‘democracy’. The second is labelled ‘capital...
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...
There is in fact no such thing as the future, singular; only futures, plural. There are multiple interpretations of history, to be sure, none definitive – but there is only one past. And although the...
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 whole notion of exemplary violence seemed to fire Lenin’s imagination. On August 11, 1918 he wrote a letter to Bolshevik leaders in Penza that speaks volumes: Comrades! The kulak uprising must be...
The rationale for the FDA’s rigid standards is to avoid the sale of a drug like thalidomide. But the unintended consequence is almost certainly to allow many more people to die prematurely than would...
The question was simply this: Would the world be French or British?
The principle of limited liability was implied: shareholders stood to lose only their investment in the company and no other assets in the event that it failed.15
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...