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 masses long ago switched from stocks to investments having higher yields and more protection from inflation. Now the pension funds - the market’s last hope - have won permission to quit stocks and...
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 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 final National Strategic Target List specified 1,050 Designated Ground Zeros (DGZs) for nuclear weapons, including 151 urban-industrial assets. Even the minimal version of the plan envisioned 650...
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 Russian commander whose ship was torpedoed by SMS Emden off Penang on October 28, 1914, was certainly unprepared for the new age of global conflict. Only twelve rounds of ammunition were ready on...
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 German Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, was one of the few authentic geniuses among nineteenth-century statesmen.
The Crusades, like the conquests that followed, were as much about overcoming Europe’s monetary shortage as about converting heathens to Christianity.14
The British welfare state, it seemed, had removed the incentives without which a capitalist economy simply could not function: the carrot of serious money for those who strove, the stick of hardship f...
The Bolsheviks promised their supporters ‘Peace, Bread and Power to the Soviets’. Peace turned out to mean abject capitulation.
The Abyss. Globalization had many economic benefits but, as in our own times, the creation of a truly international economic network combined greater efficiency with greater fragility. In 1914 a highl...
Systems can be fast, open, or secure, but only two of these three at a time.’51 The threat to world order can be summed up as ‘very fast networks x artificial intelligence x black boxes x the New Cast...
Suddenly the people running Savings and Loans had nothing to lose - a clear case of what economists call moral hazard.
Sin embargo, todos estos recursos del Estado administrativo imponen sobre el sector privado unas cargas que acaban por reducir la tasa de crecimiento y la creación de empleo.[10] La desigualdad interg...
Original Design.’ The bell curve that we encountered in Chapter 3 represents the normal distribution, in which 68.2 per cent of outcomes are within one standard deviation (plus or minus) of the mean.
Nowadays he is best remembered for the Fibonacci sequence of numbers (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 . . .), in which each successive number is the sum of the previous two, and the ratio between a number...