Simple point is that institutions are to humans what hives are to bees. They are the structures within which we organize ourselves as groups. You know when you are inside one, just as a bee knows when...
Non-Western countries had, until quite recently, highly unreliable legal systems and differing accounting rules. If a foreign trading partner decided to default on its debts, there was little that an...
Making provision for an uncertain future has taken the very simple form of an investment (usually leveraged, that is debt-financed) in a house,
La noción de un «choque de civilizaciones» es tan caricaturesca como la idea de que Estados Unidos solo está interesado en el petróleo de Oriente Próximo. Es
Inept or inflexible monetary policy in the wake of a sharp decline in asset prices can turn a correction into a recession and a recession into a depression.
Inchoate,
Desideratum,
Codicils,
By the second quarter of the twentieth century one in nine German doctors was a Jew, and one in six lawyers. There were also above-average numbers of Jews working as newspaper editors, journalists, th...
Banks have evolved since the days of the Medici precisely in order (as the 3rd Lord Rothschild succinctly put it), to ‘facilitate the movement of money from point A, where it is, to point B, where it...
As masters of the bond market, the Rothschilds were already more feared than loved. Reactionaries on the Right lamented the rise of a new form of wealth, higher-yielding and more liquid than the lande...
An unlikely champion of minority rights. His name was Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili – Stalin (‘man of steel’),
Two years later, to provide some competition in the secondary market, the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac) was set up. The effect was once again to broaden the secondary market for...
Two epidemics swept the world in 1918. One was Spanish influenza, the first recorded outbreak of which was at a Kansas army base in March 1918. As if to mock the efforts of men to kill one another, th...
Today 350 million people speak English as their first language and around 450 million have it as a second language. That is roughly one in every seven people on the planet.
The task assigned to the RAND* researcher Paul Baran in 1964 was to develop a communication system that would survive a Soviet nuclear attack. Baran suggested three possible structures for such a syst...
The performance of the American stock market is perhaps best measured by comparing the total returns on stocks, assuming the reinvestment of all dividends, with the total returns on other financial as...
The idea was to reinvent mortgages by bundling thousands of them together as the backing for new and alluring securities that could be sold as alternatives to traditional government and corporate bond...
The gold standard had its advantages, no doubt. Exchange rate stability made for predictable pricing in trade and reduced transaction costs, while the long-run stability of prices acted as an anchor f...
The finances of the Confederacy are one of the great might-have-beens of American history.39 For, in the final analysis, it was as much a lack of hard cash as a lack of industrial capacity or manpower...