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 frenzy of the cheering at the Cow Palace was reminiscent of Nazi times. . . . They [the Goldwater supporters] are the middle class gone rampant: the technocrats, the white collar workers impelled...
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...
The Portuguese did not arrive with many products of their own to offer Asian consumers (though they did bring some slaves and gold from their West African outposts). That was not the point. Nor did th...
The Armenian genocide, the massacres of the Pontic Greeks and the agreed ‘exchanges’ of Greek and Turkish populations after the sack of Smyrna illustrated with a terrible clarity the truth of the Arch...
Technologies come and go. The world remains a world of squares and towers.
Somehow no really terrible Western ideas like, say, witch-burning or communism ever get mentioned, though they seem just as plausibly the products of Judaeo-Christian culture as the spirit of capitali...
Some S&Ls bet their depositors’ money on highly dubious projects. Many simply stole it, as if deregulation meant that the law no longer applied to them.
Since no country has had any experience with the tactical use of nuclear weapons, the possibility of miscalculation is considerable. The temptation to use the same target system as for conventional wa...
Since de Soto published The Mystery of Capital, revolutions in countries like Tunisia and Egypt have provided compelling evidence in support of his approach. He sees the ‘Arab Spring’ primarily as a r...
Salvo unas cuantas excepciones, la élite política británica, a diferencia de la élite intelectual mayoritariamente socialista, encontró muy difícil aceptar que el imperio tenía que desaparecer como pr...
Rather than being a cause of the late twentieth-century crisis, the Internet appears to have been a consequence of the breakdown of hierarchical power.
Pero los intereses estadounidenses podían también verse satisfechos porque la ocupación de países extranjeros reportaba beneficios (al cabo de un tiempo extraordinariamente breve). Sobre esta base, er...
Outlandish ideas stand a better chance of success if they come with royal approval.
Only general officers were entitled to know our true rank. To all others our standard reply to the inevitable question, What is your rank? was simply a firm, My rank is confidential, but at this momen...
One difficulty is that we cannot always reconstruct the past thoughts of these non-Western peoples, for not all of them existed in civilizations with the means of recording and preserving thought. In...
Once the United States was famed as a land of opportunity, where a family could leap from ‘rags to riches’ in a generation. But today, if you are born to parents in the bottom income quintile, you hav...
No tenemos ningún interés en Sudamérica; no sentimos ninguna simpatía políticamente fundamentada hacia ellos. Venimos de orígenes distintos... Ni todos los tratados que pudiéramos hacer, ni los comisi...
News of the Indian Mutiny had taken forty-six days to reach London in 1857, travelling at an effective speed of 3.8 miles an hour. News of the huge Nobi earthquake in Japan in 1891 took a single day,...