The state of the future will need to function more like the human immune system
The price people are prepared to pay for a piece of a company tells you how much money they think that company will make in the future. In effect, stock markets hold hourly referendums on the companie...
The medieval contract known as the census, which allowed one party to buy a stream of annual payments from another.
The crisis prompted the issue of emergency paper money: in Britain, £1 and 10s Treasury notes; in the United States, the emergency currency that banks were authorized to issue under the Aldrich-Vreela...
The German Workers’ Party. Their principal goal, declared its leader in 1913, was ‘the maintenance and increase of [German] living space’ (Lebensraum) against the threat posed by Czech Halbmenschen (‘...
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...
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
Inchoate,
Currency peg can mean higher volatility in short-term interest rates, as the central bank seeks to keep the price of its money steady in terms of the peg. It can mean deflation, if the supply of the p...
Bond markets have power because they’re the fundamental base for all markets. The cost of credit, the interest rate [on a benchmark bond], ultimately determines the value of stocks, homes, all asset c...
A chaos so great and so obscure that nothing about it can be known’.
Technologies come and go. The world remains a world of squares and towers.
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.
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...
Outlandish ideas stand a better chance of success if they come with royal approval.
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...
My generation feels like it’s the lucky one,’ she told me one night. ‘Our grandparents had the Great Leap Forward, our parents had the Cultural Revolution. But we get to study, to travel, to make mone...
Japan in the 1930s became a garrison state.43 But it was one which carried within it the promise of a ‘warfare-welfare state’, offered social security in return for military sacrifice.
In the 1990s the world’s population for the first time exceeded six billion, more than three times what it had been when the First World War broke out.