Russia’s intelligence network did its utmost to damage his rival’s reputation,
It was an idea that made the crucial difference between British and Iberian America – an idea about the way people should govern themselves. Some people make the mistake of calling that idea ‘democrac...
Welter
We cannot transmit ideas and behaviours much beyond our friends’ friends’ friends
There was an orgy of vandalism and looting,
Sanguine.
Fraught
Financial markets saw the war of 1914–18 coming, we should expect to see declines in bond prices or rises in bond yields (since the yield is essentially the interest paid on a bond divided by its mark...
Billions of things linked to one another in myriad ways
Bear in mind when trying to compare housing with other forms of capital asset. The first is depreciation. Stocks do not wear out and require new roofs; houses do. The second is liquidity. As assets, h...
What makes a civilization real to its inhabitants, in the end, is not just the splendid edifices at it centre, nor even the smooth functioning of the institutions they house. At its core, a civilizati...
Unlike Britain, France, Italy and Russia, however, Germany did not have access to the international bond market during the war (having initially spurned the New York market and then been shut out of i...
To my mind, a civilization is much more than just the contents of a few first-rate art galleries. It is a highly complex human organization. Its paintings, statues and buildings may well be its most e...
The majority of books about World War I represent its causes as diplomatic, its course as military and its consequences as economic.
Kaffir
It nevertheless remains true that, in most countries for which long-run data are available, stocks have out-performed bonds – by a factor of roughly five over the twentieth century.9 This can scarcely...
There are institutional frameworks that have the opposite effect: incentivizing bad behaviour like killing people who annoy us, or stealing property we covet, or idling away our time. Where bad instit...
The war should be understood as a kind of backlash against globalization, heralded by rising tariffs and immigration restrictions in the decade before 1914, and welcomed most ardently by Europe’s agra...
The unexpectedness of war
The sellers of these ‘structured products’ boasted that securitization was having the effect of allocating risk ‘to those best able to bear it’. Only later did it turn out that risk was being allocate...