Then resold their loans in bulk to Wall Street banks. The banks, in turn, bundled the loans into high-yielding residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) and sold them on to investors around the wo...
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 twentieth century ran a series of experiments, imposing quite different institutions on two sets of Germans (in West and East), two sets of Koreans (in North and South) and two sets of Chinese (in...
Political transition lies in the detail of the constitution, not to mention the rules governing the constituent assembly that designs it. How does the legislature stand relative to the executive and t...
Parsimonious
Money is a matter of belief, even faith: belief in the person paying us; belief in the person issuing the money he uses or the institution that honours his cheques or transfers. Money is not metal. It...
Modern terms, what Law was attempting could be described as reflation. The French economy had been in recession in 1716 and Law’s expansion of the money supply with banknotes clearly did provide a muc...
In the history of the bond market.68 So successful did Argentina’s default prove (economic growth has since surged while bond spreads are back in the 300-500 basis point range) that many economists we...
How far history is distorted by the dubious benefit of hindsight.
Globalization. Only one era in history remotely resembles our own in terms of the degree of international economic and social integration, and that is the period from around 1875 to 1914. World trade...
Extravagant generosity with other people’s money.
A better explanation may be the fundamental deterioration of standards in both legislation and governance that we see in nearly every democracy, regardless of their different twentieth-century histori...
Why, to give another suggestive example, did it take an American journalist sixty-five days to get official permission (including, after a wait of up to five weeks, a Food
When half the nodes of a random graph the size of most real-world networks are removed, the network is destroyed. But when the same procedure is carried out against a scale-free model of a similar siz...
The risk was spread across the globe from American state pension funds to public health networks in Australia and even to town councils beyond the Arctic Circle. In Norway, for example, the municipali...
The people were divided into the persecuted and those who persecuted them. That wild beast, which lives in man and does not dare to show itself until the barriers of law and custom have been removed,...
The great thinkers of the eighteenth century were also pioneering tourists
The Hollywood version of the War of Independence is a straightforward fight between heroic Patriots and wicked, Nazi-like Redcoats. The reality was quite different. This was indeed a civil war which d...
Rising to his feet he said, ‘If the heir to the throne has been assassinated, well, first of all we know nothing for certain, and secondly, it doesn’t concern us in the least.’…
Only after Eden agreed to leave Egypt unconditionally did Eisenhower arrange a billion-dollar rescue package from the IMF and the Export-Import Bank.