The European political elites now effectively rely on US companies such as Facebook to carry out censorship on their behalf, seemingly oblivious to the risk that Facebook’s ‘community standards’ may e...
Propounded
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...
Malfeasance
Knout
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...
Fin-de-siècle
Extravagant generosity with other people’s money.
Elide
Without the spread of British rule around the world, it is hard to believe that the structures of liberal capitalism would have been so successfully established in so many different economies around t...
When making their loans, the bankers should have thought more carefully about how easily they could call back the money - essentially a question about the liquidity of the loan.
The key point is that not all sets of institutions, when you add up the sum of the parts, are equal. There are good and bad combinations. In some sets of institutions, people can flourish freely as in...
The Emperor and his ministers might dance Western dances and even, in violation of traditional Japanese propriety, smile Western smiles. But their underlying and deadly earnest aim was always to wipe...
Some problems can only be resolved by network analysis.
Only after Eden agreed to leave Egypt unconditionally did Eisenhower arrange a billion-dollar rescue package from the IMF and the Export-Import Bank.
La administración británica de las finanzas egipcias tuvo mucho en común con una misión del Fondo Monetario Internacional, o más bien con el modo en que una misión del FMI operaría si pudiera llamar a...
Historians are not scientists. They cannot (and should not even trying to) establish universal laws of social or political physics with reliable predictive powers. Why? Because there is no possibility...
Why, when its causes today seem so numerous and so obvious, were contemporaries so oblivious of Armageddon until just days before its advent? One possible answer is that their vision was blurred by a...
Well as illiterate, unhealthy and bloody. I admire contemporary social scientific work that distinguishes between ‘open’ and ‘closed’ sets of institutions,18 but as an historian I find that distinctio...
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...