Institutions or products of culture. But they formalize a set of norms.
I wrote this book because I had formed a strong impression that the people currently living were paying insufficient attention to the dead.
Hemos olvidado profundamente en todas partes que el Pago Monetario no es la única relación entre seres humanos... No es el único nexo del hombre con el hombre'—Thomas Carlyle
Facebook relayed the bogus story that Trump had been endorsed by the Pope.
As the banks took over the securities, the ratios between their capital and their assets lurched down towards their regulatory minima. Central banks in the United States and Europe sought to alleviate...
We cannot transmit ideas and behaviours much beyond our friends’ friends’ friends
Was true of the English East India Company, the VOC’s biggest challenge was the principal-agent problem: the tendency of its men on the spot to trade on their own account, bungle transactions or simpl...
Parsimonious
Least 40 million people died as a result of the epidemic, the majority of them suffocated by a lethal accumulation of blood and other fluid in the lungs. Ironically, unlike most flu epidemics, but lik...
Desideratum,
What became known in Russia as ‘pogroms’ – literally ‘after thunder’ – had been a recurrent feature of life in Western and Central Europe from medieval times onwards.
Sir Richard Turnbull, the penultimate Governor of Aden, once told Labour politician Denis Healey that 'when the British Empire finally sank beneath the waves of history, it would leave behind it only...
No serious writer would claim that the reign of Western civilization was unblemished. Yet there are those who would insist that there was nothing whatever good about it. This position is absurd.
Kaffir
Edsel Ford, son of the firm’s founder Henry,
Those who live by the tort, die by the tort.
There could be no planning because no one had time for it
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...
Resisting the temptation to build complexity when (as in the case of financial regulation) simplicity is a better option.
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...