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...
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...
Coruscating
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...
Traders had begun to speak of the ‘Greenspan put’ because having him at the Fed was like having a ‘put’ option on the stock market (an option but not an obligation to sell stocks at a good price in th...
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...
Russia’s intelligence network did its utmost to damage his rival’s reputation,
Only after Eden agreed to leave Egypt unconditionally did Eisenhower arrange a billion-dollar rescue package from the IMF and the Export-Import Bank.
It was a war of evil against lesser evil.
Unintelligible because the print was so small.
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 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...
Spurious
Parsimony.
The majority of books about World War I represent its causes as diplomatic, its course as military and its consequences as economic.
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...
Credit was, quite simply, the total of banks’ assets (loans).
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...
Propounded
Money: a unit of account, a store of value - portable power.