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...
The libel that Jews ritually murdered Christian children to mix their blood in the unleavened bread baked at Passover appears to have originated in twelfth-century England. By the fifteenth century it...
The first symptoms of decline. The collapse of nations, he argued, was due to internal rigidity coupled with a decline in the ability, both moral and physical, to shape surrounding circumstances. . . ...
The financial system is so genuinely complex and so many of the relationships within it are non-linear, even chaotic.
The Japanese experience, when a conscious effort by the central bank to prick an asset bubble ended up triggering an 80 per cent stock market sell-off and a decade of economic stagnation.
The Dutch had improved on the Italian system of public debt (introducing, among other things, lottery loans which allowed people to gamble as they invested their savings in government debt). They had...
The Bank’s proper role in a crisis as the ‘lender of last resort’, to lend freely, albeit at a penalty rate, to combat liquidity crises.42
Suppose they began to worry about the health of the Japanese currency, the yen, in which bonds are denominated and in which the interest is paid. In such circumstances, the price of the bond would dro...
Six degrees of the mathematician Paul Erdös, himself a pioneer of network theory, as we have seen.13 Recent research suggests the number is now closer to five than six, which suggests that technologic...
Propounded
Peculation.
Our species should really be known as Homo dictyous (‘network man’) because – to quote the sociologists Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler – ‘our brains seem to have been built for social networks’.
Only when savers can put their money in reliable banks that it can be channelled from the idle to the industrious.
More likely to have creative ideas (or less likely to suffer from group-think).
Malfeasance
Los regímenes constitucionales basados en el imperio de la ley son a su vez más susceptibles de experimentar revoluciones financieras que alienten tanto la inversión extranjera como la formación inter...
It’s not owning property that gives you security; it just gives your creditors security. Real security comes from having a steady income,
It is not ‘Eurocentrism’ or (anti-)‘Orientalism’ to say that the rise of Western civilization is the single most important historical phenomenon of the second half of the second millennium after Chris...
Investors tended to infer future changes in fiscal and monetary policy from political events, which were regularly reported in private correspondence, in newspapers and by telegraph agencies. Among th...