Quotes from Niall Ferguson

Because they are all derived from the value of underlying assets, all futures contracts are forms of 'derivative'.

The gold standard had its advantages, no doubt. Exchange rate stability made for predictable pricing in trade and reduced transaction costs, while the long-run stability of prices acted as an anchor for inflation expectations. Being on gold may also have reduced the costs of borrowing by committing governments to pursue prudent fiscal and monetary policies.

Inflation has come down partly because many of the items we buy, from clothes to computers, have got cheaper as a result of technological innovation and the relocation of production to low-wage economies in Asia.

Los gobernantes arbitrarios y corruptos tienen una enorme responsabilidad por este fracaso económico.36 Buena parte del dinero que llovió sobre los países pobres ha sido simplemente filtrado y devuelto (con frecuencia hacia cuentas de bancos en Suiza), pues los gobernantes corruptos han atesorado sus mal obtenidas ganancias en el extranjero.

Otros pidieron prestado para financiar un estilo de vida basado en un consumo ostentoso. Los duques de Devonshire, por ejemplo, se gastaban entre el 40 y el 55 por ciento de su renta anual en pagar intereses: tan enormes eran las cantidades que habían pedido prestadas en el siglo XIX. «Lo único que ustedes no tienen —se quejaba uno de sus abogados— es la capacidad de autocontrol.»

In the 1990s the world's population for the first time exceeded six billion, more than three times what it had been when the First World War broke out.

Today, banking assets (that is, loans) in the world's major economies are equivalent to around 150 per cent of those countries' combined GDP.

T]o divine the direction on a calm sea may prove more difficult than to chart a course through tempestuous waters, where the violence of the elements imparts inspiration through the need for survival."25

Kazuo Ishiguro's novel The Buried Giant.

Only in the realm of political institutions does there remain significant global diversity, with a wide range of governments around the world resisting the idea of the rule of law, with its protection of individual rights, as the foundation for meaningful representative government. It is as much as a political ideology as a religion that a militant Islam seeks to resist the advance of the late twentieth-century Western norms of gender equality and sexual freedom.

The facile, if not tautological, answer to the question is that the West dominated the Rest because of imperialism.

making provision for an uncertain future has taken the very simple form of an investment (usually leveraged, that is debt-financed) in a house

The reality, then, was that Indian nationalism was fuelled not by the impoverishment of the many but by the rejection of the privileged few.

aunque el liberalismo económico y político anglófono sigue siendo las más atractiva cultura del mundo, tiene el reto de hacer frente, como ha ocurrido desde la revolución iraní, a una seria amenaza procedente del fundamentalismo islámico.

The Crusades, like the conquests that followed, were as much about overcoming Europe's monetary shortage as about converting heathens to Christianity.14

the way the money was spent ensured that Spain's newfound wealth provided the entire continent with a monetary stimulus.

Few things are harder to predict accurately than the timing and magnitude of financial crises, because the financial system is so genuinely complex and so many of the relationships within it are non-linear, even chaotic.

currency peg can mean higher volatility in short-term interest rates, as the central bank seeks to keep the price of its money steady in terms of the peg. It can mean deflation, if the supply of the peg is constrained (as the supply of gold was relative to the demand for it in the 1870s and 1880s).

They dug up so much silver to pay for their wars of conquest that the metal itself dramatically declined in value - that is to say, in its purchasing power with respect to other goods.

The second hallmark of the stationary state was the ability of a corrupt and monopolistic elite to exploit the system of law and administration to their own advantage: In a country too, where, though the rich or the owners of large capitals enjoy a good deal of security, the

agencies began to downgrade scores of RMBS CDOs (short for 'residential mortgage-backed security collateralized debt obligations', the very term testifying to the over-complex nature of these products).

Can a non-Western power really hope to benefit from downloading Western scientific knowledge, if it continues to reject that other key part of the West's winning formula: the third institutional innovation of private property rights, the rule of law and truly representative government?

For some readers, I dare say, the word 'institution' still conjures up a Victorian vision of lunatic asylums: poor old Niall, he's in an institution now. That is not the kind of institution I mean. I am talking about, for example, political institutions, like the British Parliament or the American Congress. When we talk about

was China in some sense a victim of its own success – stuck in a 'high-level equilibrium trap' by the ability of its cultivators to provide a vast number of people with just enough calories to live?