Quotes from Niall Ferguson

Some of the network graphs that Able Danger produced were twenty feet long and almost wholly unintelligible because the print was so small.8 Krebs himself concluded that there would be no substitute for human intelligence in the war on terrorism; the alternative would be to drown in big data.

The Russian commander whose ship was torpedoed by SMS Emden off Penang on October 28, 1914, was certainly unprepared for the new age of global conflict. Only twelve rounds of ammunition were ready on deck; but there were sixty Chinese prostitutes below.

the lights in financial markets were flashing green, not red, until the very eve of destruction.

We don't need a 'low carbon economy,'" she declared at the World Economic Forum in January 2020. "We don't need to 'lower emissions.' Our emissions have to stop if we are to have a chance to stay below the 1.5-degree target …. Any plan or policy of yours that doesn't include radical emission cuts at the source, starting today, is completely insufficient.

two square yards of public land. Their arbitrary act of expropriation cost Mohamed Bouazizi his livelihood and his life. But his self-immolation sparked a revolution Ã¢â'¬â€œ though how glorious a revolution remains to be seen. It will depend on how far new constitutional arrangements in countries like Tunisia and Egypt achieve the shift from an extractive to an inclusive state, from the arbitrary power of rent-seeking elites to the rule of law for all.

Creo que tenemos la peculiar idea de que nuestro gobierno es perfecto sin saber real y verdaderamente cómo funciona».72

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 simply defraud the company.

The more integrated the world's financial markets become, the greater the opportunities for financially knowledgeable people wherever they live - and the bigger the risk of downward mobility for the financially illiterate.

At Tsushima on May 27–28, 1905, the Japanese fleet under Admiral T?g? Heihachir? sent two-thirds of the Russian fleet – 147,000 tons of naval hardware and nearly 50,000 sailors – to the bottom of the Korea Strait.

Meanwhile, property prices roughly trebled between 1963 and 1979, while consumer prices rose by a factor of just 2.5. But there was a sting in the tail. The same governments that avowed their faith in the 'property-owning democracy' also turned out to believe in price stability, or at least lower inflation. Achieving that meant higher interest rates.

Debts were transferable, hence 'pay the bearer' rather than a named creditor.

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 allocated to those least able to understand it.

Since no country has had any experience with the tactical use of nuclear weapons, the possibility of miscalculation is considerable. The temptation to use the same target system as for conventional war and thereby produce vast casualties will be overwhelming. The pace of operations may out strip the possibilities of negotiation. Both sides would be operating in the dark with no precedents to guide them.119

the financial system is so genuinely complex and so many of the relationships within it are non-linear, even chaotic.

public expectations of inflation to shift and the demand for cash balances to fall

it is no longer a mere possibility that this network can be instrumentalized by corrupt oligarchs or religious fanatics to wage a new and unpredictable kind of war in cyberspace. That war has commenced. Indices of geopolitical risk suggest that conventional and even nuclear war may not be far behind.

But the foundation on which all of this rested was the underlying credibility of a borrower's promise to repay. (It is no coincidence that in English the root of 'credit' is credo, the Latin for 'I believe

En ambas economías el caos fiscal se aunaba con la inflación rampante, que en Alemania evocaba la hiperinflación de 1923.Y ¿no había sido Hitler el «hijo adoptivo de la inflación»?88

In 1800 seven out of the world's ten biggest cities had still been Asian, and Beijing had still exceeded London in size. By 1900, largely as a result of the Industrial Revolution, only one of the biggest was Asian; the rest were European or American.

Pure monetary theory, however, cannot explain why in one country the inflationary process proceeds so much further or faster than in another.

In all countries there was a torrent of what Paul Fussell has called 'high diction': a friend became a 'comrade', a horse became a 'steed', the enemy became the 'foe'.

La Unión Soviética, a diferencia de anteriores aspirantes a la hegemonía, está animada por una nueva fe fanática, antitética a la nuestra, y busca imponer su autoridad absoluta sobre el resto del mundo.

Optimistic buyers of stocks are bulls, pessimistic sellers are bears.

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'.