Quotes from Niall Ferguson

there are now two kinds of people in the world: those who own and run the networks, and those who merely use them

the unexpectedness of war

The masses long ago switched from stocks to investments having higher yields and more protection from inflation. Now the pension funds - the market's last hope - have won permission to quit stocks and bonds for real estate, futures, gold, and even diamonds. The death of equities looks like an almost permanent condition.5

La UE está muy poblada pero envejece. Su economía es grande pero lenta. Su productividad no es mala, pero está viciada por el ocio excesivo. Es

Ownership of real property is second only to ownership of intellectual property

specified confidence intervals (for example, the statement that 40 per cent of the balls in the jar are white, at a confidence interval of 95 per cent, implies that the precise value lies somewhere between 35 and 45 per cent - 40 plus or minus 5 per cent).

the joint-stock, limited-liability corporation: joint-stock because the company's capital was jointly owned by multiple investors; limited-liability because the separate existence of the company as a legal 'person' protected the investors from losing all their wealth if the venture failed.

Only by historical methods can we explain why, over the past thirty years, so many countries created forms of debt that, by design, cannot be inflated away; and why, as a result, the next generation will be saddled for life with liabilities incurred by their parents and grandparents.

Marx era una persona odiosa. Vividor desaliñado y polemista virtulento le gustaba alardear que su espora era, por nacimiento, «la baronesa de Von Estphalen»(...). En consecuencia, durante casi toda su vida hubo de depender de los donativos de Engels, para quien el socialismo era una mera afición (...)

Stalin's power consisted of three distinct elements: total control of the party bureaucracy, total control of the means of communication Ã¢â'¬â€œ with the Kremlin telephone network as the central hub Ã¢â'¬â€œ and total control of a secret police staffed by men who themselves lived in fear.

modern terms, what Law was attempting could be described as reflation. The French economy had been in recession in 1716 and Law's expansion of the money supply with banknotes clearly did provide a much-needed stimulus.52

government had degenerated into what has been called an 'administrative' or 'managerial' state, hierarchical and bureaucratic in its mode of operation, dedicated to generating ever more complicated regulation that had precisely the opposite effect of that intended.

To demonstrate that Western institutions have indeed degenerated, I am going to have to open up some long-sealed black boxes. The first is the one labelled 'democracy'. The second is labelled 'capitalism'. The third is 'the rule of law'. And the fourth is 'civil society'. Together, they are the key components of our civilization.

Gibbon's breathtaking chapter on early Christianity (volume I, chapter 15 of his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) or in Candide, Voltaire's devastating mockery of Leibniz's claim that 'all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds'.m

The reality, as we shall see, is that history is a process too complex to be modeled, even in the informal ways favored by Turchin and Dalio. Moreover, the more systematic modeling is done of historical phenomena—notably pandemics, but also climate change or environmental degradation—the easier it becomes to go "from being roughly right towards being precisely wrong.

John [Ivan] the Terrible

The Rothschilds had decided the outcome of the Napoleonic Wars by putting their financial weight behind Britain. Now they would help decide the outcome of the American Civil War - by choosing to sit on the sidelines.

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

Just as global networks of communication and transportation had made the mass migrations of the late nineteenth century possible,6 so political networks of populism and nativism sprang into life to resist them.

the creditor could draw a bill on the debtor and either use the bill as a means of payment in its own right or obtain cash for it at a discount from a banker willing to act as broker.

tears' after he told her simply: 'It's all up.'26 Churchill was the exception. He told Violet Asquith on 22 February 1915: I think a curse should rest on me – because I love this war. I know it's smashing & shattering the lives of thousands every moment – & yet – I can't help it – I enjoy every second

Soros regards himself as more a philosopher than a hit man. His book The Alchemy of Finance (1987) begins with a bold critique of the fundamental assumptions of economics as a subject

There were no cheques; instructions were given orally and written in the bank's books. There was no interest; depositors were given discrezione (in proportion to the annual profits of the firm) to compensate them for risking their money.33

The finances of the Confederacy are one of the great might-have-beens of American history.39 For, in the final analysis, it was as much a lack of hard cash as a lack of industrial capacity or manpower that undercut what was, in military terms, an impressive effort by the Southern states.