Quotes from Niall Ferguson

If the British wished to abolish the slave trade, they simply sent the navy. By 1840 no fewer than 425 slave ships had been intercepted by the Royal Navy off the West African coast and escorted to Sierra Leone, where nearly all of them were condemned.

La retórica europea de los nazis halló especial resonancia en todos aquellos conservadores para quienes el dominio alemán parecía un mal menor frente al comunismo soviético.

En lugar de coaligarse en una masa empobrecida, el proletariado se subdividió entre unas «aristocracias obreras» cualificadas y un lumopenproletariado vicioso. Las primeras prefirieron las huelgas y la negociación colectiva a la revolución (...), el segundo prefirió la ginebra.

In 1515 a decree of Sultan Selim I had threatened with death anyone found using the printing press.36 This failure to reconcile Islam with scientific progress was to prove disastrous. Having once provided European scholars with ideas and inspiration, Muslim scientists were now cut off from the latest research. If the Scientific Revolution was generated by a network, then the Ottoman Empire was effectively offline.

a better explanation may be the fundamental deterioration of standards in both legislation and governance that we see in nearly every democracy, regardless of their different twentieth-century histories

The Bolsheviks promised their supporters 'Peace, Bread and Power to the Soviets'. Peace turned out to mean abject capitulation.

they felt a genuine distaste for the institution of slavery. But of at least equal importance was a sense that the Confederacy was not a good credit risk (after all, the Confederate president Jefferson Davis had openly advocated the repudiation of state debts when he was a US senator).

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 technological change since the 1970s has perhaps been less transformative than is commonly supposed.14 For the directors of Fortune 1000 companies, however, it is 4.6.15 For Facebook users it was 3.74 in 2012,16 and just 3.57 in 2016.

an Empire-less Britain would be just a 'cold and unimportant little island where we should all have to work very hard and live mainly on herring and potatoes'.

The life of a hunter-gatherer is indeed, as Thomas Hobbes said of the state of nature, 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short'.

The imposition of British rule (as in Egypt in 1882) practically amounted to a 'no default' guarantee; the only uncertainty investors had to face concerned the expected duration of British rule.

by the second decade of the twentieth century the gap in living standards between London and Beijing was around six to one, compared with two to one in the eighteenth century.36

extravagant generosity with other people's money.

Como Keynes dijo una vez, cuando los hechos cambian uno debe cambiar de opinión.

Meanwhile, as Francis Fukuyama has argued, the very legitimacy of democratic politics is being corroded because 'interest groups . . . are able to effectively buy politicians with campaign contributions and lobbying', a process that he dubs 'repatrimonialization

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 the future).

fight over scarce resources (food and fertile women)

every one per cent increase in the Bank of England's base lending rate correlated with a three per cent drop in government popularity.

and growing need for fixed income securities, and for low inflation to ensure that the interest they pay retains its purchasing power. As more and more people leave the workforce, recurrent public sector deficits ensure that the bond market will never be short of new bonds to sell.

Rothschild . . . destroyed the predominance of land, by raising the system of state bonds to supreme power, thereby mobilising property and income and at the same time endowing money with the previous privileges of the land. He thereby created a new aristocracy, it is true, but this, resting as it does on the most unreliable of elements, on money, can never play as enduringly regressive a role as the former aristocracy, which was rooted in the land, in the earth itself.

If our ancestors had cared for the rights of other people,' he had reminded his Cabinet colleagues in 1878, 'the British Empire would not have been made.

Complexity is not cheap; on the contrary, it is very expensive indeed. The administrative state has found an easy solution to the problem of increasing the volume of public 'goods' without making commensurate increases to taxation, and that is to finance current government consumption through borrowing.

it's not owning property that gives you security; it just gives your creditors security. Real security comes from having a steady income

They achieved this by learning a crucial lesson: in finance small is seldom beautiful. By making their bank bigger and more diversified than any previous financial institution, they found a way of spreading their risks. And by engaging in currency trading as well as lending, they reduced their vulnerability to defaults.