Quotes from Niall Ferguson

resisting the temptation to build complexity when (as in the case of financial regulation) simplicity is a better option.

The S&Ls were simultaneously losing money on long-term fixed-rate mortgages, because of inflation, and haemorrhaging deposits to higher-interest money market funds.

Inflation', wrote Milton Friedman in a famous definition, 'is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon, in the sense that it cannot occur without a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.' What

La carrera de Morgan ilustra perfectamente el modo como se construyó el imperio, que consistió en la transición de la piratería al poder político, hecho que cambiaría el mundo para siempre.

The Amsterdam Exchange Bank (Wisselbank) was set up in 1609 to resolve the practical problems created for merchants by the circulation of multiple currencies in the United Provinces, where there were no fewer than fourteen different mints and copious quantities of foreign coins.

Intergenerational inequity in public finance, hypertrophic growth of regulation, deterioration in the rule of law and corrosion of educational institutions Ã¢â'¬â€œ taken together, these lead to a 'great degeneration' of both economic performance and (as we shall see) social cohesion.

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. . . . What would have been Western history if the knights who defeated the Arabs at Tours had surrendered because they believed in the historic inevitability of the triumph of Christianity? Central Europe would today be Moslem."134

By allowing merchants to set up accounts denominated in a standardized currency, the Exchange Bank pioneered the system of cheques and direct debits or transfers that we take for granted today. This allowed more and more commercial transactions to take place without the need for the sums involved to materialize in actual coins.

Europe's central banks had nearly all committed themselves to the gold standard by 1908; that meant that they nearly all had to target their gold reserves, raising rates (or otherwise intervening) if they experienced a specie outflow. At the very least, this simplified life for investors, by reducing the risk of large exchange rate fluctuations.

Although it performed the same functions as the Dutch Wisselbank, the Riksbank was also designed to be a Lanebank, meaning that it engaged in lending as well as facilitating commercial payments. By lending amounts in excess of its metallic reserve, it may be said to have pioneered the practice of what would later be known as fractional reserve banking, exploiting the fact that money left on deposit could profitably be lent out to borrowers.

El Japón en el que Hiro-Hito alcanzó la edad adulta era un país que admiraba a Occidente por su modernidad al tiempo que se hallaba resentido contra él por su arrogancia. Parecía que, para ser tratado como un igual, Japón tendría que adquirir también el último de los accesorios occidentales: un imperio.

Franklin had admitted that the colonies had different forms of government, different laws, different interests, and some of them different religious persuasions and different manners. Their jealousy of each other is so great that however necessary an union of the colonies has long been, for their common defence and security against their enemies, and how sensible soever each colony has been of that necessity, yet they have never been able to effect such an union among themselves.

The thinkers in their youth are almost always very lonely creatures. . . . The university most worthy of rational admiration is that one in which your lonely thinker can feel himself least lonely, most positively furthered and most richly fed. —WILLIAM JAMES1

Sirve el Hummer para la conquista, o para el consumo? La respuesta es que para ambas cosas. De hecho, con su bajo kilometraje por litro (un promedio de cuatro kilómetros por litro) y su gran altura y anchura, ejemplifica el despilfarro estadounidense en el uso del petróleo.

Very few economists foresaw the crisis, but a great many have tried retrospectively to explain it, generating a large literature of distinctly mixed quality.

Inflation', wrote Milton Friedman in a famous definition, 'is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon, in the sense that it cannot occur without a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.

From the summer of 1719 investors who wished to acquire the 'daughters' and 'granddaughters' were generously assisted by the Banque Royale, which allowed shareholders to borrow money, using their shares as collateral; money they could then invest in more shares.

least 40 million people died as a result of the epidemic, the majority of them suffocated by a lethal accumulation of blood and other fluid in the lungs. Ironically, unlike most flu epidemics, but like the war that preceded and spread it, the influenza of 1918 disproportionately killed young adults. One in every hundred American males between the ages of 25 and 34 fell victim to the 'Spanish Lady'.

By August, the pandemic of 2020 seemed more likely to end up closer to the 1957–58 Asian flu in terms of excess mortality. (As we saw in chapter 7, the Asian flu killed up to 115,700 Americans, the equivalent of 215,000 in 2020, and between 700,000 and 1.5 million people worldwide, equivalent to 2 to 4 million dead today.) That meant that in August 2020, COVID-19 was still capable of killing many more people.

Two epidemics swept the world in 1918. One was Spanish influenza, the first recorded outbreak of which was at a Kansas army base in March 1918. As if to mock the efforts of men to kill one another, the virus spread rapidly across the United States and then crossed to Europe on the crowded American troopships.

first networked polity. 'In no country in the world,' declared Tocqueville, 'has the principle of association been more successfully used or applied to a greater multitude of objects than in America':

Bread, cash, dosh, dough, loot, lucre, moolah, readies, the where-withal: call it what you like, money matters.

most money is invisible, little more than numbers on a computer screen?

then resold their loans in bulk to Wall Street banks. The banks, in turn, bundled the loans into high-yielding residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) and sold them on to investors around the world, all eager for a few hundredths of a percentage point more return on their capital. Repackaged as collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), these subprime securities could be transformed from risky loans to flaky borrowers into triple-A rated investment-grade securities.