Quotes from Niall Ferguson

M0 (also known as the monetary base or high-powered money), which is equal to the total liabilities of the central bank, that is, cash plus the reserves of private sector banks on deposit at the central bank; and M1 (also known as narrow money), which is equal to cash in circulation plus demand or 'sight' deposits.

I wrote this book because I had formed a strong impression that the people currently living were paying insufficient attention to the dead.

The Abyss. Globalization had many economic benefits but, as in our own times, the creation of a truly international economic network combined greater efficiency with greater fragility. In 1914 a highly optimized system crashed in what was, without doubt, the biggest financial collapse of all time. (Unlike in 1929 or in 2008, the world's major stock markets were forced to suspend trading for no less than five months.)

it is not 'Eurocentrism' or (anti-)'Orientalism' to say that the rise of Western civilization is the single most important historical phenomenon of the second half of the second millennium after Christ. It is a statement of the obvious.

They've got the usual Socialist disease — they've run out of other people's money.

When making their loans, the bankers should have thought more carefully about how easily they could call back the money - essentially a question about the liquidity of the loan.

The first is that poverty is not the result of rapacious financiers exploiting the poor. It has much more to do with the lack of financial institutions, with the absence of banks, not their presence.

non-Western countries had, until quite recently, highly unreliable legal systems and differing accounting rules. If a foreign trading partner decided to default on its debts, there was little that an investor situated on the other side of the world could do. In the first era of globalization, the solution to this problem was brutally simple but effective: to impose European rule.

Bread, cash, dosh, dough, loot, lucre, moolah, readies, the where-withal: call it what you like, money matters. To Christians, the love of it is the root of all evil. To generals, it is the sinews of war; to revolutionaries, the shackles of labour. But what exactly is money? Is it a mountain of silver, as the Spanish conquistadors thought? Or will mere clay tablets and printed paper suffice? How did we

Only after Eden agreed to leave Egypt unconditionally did Eisenhower arrange a billion-dollar rescue package from the IMF and the Export-Import Bank.

a chaos so great and so obscure that nothing about it can be known'.

As early as 1975 she had come up with a wonderful line about the Labour Party: "They've got the usual Socialist disease — they've run out of other people's money.

Only general officers were entitled to know our true rank. To all others our standard reply to the inevitable question, "What is your rank?" was simply a firm, "My rank is confidential, but at this moment I am not outranked."39

The word 'network', which was scarcely used before the late nineteenth century, is now overused as both a verb and a noun. To the ambitious young insider, it is always worth going to the next party, no matter how late it is, for the sake of networking. Sleep may be appealing, but the fear of missing out is appalling. To the disgruntled old outsider, on the other hand, the word network has a different connotation.

Y aunque no hubiera sido así, resulta dudoso que las inyecciones de capital del tipo imaginado por diversos economistas estadounidenses como Walt Rostow* fueran la solución a los problemas de la mayoría de las economías africanas, asiáticas y latinoamericanas. Una buena parte de la ayuda iba a parar a los países pobres, pero la mayor parte de ella se perdía o era robada.

El famoso lema de Samuel Adams: «No taxation without representation» («No a los impuestos sin representación») no era un rechazo a lo británico, sino su afirmación enfática. Lo que los colonos decían estar haciendo era exigir la misma libertad disfrutada por los súbditos británicos al otro lado del Atlántico.

Known to the Chinese as 'Iron-Headed Old Rat

The Four Black Boxes 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

Historians are not scientists. They cannot (and should not even trying to) establish universal laws of social or political physics with reliable predictive powers. Why? Because there is no possibility of repeating the single, multi-millennium experiment that constant to the past. The sample size of human history is one.

Though we hear much less about it, India had made a bigger contribution to the imperial war than Australia in terms of both finance and manpower.

the pairing instinct is the great remover of the limits between individuals

Credit was, quite simply, the total of banks' assets (loans).

My generation feels like it's the lucky one,' she told me one night. 'Our grandparents had the Great Leap Forward, our parents had the Cultural Revolution. But we get to study, to travel, to make money. So I guess we really don't think that much about the Square thing.

Cities with at least one printing press in 1500 were significantly more likely to adopt Protestantism than cities without printing, but it was cities with multiple competing printers that were most likely to turn Protestant.