Quotes from Niall Ferguson

Between the early 1600s and the 1950s, more than 20 million people left the British Isles to begin new lives across the seas. Only a minority ever returned. No other country in the world came close to exporting so many of its inhabitants.

The Hollywood version of the War of Independence is a straightforward fight between heroic Patriots and wicked, Nazi-like Redcoats. The reality was quite different. This was indeed a civil war which divided social classes and even families. And the worst of the violence did not involve regular British troops, but was perpetrated by rebel colonists against their countrymen who remained loyal to the crown.

without easy credit creation a true bubble cannot occur. That is why so many bubbles have their origins in the sins of omission or commission of central banks.

between economic freedom and government regulation? Chapter 2 will address these issues. The specific question I ask is how far very complex regulation has become the disease of which it purports to be the cure, distorting and corrupting both the political and the economic process.

The idea was to reinvent mortgages by bundling thousands of them together as the backing for new and alluring securities that could be sold as alternatives to traditional government and corporate bonds - in short, to convert mortgages into bonds.

It was misconceived because Johnson appeared to think the kind of tactics that worked in a Texas saloon would work in Vietnam: beat a man, then stop beating him and say, "Give in, or I'll beat you some more.

Increasingly, its discount rate was seen as the minimum short-term interest rate in the so-called money market (for short-term credit, mostly through the discounting of commercial bills).

Just as Hitler had predicted, it was rival empires more than indigenous nationalists who propelled the process of decolonization forward.

Lo más desconcertante, sin embargo, fue el fracaso de Estados Unidos en lograr una intervención exitosa en Cuba, un país que era más cercano geográficamente, más prometedor en términos económicos y más valioso a un nivel estratégico que todos los demás.

Edmund Burke habló en nombre de muchos cuando dijo: «El uso de la fuerza exclusivamente […] puede dominar por un momento, pero no evita la necesidad de volver a dominar otra vez, y una nación no es gobernada si ha de ser perpetuamente conquistada».

they are the key components of our civilization. I want to show that inside these political, economic, legal and social black boxes are highly complex sets of interlocking institutions. Like the circuit boards inside your computer or your smartphone, it is these institutions that make the gadget work. And if it stops working, it is probably because of a defect in the institutional wiring. You cannot understand what is wrong just by looking at the shiny casing. You need to look inside.

The Boxers believed that after one hundred days of training in martial arts they would be impervious to bullets. After three hundred days they would be able to fly.

The key point is that not all sets of institutions, when you add up the sum of the parts, are equal. There are good and bad combinations. In some sets of institutions, people can flourish freely as individuals, as families, as communities. That is because the institutions effectively incentivize us to do good things Ã¢â'¬â€œ like, for example, inventing new and more efficient ways of working, or co-operating with our neighbours rather than trying to murder them. Conversely

Beer production was reduced in all the European combatants, but the reduction was more severe among the Central Powers: a fall of two-thirds for Germany, compared with just over half for Britain.

We must resist the temptation to romanticize history's losers.

La inflación —escribía Milton Friedman en una célebre definición— es siempre y en todas partes un fenómeno monetario, en el sentido de que no puede producirse sin un incremento más rápido en la cantidad de dinero que en la producción.»

Unlike Britain, France, Italy and Russia, however, Germany did not have access to the international bond market during the war (having initially spurned the New York market and then been shut out of it).

la noción de un «choque de civilizaciones» es tan caricaturesca como la idea de que Estados Unidos solo está interesado en el petróleo de Oriente Próximo. Es

In the early 1950s, Harold Macmillan declared that the choice facing the country was between 'the slide into a shoddy and slushy Socialism (as a second-rate power), or the march to the third British Empire'. After Suez only the first option seemed to remain.

Much sooner, and to a much greater extent than in Britain, the German and Austrian authorities had to turn to their central banks for short-term funding.

A society that expects most individuals to take responsibility for the management of their own expenditure and income after tax, that expects most adults to own their own homes and that leaves it to the individual to determine how much to save for retirement and whether or not to take out health insurance, is surely storing up trouble for the future by leaving its citizens so ill-equipped to make wise financial decisions.

Como decía Milton Friedman, la inflación es un fenómeno monetario. Pero la hiperinflación es siempre y en todas partes un fenómeno político, en el sentido de que no puede producirse sin una disfunción fundamental de la economía política de un país.

The odds of the average American being shot to death are 1 in 314. But he or she is even more likely to commit suicide (1 in 119); more likely still to die in a fatal road accident (1 in 78); and most likely of all to die of cancer (1 in 5).11

The modern-day dollar bill acquired its current design in 1957. Since then its purchasing power, relative to the consumer price index, has declined by a staggering 87 per cent. Average annual inflation in that period has been over 4 per cent