Quotes from Niall Ferguson

The subprime butterfly had flapped its wings and triggered a global hurricane.

British Empire acted as an agency for imposing free markets, the rule of law, investor protection and relatively incorrupt government on roughly a quarter of the world.

By discouraging saving and encouraging consumption, accelerating inflation had stimulated output and employment

Let every nation know," declared Kennedy in his inaugural address, "that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

Despite Lawrence's wartime promises to the Arabs, it was agreed to give Iraq, Transjordan and Palestine the status of British 'mandates' – the euphemism for colonies – while the French got Syria and the Lebanon.* The former German colonies of Togoland, Cameroon and East Africa were added to the British possessions

By the summer of 1920 Lenin felt confident enough to export the Revolution westwards, ordering the Red Army to march on Warsaw and confidently talking of the need to 'sovietize Hungary and perhaps Czechia and Romania too'. Only their decisive defeat by the Polish army on the banks of the River Vistula halted the spread of the Bolshevik epidemic.

En teoría el impuesto era pagado por los productores de los artículos afectados, pero en la práctica recaía sobre los consumidores, pues los productores se limitaban a agregar el impuesto a sus precios. Incluso el vaso de cerveza o whisky que consumía o cada pipa que fumaba estaban sujetos a impuestos. Como lo dijo Burns, su negocio era «oprimir al publicano y al pecador con las ruedas despiadadas de los impuestos interiores».

When bond prices fall, interest rates soar, with painful consequences for all borrowers.

armed with an AK47 - a gift from Fidel Castro, the man he had sought to emulate. As the tanks rumbled towards him, Allende realized it was all over and, cornered in what was left of his quarters, shot himself.

Buying a 100,000 yen bond keeps the capital sum safe while also providing regular payments to the saver. To be precise, the bond pays a fixed rate or 'coupon' of 1.5 per cent: 1,500 yen a year in the case of a 100,000 yen bond. But the market interest rate or current yield is calculated by dividing the coupon by the market price, which is currently 102,333 yen: 1,500 ÷ 102,333 = 1.47 per cent.

The only way to ensure that peasants handed over their grain to feed the Red Army, he insisted, was to order exemplary executions of so-called kulaks, the supposedly rapacious capitalist peasants whom it suited the Bolsheviks to demonize. 'How can you make a revolution without firing squads?' Lenin asked. 'If we can't shoot a White Guard saboteur, what sort of great revolution is it? Nothing but talk and a bowl of mush.

man who had exchanged his $1,000 of savings for gold in 1970, while the gold window was still ajar, would have received just over 26.6 ounces of the precious metal. At the time of writing, with gold trading at close to $1,000 an ounce, he could have sold his gold for $26,596.

suppose they began to worry about the health of the Japanese currency, the yen, in which bonds are denominated and in which the interest is paid. In such circumstances, the price of the bond would drop as nervous investors sold off their holdings. Buyers would only be found at a price low enough to compensate them for the increased risk of a Japanese default or currency depreciation.

Let's face up to the question of who we support; let's defend the bastards and reform them later. 

Sería más acertado hablar de «nihilismo islámico», o quizá «bolchevismo islámico», pues no debemos olvidar que en sus primeros años Lenin y Stalin fueron también terroristas. En

Japan in the 1930s became a garrison state.43 But it was one which carried within it the promise of a 'warfare-welfare state', offered social security in return for military sacrifice.

The Armenian genocide, the massacres of the Pontic Greeks and the agreed 'exchanges' of Greek and Turkish populations after the sack of Smyrna illustrated with a terrible clarity the truth of the Archbishop of Aleppo's warning: when a multi-ethnic empire mutated into a nation state, the result could only be carnage. It was as if, for the sake of a spuriously modern uniformity, the basest instincts of ordinary men were unleashed in a kind of tribal bloodletting.

banks have evolved since the days of the Medici precisely in order (as the 3rd Lord Rothschild succinctly put it), to 'facilitate the movement of money from point A, where it is, to point B, where it is needed'.48 Credit and debt, in short, are among the essential building blocks of economic development, as vital to creating the wealth of nations as mining, manufacturing or mobile telephony.

You ask professors to study things, but you never put them in charge of anything.

From the point of view of most African-Americans, American independence postponed emancipation by at least a generation.

lo más sorprendente del 11 de septiembre es que no hubiera ocurrido antes. Estados Unidos llevaba años subvencionando a Israel. Había sostenido al régimen del sha en Irán. Había desplegado tropas en Arabia. No había pocos motivos para un atentado perpetrado por uno u otro de los grupos terroristas de Oriente Próximo.

It was the Germans who first spoke of the war as 'der Weltkrieg', the world war; the British preferred the 'European War' or, later, the 'Great War'.

only when savers can put their money in reliable banks that it can be channelled from the idle to the industrious.

bond markets have power because they're the fundamental base for all markets. The cost of credit, the interest rate [on a benchmark bond], ultimately determines the value of stocks, homes, all asset classes.