Quotes from Niall Ferguson

The English were luckier in their drugs, too: long habituated to alcohol, they were roused from inebriation in the seventeenth century by American tobacco, Arabic coffee and Chinese tea. They got the stimulation of the coffee house, part café, part stock exchange, part chat-room;47 the Chinese ended up with the lethargy of the opium den, their pipes filled by none other than the British East India Company.

solo unas lecciones de vuelo y unos cutters. En el momento en que escribo, ochenta lecciones de una hora de vuelo incluidos el coste del alquiler de la nave y la instrucción cuestan menos de nueve mil dólares. Un cutter con seis hojas cuesta 2,11 dólares. Por un desembolso insignificante, un puñado de hombres pudieron matar a 3.173 personas

The problem is that the ISIS network defies conventional counter-terrorist tactics. Contrary to popular belief, this is not because its relies on 'lone wolves', who by their very nature are hard to detect. The Paris attacks of November 2015 were a well-planned operation involving around eighteen people in addition to the nine attackers.

Financial market data – specifically, movements in the prices of government bonds – strongly reinforce the impression that the war came as a surprise to the people who had the biggest incentive to anticipate it.

Its prime cause was the rise and fall of 'securitized lending', which allowed banks to originate loans but then repackage and sell them on. And that was only possible because the rise of banks was followed by the ascent of the second great pillar of the modern financial system: the bond market.

hierarchies are just special kinds of network in which flows of information or resources are restricted to certain edges in order to maximize the centrality of the ruling node.

As the banks took over the securities, the ratios between their capital and their assets lurched down towards their regulatory minima. Central banks in the United States and Europe sought to alleviate the pressure on the banks with interest rate cuts

Even if, as seems likely, Islamic State is defeated in Iraq and Syria, its network in cyberspace and in the West will live on, a toxic milieu where the memes of dawa can breed, converting one loser after another to the cause of murderous martyrdom.

there could be no planning because no one had time for it

Or, to reassure the bond market, does it cut expenditures in some other area, upsetting voters or vested interests? Or does it try to reduce the deficit by raising taxes?

Russia's intelligence network did its utmost to damage his rival's reputation

rumours can go viral without sophisticated information technology.

though this was not formally demonstrated until the 2010 mid-term elections to Congress Ã¢â'¬â€œ Facebook was a highly effective tool for political mobilization, especially when used to target local non-digital networks.

Despite the South's military setbacks, they retained their value for most of the war for the simple reason that the price of the underlying security, cotton, was rising as a consequence of increased wartime demand. Indeed, the price of the bonds actually doubled between December 1863 and September 1864, despite the Confederate defeats at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, because the price of cotton was soaring.

Above all, the Trump campaign, like the British Vote Leave campaign, made full use of Facebook's ad-testing capability, trying tens of thousands of variants to establish what worked best on the voters being targeted.

now Rothschild was providing Europe with a new social elite by   raising up the system of government bonds to supreme power . . . [and] endowing money with the former privileges of land. To be sure, he has thereby created a new aristocracy, but this is based on the most unreliable of elements, on money . . . [which] is more fluid than water and less steady than the air . . .32

European sense. No one can predict how it will end because there is no precedent for it.

The question was simply this: Would the world be French or British?

Protection Certificate) to open a lemonade stand in New York City?

From 1500, anyone in China found building a ship with more than two masts was liable to the death penalty; in 1551 it became a crime even to go to sea in such a ship.21 The records of Zheng He's journeys were destroyed. Zheng He himself died and was almost certainly buried at sea. What

arguing that Google and Facebook should do the censoring is not just an abdication of responsibility; it is evidence of unusual naivety. As if these two companies were not already mighty enough, European politicians apparently want to give them the power to limit their citizens' free expression.

as inflation has fallen, so bonds have rallied in what has been one of the great bond bull markets of modern history. Even more remarkably, despite the spectacular Argentine default - not to mention Russia's in 1998 - the spreads on emerging market bonds have trended steadily downwards, reaching lows in early 2007 that had not been seen since before the First World War, implying an almost unshakeable confidence in the economic future.

en Latinoamérica las constituciones se utilizan como instrumentos para subvertir el propio imperio de la ley

the crisis prompted the issue of emergency paper money: in Britain, £1 and 10s Treasury notes; in the United States, the emergency currency that banks were authorized to issue under the Aldrich-Vreeland Act of 1908.46 Then, as now, the authorities reacted to a liquidity crisis by printing money.