Quotes from Niall Ferguson

No tenemos ningún interés en Sudamérica; no sentimos ninguna simpatía políticamente fundamentada hacia ellos. Venimos de orígenes distintos... Ni todos los tratados que pudiéramos hacer, ni los comisionados que pudiéramos enviar, ni el dinero que pudiéramos prestarles, transformarían a sus Bolívares... en Washingtons'. —Edward Everett

figures must be adjusted downwards to take account of the cost of living, which has risen by a factor of nearly seven in my lifetime.

What became known in Russia as 'pogroms' – literally 'after thunder' – had been a recurrent feature of life in Western and Central Europe from medieval times onwards.

It nevertheless remains true that, in most countries for which long-run data are available, stocks have out-performed bonds – by a factor of roughly five over the twentieth century.

the European political elites now effectively rely on US companies such as Facebook to carry out censorship on their behalf, seemingly oblivious to the risk that Facebook's 'community standards' may end up being stricter than European law.

the Bank's proper role in a crisis as the 'lender of last resort', to lend freely, albeit at a penalty rate, to combat liquidity crises.42

Latin American republics were among the first to discover that it was relatively painless to default when a substantial proportion of bondholders were foreign.

The Portuguese did not arrive with many products of their own to offer Asian consumers (though they did bring some slaves and gold from their West African outposts). That was not the point. Nor did they come as conquerors, intent on acquiring territory or new subjects for their king. What the Portuguese had was a series of technological advantages that made their bid to establish a new and superior trade network viable.

Had the Illuminati remained faithful to Weishaupt's original blueprint, they would long ago have been forgotten, if they had ever been heard of at all. The key to their growth and later notoriety was their infiltration of German Masonic lodges

annus mirabilis

Consider this: the US economy created 2.4 million jobs in the three years beginning in June 2009. In the same period, 3.3 million Americans were awarded disabled worker benefits. The percentage of working-age Americans collecting disability insurance has risen from below three percent in 1990 to six percent. Unemployment is being concealed – and rendered permanent – in ways all too familiar to Europeans. Able bodied people are classified as disabled and never work again.

It is hard to believe that Gladstone would have ordered the invasion of Egypt in 1882 if the Egyptian government had not threatened to renege on its obligations to European bondholders, himself among them.

Some S&Ls bet their depositors' money on highly dubious projects. Many simply stole it, as if deregulation meant that the law no longer applied to them.

remember that the interest is paid on the face value of the bond, so if you can buy a 5 per cent bond at just 10 per cent of its face value you can earn a handsome yield of 50 per cent. In essence, you expect a return proportional to the risk you are prepared to take.

The 1789 Revolution had given the French a political script of unequalled drama. For the better part of the following century the temptation to reenact the play was irresistible.

the German Workers' Party. Their principal goal, declared its leader in 1913, was 'the maintenance and increase of [German] living space' (Lebensraum) against the threat posed by Czech Halbmenschen ('half-humans'). This was in fact a response to the creation of a Czech National Socialist Party in 1898.

It was a war of evil against lesser evil.

En 1863, en Newcastle, el doctor James Hunt había dejado consternada a la audiencia de una reunión de la British Association for the Advancement of Science, al afirmar que los «negros» eran una especie separada de seres humanos, a medio camino entre el mono y el «hombre europeo».

the state has to pay 50 per cent, then even reliable commercial borrowers are likely to pay some kind of war premium. It is no coincidence that the year 1499, when Venice was fighting both on land in Lombardy and at sea against the Ottoman Empire, saw a severe financial crisis as bonds crashed in value and interest rates soared.

there was an orgy of vandalism and looting

The Bolshevik newspaper Krasnaya Gazeta declared: 'Without mercy, without sparing, we will kill our enemies in scores of hundreds. Let them be thousands, let them drown themselves in their own blood. For the blood of Lenin…let there be floods of blood of the bourgeoisie – more blood, as much as possible.

In 1383, the authorities in Marseille extended the isolation period to forty days, giving the quarantine its name. (The duration was a biblical touch, inspired by the forty days and forty nights of the flood in Genesis, the forty years the Israelites spent wandering in the wilderness, and the forty days of Lent.)

the medieval contract known as the census, which allowed one party to buy a stream of annual payments from another.

The American trait I dislike the most is their casual approach to life. No one thinks ahead further than the next minute, no one has the courage to look life squarely in the eye, difficult things are always avoided. No youth of my age has any kind of spiritual problem that he seriously concerns himself with… one of the main reasons why I have had difficulty making friends with any American.