Quotes from Niall Ferguson

The possibility exists that information and computer technology could enable Beijing to build a system of 'social credit', analogous to financial credit in the West, that would (in official parlance) 'allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step'.

The statesman is therefore like one of the heroes in classical drama who has had a vision of the future but who cannot transmit it directly to his fellow-men and who cannot validate its truth. Nations learn only by experience; they 'know' only when it is too late to act. But statesmen must act as if their intuition were already experience, as if their aspiration were truth.

an increase in the supply of paper money, and hence a decrease in the purchasing power of the currencies in which most bonds were denominated. A rational investor who anticipated a major war would sell bonds in anticipation of these effects.

Salvo unas cuantas excepciones, la élite política británica, a diferencia de la élite intelectual mayoritariamente socialista, encontró muy difícil aceptar que el imperio tenía que desaparecer como precio a pagar por la victoria.

To date, around 99.9 percent of all species ever to have inhabited Earth have become extinct.

The Emperor and his ministers might dance Western dances and even, in violation of traditional Japanese propriety, smile Western smiles. But their underlying and deadly earnest aim was always to wipe the smiles off European faces.

as masters of the bond market, the Rothschilds were already more feared than loved. Reactionaries on the Right lamented the rise of a new form of wealth, higher-yielding and more liquid than the landed estates of Europe's aristocratic elites. As Heinrich Heine discerned, there was something profoundly revolutionary about the financial system the Rothschilds were creating:

when set in its proper historical context, the present time appears less unnervingly unprecedented and more familiar.

The bacteriologist, often risking his life to find cures for lethal afflictions, was another kind of imperial hero, as brave in his way as the soldier-explorer.

financial markets saw the war of 1914–18 coming, we should expect to see declines in bond prices or rises in bond yields (since the yield is essentially the interest paid on a bond divided by its market price).

an unlikely champion of minority rights. His name was Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili – Stalin ('man of steel')

In marked contrast, Ottoman scientific progress was non-existent in this same period. The best explanation for this divergence was the unlimited sovereignty of religion in the Muslim world. Towards the end of the eleventh century, influential Islamic clerics began to argue that the study of Greek philosophy was incompatible with the teachings of the Koran.32

the price people are prepared to pay for a piece of a company tells you how much money they think that company will make in the future. In effect, stock markets hold hourly referendums on the companies whose shares are traded there: on the quality of their management, on the appeal of their products, on the prospects of their principal markets.

rigid structures of a hierarchical order can disintegrate with astounding rapidity.

South Slav (Yugoslav)

All these people want is a chance for the future, a chance they will follow with a strict consequentness [sic]. They will resent pity, they will be suspicious of oversolicitousness. They have seen man from his most evil side, who can blame them for being suspicious? They will resent having somebody plan every little detail for them. And in all fairness, who can blame them for that? Have they not lived in the land of the dead and so what can be so terrifying about the land of the living?

Christianity, the King remarked sardonically, was 'stuffed with miracles, contradictions and absurdities, was spawned in the fevered imaginations of the Orientals and then spread to our Europe, where some fanatics espoused it, some intriguers pretended to be convinced by it and some imbeciles actually believed it'.

billions of things linked to one another in myriad ways

the Government National Mortgage Association (Ginnie Mae), which was to cater to poor borrowers like military veterans, and a rechartered Fannie Mae, now a privately owned government sponsored enterprise (GSE), which was permitted to buy conventional as well as government-guaranteed mortgages.

by the second quarter of the twentieth century one in nine German doctors was a Jew, and one in six lawyers. There were also above-average numbers of Jews working as newspaper editors, journalists, theatre directors and academics. Indeed, they were under-represented in only one of Germany's elite occupational groups, and that was the officer corps of the army. Anti-Semitism, then, was sometimes nothing more than the envy of under-achievers.

The closure of the stock market and the intervention of the authorities to supply liquidity almost certainly averted a catastrophic fire-sale of assets.

inept or inflexible monetary policy in the wake of a sharp decline in asset prices can turn a correction into a recession and a recession into a depression.

In the end, the British sacrificed her Empire to stop the Germans, Japanese and Italians from keeping theirs. Did not that sacrifice alone expunge all the Empire's other sins?

Se ha demostrado de modo convincente que una de las principales razones para la creciente desigualdad internacional en los años setenta y ochenta fue en realidad el proteccionismo en los países menos desarrollados. Una