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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 1dfca4d | 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.. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 36534ec | 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.. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 08728b7 | los inversores prefieren colocar su dinero en paises donde los derechos de la propiedad privada esten protegidos de manera eficaz, aunque esto deberia ser considerado como un requisito minimo. En | Niall Ferguson | ||
| bf56d0a | David Landes sintetizo esta perspectiva postulando que el gobierno ideal para el crecimiento y desarrollo 1. aseguraria los derechos de la propiedad privada del mejor modo posible para alentar el ahorro y la inversion; 2. aseguraria los derechos de libertad individual [...] tanto contra los abusos de la tirania como [...] del crimen y la corrupcion; 3. haria cumplir el derecho contractual [...]; 4. proporcionaria un gobierno estable [...].. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| ce6e0bb | los regimenes constitucionales basados en el imperio de la ley son a su vez mas susceptibles de experimentar revoluciones financieras que alienten tanto la inversion extranjera como la formacion interna de capital. Una | Niall Ferguson | ||
| b3c3334 | a South American mercenary who served as Inspector General of the Turkish forces in Armenia, reported that the Governor-General of the province had ordered the local authorities in Adil Javus 'to exterminate all Armenian males of twelve years of age and over'. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| d5251f8 | The more integrated the world's financial markets become, the greater the opportunities for financially knowledgeable people wherever they live - and the bigger the risk of downward mobility for the financially illiterate. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 275534e | the financial system is so genuinely complex and so many of the relationships within it are non-linear, even chaotic. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 01ec4c6 | striving to be a master of the universe | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 806f820 | The rationale for the FDA's rigid standards is to avoid the sale of a drug like thalidomide. But the unintended consequence is almost certainly to allow many more people to die prematurely than would have died from side-effects under a less restrictive regime. We count and recount the costs of such side-effects. We do not count the costs of not allowing new drugs to be made available. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 2de685a | Nowadays he is best remembered for the Fibonacci sequence of numbers (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 . . .), in which each successive number is the sum of the previous two, and the ratio between a number and its immediate antecedent tends towards a 'golden mean' (around 1.618). It | Niall Ferguson | ||
| db7fbae | Why exactly has social mobility declined in the United States in the past thirty years, so that the probability has more than halved that a man born into the bottom 25 per cent of the income distribution will end his life in the top quartile?13 Once the United States was famed as a land of opportunity, where a family could leap from 'rags to riches' in a generation. But today, if you are born to parents in the bottom income quintile, you ha.. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| dea04b9 | This book is about the causes of our stationary state. It is inspired by Smith's insight that both stagnation and growth are in large measure the results of 'laws and institutions'. Its central thesis is that what was true of China in Smith's day is true of large parts of the Western world in our time. It is our laws and institutions that are the problem. The Great Recession is merely a symptom of a more profound Great Degeneration. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| dec2ad9 | To demonstrate that Western institutions have indeed degenerated, I am going to have to open up some long-sealed black boxes. The first is the one labelled 'democracy'. The second is labelled 'capitalism'. The third is 'the rule of law'. And the fourth is 'civil society'. Together, they are the key components of our civilization. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 7bbb2f8 | the creditor could draw a bill on the debtor and either use the bill as a means of payment in its own right or obtain cash for it at a discount from a banker willing to act as broker. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 34e9170 | There were no cheques; instructions were given orally and written in the bank's books. There was no interest; depositors were given discrezione (in proportion to the annual profits of the firm) to compensate them for risking their money.33 | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 21b3056 | The life of a hunter-gatherer is indeed, as Thomas Hobbes said of the state of nature, 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short'. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| d30d0d8 | fight over scarce resources (food and fertile women) | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 5e9ec6f | Bread, cash, dosh, dough, loot, lucre, moolah, readies, the where-withal: call it what you like, money matters. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 448f29c | most money is invisible, little more than numbers on a computer screen? | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 1e12a34 | 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 | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 65049da | tranche | Niall Ferguson | ||
| dacb0bc | fraught | Niall Ferguson | ||
| c26380e | 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: | Niall Ferguson | ||
| aeac5a3 | money: a unit of account, a store of value - portable power. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| cc4d43a | The gold standard had its advantages, no doubt. Exchange rate stability made for predictable pricing in trade and reduced transaction costs, while the long-run stability of prices acted as an anchor for inflation expectations. Being on gold may also have reduced the costs of borrowing by committing governments to pursue prudent fiscal and monetary policies. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 766d0c1 | Today, banking assets (that is, loans) in the world's major economies are equivalent to around 150 per cent of those countries' combined GDP. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 3685e33 | assets | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 7165e86 | currency peg can mean higher volatility in short-term interest rates, as the central bank seeks to keep the price of its money steady in terms of the peg. It can mean deflation, if the supply of the peg is constrained (as the supply of gold was relative to the demand for it in the 1870s and 1880s). | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 2274606 | They dug up so much silver to pay for their wars of conquest that the metal itself dramatically declined in value - that is to say, in its purchasing power with respect to other goods. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| fc68395 | They achieved this by learning a crucial lesson: in finance small is seldom beautiful. By making their bank bigger and more diversified than any previous financial institution, they found a way of spreading their risks. And by engaging in currency trading as well as lending, they reduced their vulnerability to defaults. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| e9f9183 | The Amsterdam Exchange Bank (Wisselbank) was set up in 1609 to resolve the practical problems created for merchants by the circulation of multiple currencies in the United Provinces, where there were no fewer than fourteen different mints and copious quantities of foreign coins. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 321045f | By allowing merchants to set up accounts denominated in a standardized currency, the Exchange Bank pioneered the system of cheques and direct debits or transfers that we take for granted today. This allowed more and more commercial transactions to take place without the need for the sums involved to materialize in actual coins. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 6213302 | 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. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 699ccaf | The limitation on this system was simply that the Exchange Bank maintained something close to a 100 per cent ratio between its deposits and its reserves of precious metal and coin. As late as 1760, when its deposits stood at just under 19 million florins, its metallic reserve was over 16 million. A run on the bank was therefore a virtual impossibility, since it had enough cash on hand to satisfy nearly all of its depositors if, for some rea.. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 050d350 | Although it performed the same functions as the Dutch Wisselbank, the Riksbank was also designed to be a Lanebank, meaning that it engaged in lending as well as facilitating commercial payments. By lending amounts in excess of its metallic reserve, it may be said to have pioneered the practice of what would later be known as fractional reserve banking, exploiting the fact that money left on deposit could profitably be lent out to borrowers. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 65e9a90 | M0 (also known as the monetary base or high-powered money), which is equal to the total liabilities of the central bank, that is, cash plus the reserves of private sector banks on deposit at the central bank; and M1 (also known as narrow money), which is equal to cash in circulation plus demand or 'sight' deposits. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 722c93a | When making their loans, the bankers should have thought more carefully about how easily they could call back the money - essentially a question about the liquidity of the loan. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| e0e4f49 | Credit was, quite simply, the total of banks' assets (loans). | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 75fc6c2 | relationships between debtors and creditors brokered or 'intermediated' by increasingly numerous institutions called banks. The core function of these institutions was now information gathering and risk management. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| fc51cbc | By discouraging saving and encouraging consumption, accelerating inflation had stimulated output and employment | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 3093998 | 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. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 4dd28b1 | annus mirabilis | Niall Ferguson | ||
| cb81b95 | 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. | Niall Ferguson |