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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| bb94022 | Inflation has come down partly because many of the items we buy, from clothes to computers, have got cheaper as a result of technological innovation and the relocation of production to low-wage economies in Asia. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 09d0667 | Banknotes (which originated in seventh-century China) are pieces of paper which have next to no intrinsic worth. They are simply promises to pay (hence their original Western designation as 'promissory notes'), | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 53c8923 | mulcted | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 65a60fa | Debts were transferable, hence 'pay the bearer' rather than a named creditor. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| a17325f | But the foundation on which all of this rested was the underlying credibility of a borrower's promise to repay. (It is no coincidence that in English the root of 'credit' is credo, the Latin for 'I believe | Niall Ferguson | ||
| b51b7bd | In real terms, stocks increased by a factor of 10.3; bonds by a factor of 3.4; bills by a factor of 1.8. Had my parents made the mistake of simply buying $10,000 in dollar bills in 1964, the real value of their son's nest egg would have declined in real terms by 85 per cent. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 6615421 | in the history of the bond market.68 So successful did Argentina's default prove (economic growth has since surged while bond spreads are back in the 300-500 basis point range) that many economists were left to ponder why any sovereign debtor ever honours its commitments to foreign bondholders.69 | Niall Ferguson | ||
| f72b452 | The masses long ago switched from stocks to investments having higher yields and more protection from inflation. Now the pension funds - the market's last hope - have won permission to quit stocks and bonds for real estate, futures, gold, and even diamonds. The death of equities looks like an almost permanent condition.5 | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 15a64c3 | the joint-stock, limited-liability corporation: joint-stock because the company's capital was jointly owned by multiple investors; limited-liability because the separate existence of the company as a legal 'person' protected the investors from losing all their wealth if the venture failed. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 88132aa | and growing need for fixed income securities, and for low inflation to ensure that the interest they pay retains its purchasing power. As more and more people leave the workforce, recurrent public sector deficits ensure that the bond market will never be short of new bonds to sell. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 615ca82 | Bonds, as we saw in Chapter 2, are no more than promises by governments to pay interest and ultimately repay principal over a specified period of time. Either through default or through currency depreciation, many governments have failed to honour those promises. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| a10fad5 | some of the structural drivers of inflation have also weakened. Trade unions have become less powerful. Loss-making state industries have been privatized. But, perhaps most importantly of all, the social constituency with an interest in positive real returns on bonds has grown. In the developed world a rising share of wealth is held in the form of private pension funds and other savings institutions that are required, or at least expected, .. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 4e0452e | without easy credit creation a true bubble cannot occur. That is why so many bubbles have their origins in the sins of omission or commission of central banks. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 2c45ef4 | Unlike Britain, France, Italy and Russia, however, Germany did not have access to the international bond market during the war (having initially spurned the New York market and then been shut out of it). | Niall Ferguson | ||
| d03e1cc | Between 1929 and 1933, the public succeeded in increasing its cash holdings by 31 per cent; commercial bank reserves were scarcely altered (indeed, surviving banks built up excess reserves); but commercial bank deposits decreased by 37 per cent and loans by 47 per cent. The absolute numbers reveal the lethal dynamic of the 'great contraction'. An increase of cash in public hands of $1.2 billion was achieved at the cost of a decline in bank .. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| ac0a502 | 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. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| c5d87cd | desideratum, | Niall Ferguson | ||
| b08710d | fettle | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 5a4e4cd | welter | Niall Ferguson | ||
| cbcd6fe | The principle of limited liability was implied: shareholders stood to lose only their investment in the company and no other assets in the event that it failed.15 | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 5fd0657 | it was decreed that Banque Generale notes should be used in payment for all taxes, a measure initially resisted in some places but effectively enforced by the government. Law's ambition was to revive economic confidence in France by establishing a public bank, on the Dutch model, but with the difference that this bank would issue paper money. As money was invested in the bank, the government's huge debt would be consolidated. At the same ti.. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| f3ea74d | sop | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 47e25bd | Rising to his feet he said, 'If the heir to the throne has been assassinated, well, first of all we know nothing for certain, and secondly, it doesn't concern us in the least.'... | Niall Ferguson | ||
| a6732f1 | no man prepar'd for it; no man consider'd it would come like a Thief in the night, exactly as it happens in the case of death.'74 | Niall Ferguson | ||
| bb4fbe0 | was true of the English East India Company, the VOC's biggest challenge was the principal-agent problem: the tendency of its men on the spot to trade on their own account, bungle transactions or simply defraud the company. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 191599f | President Franklin Roosevelt argued that all that Americans had to fear was 'fear itself'. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| a142c9a | Another Russian unit ordered the Jews of a shtetl near Wolkowisk to strip naked, dance with one another, and then ride on pigs; they then proceeded to shoot every tenth person. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 98d4b51 | they were a sort of vermin like plague-rats that had to be exterminated. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| a67d25e | The people were divided into the persecuted and those who persecuted them. That wild beast, which lives in man and does not dare to show itself until the barriers of law and custom have been removed, was now set free. The signal was given, the barriers were down. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 8108f00 | modern terms, what Law was attempting could be described as reflation. The French economy had been in recession in 1716 and Law's expansion of the money supply with banknotes clearly did provide a much-needed stimulus.52 | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 26240ae | and ingenuous outsiders, like Groucho Marx.83 | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 584f41d | a chaos so great and so obscure that nothing about it can be known'. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 5453953 | the air was filled with obscure ideas | Niall Ferguson | ||
| a0b6f82 | 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. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| dde438e | codicils, | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 404900d | 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. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 1937263 | 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. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 76548ae | splenetic | Niall Ferguson | ||
| a3e1567 | Bringing an 'emerging market' under the aegis of the British Empire was the surest way to remove political risk from investors' concerns.51 Even those outside the Empire risked a visit from a gunboat if they defaulted, as Venezuela discovered in 1902, when a joint naval expedition by Britain, Germany and Italy temporarily blockaded the country's ports. The United States was especially energetic (and effective) in protecting bondholders' int.. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| ef0eaea | 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. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| abbd92f | coruscating | Niall Ferguson | ||
| bcfb4d2 | an unlikely champion of minority rights. His name was Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili - Stalin ('man of steel'), | Niall Ferguson | ||
| f466aba | South Slav (Yugoslav) | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 24431f5 | Their mission achieved, Princip and Cabrinovic both tried to commit suicide, but the cyanide in the capsules they carried had oxidized and failed to kill them. | Niall Ferguson |