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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 12a6032 | aunque el liberalismo economico y politico anglofono sigue siendo las mas atractiva cultura del mundo, tiene el reto de hacer frente, como ha ocurrido desde la revolucion irani, a una seria amenaza procedente del fundamentalismo islamico. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 92c2766 | Africa is in fact a more Christian continent than Europe. There are now, for example, more Anglicans in Nigeria than in England. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 0bec204 | Me estremezco al pensar en cual ha de ser el resultado de una lucha entre sistemas tan distintos; uno de nosotros ha de prevalecer y el otro sera destruido, en cualquier caso no podemos existir ambos de forma segura. De su parte esta la inmensa riqueza de su imperio, recursos intactos, experiencia y practica en las armas, una soldadesca veterana, una serie ininterrumpida de victorias, disposicion a resistir las dificultades, union, orden, d.. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| a9bf9c5 | Since no country has had any experience with the tactical use of nuclear weapons, the possibility of miscalculation is considerable. The temptation to use the same target system as for conventional war and thereby produce vast casualties will be overwhelming. The pace of operations may out strip the possibilities of negotiation. Both sides would be operating in the dark with no precedents to guide them.119 | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 2cdd63c | Vice President Nixon the following year: he was even prepared to use atomic weapons to shore up the French position in Indochina.63 "The United States cannot afford to preclude itself from using nuclear weapons even in a local situation," | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 13d4f11 | Estamos lejos de ser contrarios a la introduccion del cristianismo en la India [...] pero nada podria ser mas insensato que un intento imprudente o desatinado que introducirlo por medios que podrian irritar y suscitar sus prejuicios religiosos [...] Es deseable que el conocimiento del cristianismo sea impartido al nativo, pero los medios que se han de emplear con ese fin deberan ser tales que sean libres de cualquier peligro o alarma politi.. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| a54d813 | La carrera de Morgan es el clasico ejemplo del modo como se inicio el imperio britanico, empleando a individuos emprendedores asi como fuerzas regulares. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| a0180b3 | I would feel happier about professions of high moral principles if they did not so frequently coincide with a policy of minimum risk."189" | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 1abf1b8 | Inflation', wrote Milton Friedman in a famous definition, 'is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon, in the sense that it cannot occur without a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| de8178a | El proyecto de modernizar y cristianizar la India habia resultado un absoluto fracaso, hasta el punto que termino por barbarizar a los britanicos. Los que realmente tenian que gobernar la India habian estado en lo correcto: interferir en las costumbres nativas solo podia traer problemas. Sin embargo, los evangelicos se negaban a aceptarlo. A sus ojos, la rebelion habia ocurrido porque la modernizacion no habia avanzado lo suficientemente ra.. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| a6199f6 |
El famoso lema de Samuel Adams: < |
Niall Ferguson | ||
| dd998b1 | The Hollywood version of the War of Independence is a straightforward fight between heroic Patriots and wicked, Nazi-like Redcoats. The reality was quite different. This was indeed a civil war which divided social classes and even families. And the worst of the violence did not involve regular British troops, but was perpetrated by rebel colonists against their countrymen who remained loyal to the crown. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| b959e8b | When bond prices fall, interest rates soar, with painful consequences for all borrowers. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 86ec092 | Buying a 100,000 yen bond keeps the capital sum safe while also providing regular payments to the saver. To be precise, the bond pays a fixed rate or 'coupon' of 1.5 per cent: 1,500 yen a year in the case of a 100,000 yen bond. But the market interest rate or current yield is calculated by dividing the coupon by the market price, which is currently 102,333 yen: 1,500 / 102,333 = 1.47 per cent. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 384d81b | 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? | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 1e1ad6c | 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. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 29e4577 | the shortage of cotton also drove up the price and hence the value of the South's cotton-backed bonds, making them an irresistibly attractive investment for key members of the British political elite. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| d12847e | that investors should be able to take physical possession of the cotton which underpinned the bonds if the South failed to make its interest payments. Collateral is, after all, only good if a creditor can get his hands on it. And that is why the fall of New Orleans in April 1862 was the real turning point in the American Civil War. With the South's main port in Union hands, any investor who wanted to get hold of Southern cotton had to run t.. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 3eaa622 | Latin American republics were among the first to discover that it was relatively painless to default when a substantial proportion of bondholders were foreign. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 70a9aa1 | 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. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 09fd0e3 | 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. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 04fe84f | 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. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 7ee90a4 | the medieval contract known as the census, which allowed one party to buy a stream of annual payments from another. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| ae795f5 | public expectations of inflation to shift and the demand for cash balances to fall | Niall Ferguson | ||
| e6c2a5e | Pure monetary theory, however, cannot explain why in one country the inflationary process proceeds so much further or faster than in another. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 66b95b0 | The overwhelming impression is of professionals transformed into psychopaths - morally blinded, perhaps, by their narrow specialisms (that, at least, was the historian Friedrich Meinecke's theory). Whether collecting rail fares, conducting experiments, devising slogans, writing theses or designing ovens, it was thousands of people like Scholz, Pru fer, Fischer and Oberhauser who turned Hitler's deranged dream of genocide into reality. They,.. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| d06857f | The Rothschilds had decided the outcome of the Napoleonic Wars by putting their financial weight behind Britain. Now they would help decide the outcome of the American Civil War - by choosing to sit on the sidelines. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 1f9fc34 | they felt a genuine distaste for the institution of slavery. But of at least equal importance was a sense that the Confederacy was not a good credit risk (after all, the Confederate president Jefferson Davis had openly advocated the repudiation of state debts when he was a US senator). | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 3fa2aa3 | Era el principio constitucional (el derecho del Parlamento britanico de aprobar impuestos a los colonos americanos sin su consentimiento) la verdadera manzana de la discordia. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| b19886b | Consideramos evidentes estas verdades: que los hombres son creados iguales; que han sido dotados por el Creador de ciertos derechos inalienables; que estos derechos son la vida, la libertad y la busqueda de la felicidad>>. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 408a13c | After the creation of credit by banks, the birth of the bond was the second great revolution in the ascent of money. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| f765420 | A typical contract in the archives of the merchant Francesco Datini (c. 1335-1410) stipulates that the insurers agree to assume the risks 'of God, of the sea, of men of war, of fire, of jettison, of detainment by princes, by cities, or by any other person, of reprisals, of arrest, of whatever loss, peril, misfortune, impediment or sinister that might occur, with the exception of packing and customs' until the insured goods are safely unload.. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 153c846 | Japan in the 1930s became a garrison state.43 But it was one which carried within it the promise of a 'warfare-welfare state', offered social security in return for military sacrifice. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| cd2648d | malfeasance | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 162c057 | 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. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| acb3970 | Because they are all derived from the value of underlying assets, all futures contracts are forms of 'derivative'. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 60743ed | actuarial | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 6a93328 | making provision for an uncertain future has taken the very simple form of an investment (usually leveraged, that is debt-financed) in a house, | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 0a52608 | it was said to be 'hardly in the power of liquor to affect Dr Webster's understanding or his limbs'. Yet no one was more sober when it came to calculations of life expectancy. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 513000a | parsimony. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| efc8eff | financial contracts known as options. In essence, the buyer of a call option has the right, but not the obligation, to buy an agreed quantity of a particular commodity or financial asset from the seller ('writer') of the option at a certain time (the expiration date) for a certain price (known as the strike price). Clearly, the buyer of a call option expects the price of the commodity or underlying instrument to rise in the future. When the.. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 4c3e814 | There is always home, sweet home. As an insurance policy or a pension plan, however, this strategy has one very obvious flaw. It represents a one-way, totally unhedged bet on one market: the property market. Unfortunately, as we shall see in the next chapter, a bet on bricks and mortar is very far from being as safe as houses. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| bca0726 | specified confidence intervals (for example, the statement that 40 per cent of the balls in the jar are white, at a confidence interval of 95 per cent, implies that the precise value lies somewhere between 35 and 45 per cent - 40 plus or minus 5 per cent). | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 3d91f8b | constrained | Niall Ferguson |