1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
2208
3346
3522
5443
5619
6757
7111
7112
7113
7114
7115
7581
8098
8422
8625
8752
8832
8882
8913
8932
8945
8953
8957
8960
8962
8963
8964
8965
▲
▼
| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 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 | ||
| 1dca2ee | John [Ivan] the Terrible, | Niall Ferguson | ||
| e2c2be2 | The finances of the Confederacy are one of the great might-have-beens of American history.39 For, in the final analysis, it was as much a lack of hard cash as a lack of industrial capacity or manpower that undercut what was, in military terms, an impressive effort by the Southern states. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| a6bfdd5 | The Bolsheviks promised their supporters 'Peace, Bread and Power to the Soviets'. Peace turned out to mean abject capitulation. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 4405d5e | least 40 million people died as a result of the epidemic, the majority of them suffocated by a lethal accumulation of blood and other fluid in the lungs. Ironically, unlike most flu epidemics, but like the war that preceded and spread it, the influenza of 1918 disproportionately killed young adults. One in every hundred American males between the ages of 25 and 34 fell victim to the 'Spanish Lady'. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 9635df3 | Two epidemics swept the world in 1918. One was Spanish influenza, the first recorded outbreak of which was at a Kansas army base in March 1918. As if to mock the efforts of men to kill one another, the virus spread rapidly across the United States and then crossed to Europe on the crowded American troopships. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| d5edc3f | how far history is distorted by the dubious benefit of hindsight. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| f05b1fb | The Boxers believed that after one hundred days of training in martial arts they would be impervious to bullets. After three hundred days they would be able to fly. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 7d5f79f | Rothschild houses had capital in excess of PS35 million on the eve of the First World War, all of it family money; it was the job of the partners to manage this huge portfolio. A large part of it they held in the form of European government bonds, the most secure form of investment and also the kind of security the Rothschilds knew best, since they had long been the principal underwriters for new bond issues on the London market. They, more.. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| baa315d | The only way to ensure that Red Army recruits did not desert or run away, Trotsky had concluded, was to mount machine-guns in their rear and shoot any who failed to advance against the enemy. This was the choice he offered: possible death in the front or certain death in the rear. 'We must put an end once and for all', he sneered with a characteristically caustic turn of phrase, 'to the papist-Quaker babble about the sanctity of human life. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| b4a91d3 | sanguine. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| ebea111 | inchoate, | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 2916aec | 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. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| fa58f37 | there was an orgy of vandalism and looting, | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 9503e03 | propounded | Niall Ferguson | ||
| d6c6e23 | investors tended to infer future changes in fiscal and monetary policy from political events, which were regularly reported in private correspondence, in newspapers and by telegraph agencies. Among the most influential bases for their inferences were three assumptions: that any war would disrupt trade and hence lower tax revenues for all governments; that direct involvement in war would increase a state's expenditure as well as reducing its.. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 47e1842 | 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. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| c508b1e | MISCEGENATION | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 2034080 | 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). | Niall Ferguson | ||
| eb05314 | elide | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 388ab5e | World War I saw the birth of total war, in the sense that it was fought between societies as much as armies. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 077ff69 | The majority of books about World War I represent its causes as diplomatic, its course as military and its consequences as economic. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 6ddd741 | globalization. Only one era in history remotely resembles our own in terms of the degree of international economic and social integration, and that is the period from around 1875 to 1914. World trade grew to an unprecedented volume. Capital flowed across borders as never before. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| f3207d2 | the introduction of universal male suffrage in 1907. | Niall Ferguson |