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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 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 | ||
| 29a164f | Traders had begun to speak of the 'Greenspan put' because having him at the Fed was like having a 'put' option on the stock market (an option but not an obligation to sell stocks at a good price in the future). | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 1590d88 | the Japanese experience, when a conscious effort by the central bank to prick an asset bubble ended up triggering an 80 per cent stock market sell-off and a decade of economic stagnation. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 36f23f7 | Original Design.' The bell curve that we encountered in Chapter 3 represents the normal distribution, in which 68.2 per cent of outcomes are within one standard deviation (plus or minus) of the mean. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| d63b244 | achievement to create the first modern insurance fund, based on correct actuarial and financial principles, rather than mercantile gambling. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| c99929c | feckless | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 2ad7197 | The odds of the average American being shot to death are 1 in 314. But he or she is even more likely to commit suicide (1 in 119); more likely still to die in a fatal road accident (1 in 78); and most likely of all to die of cancer (1 in 5).11 | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 0a9745b | armed with an AK47 - a gift from Fidel Castro, the man he had sought to emulate. As the tanks rumbled towards him, Allende realized it was all over and, cornered in what was left of his quarters, shot himself. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 6344af5 | bond markets have power because they're the fundamental base for all markets. The cost of credit, the interest rate [on a benchmark bond], ultimately determines the value of stocks, homes, all asset classes. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| e7a78d8 | Mortgages were short-term, usually for three to five years, and they were not amortized. In other words, people paid interest, but did not repay the sum they had borrowed (the principal) until the end of the loan's term, so that they ended up facing a balloon-sized final payment. The average difference (spread) between mortgage rates and high-grade corporate bond yields was about two percentage points during the 1920s, compared with about h.. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| c8c7ed1 | now Rothschild was providing Europe with a new social elite by raising up the system of government bonds to supreme power . . . [and] endowing money with the former privileges of land. To be sure, he has thereby created a new aristocracy, but this is based on the most unreliable of elements, on money . . . [which] is more fluid than water and less steady than the air . . .32 | Niall Ferguson | ||
| c540e5a | What had begun as a system of large-scale insurance had simply become a system of taxation, with today's contributions being used to pay today's benefits, rather than to accumulate a fund for future use. This 'pay-as-you-go' approach had replaced the principle of thrift with the practice of entitlement . . . [But this approach] is rooted in a false conception of how human beings behave. It destroys, at the individual level, the link between.. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 3daea10 | 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. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| efd4352 | he later made the tobacco companies pay: over $200 billion to Mississippi and forty-five other states as compensation for Medicaid costs arising from tobacco-related illnesses. The case (immortalized in the film The Insider) made Scruggs a rich man. His fee in the tobacco class action is said to have been $1.4 billion, or $22,500 for every hour his law firm worked. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 4c30698 | there is nothing safer than lending money to people with property. Why? Because if they default on the loan, you can repossess the house. Even if they run away, | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 1b171f0 | The British welfare state, it seemed, had removed the incentives without which a capitalist economy simply could not function: the carrot of serious money for those who strove, the stick of hardship for those who slacked. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| d5ce270 | Japan. So successful was the Japanese 'welfare superpower' that by the 1970s life expectancy in Japan had become the longest in the world. But that, combined with a falling birth rate, has produced the world's oldest society, with more than 21 per cent of the population already over the age of 65. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 9dd292d | money is a matter of belief, even faith: belief in the person paying us; belief in the person issuing the money he uses or the institution that honours his cheques or transfers. Money is not metal. It is trust inscribed. And it does not seem to matter much where it is inscribed: on silver, on clay, on paper, on a liquid crystal display. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| bf0b5a4 | parsimonious | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 5ce2ade | Edsel Ford, son of the firm's founder Henry, | Niall Ferguson | ||
| f653896 | Meanwhile, property prices roughly trebled between 1963 and 1979, while consumer prices rose by a factor of just 2.5. But there was a sting in the tail. The same governments that avowed their faith in the 'property-owning democracy' also turned out to believe in price stability, or at least lower inflation. Achieving that meant higher interest rates. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 4486f6f | Two years later, to provide some competition in the secondary market, the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac) was set up. The effect was once again to broaden the secondary market for mortgages, and in theory at least to lower mortgage rates. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| ccdf87a | Suddenly the people running Savings and Loans had nothing to lose - a clear case of what economists call moral hazard. | Niall Ferguson |