Quotes from The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World

“The ascent of money has been essential to the ascent of man.”
― Niall Ferguson, quote from The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World

“there really is no such thing as ‘the future’, singular. There are only multiple, unforeseeable futures, which will never lose their capacity to take us by surprise.”
― Niall Ferguson, quote from The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World

“perennial truths of financial history. Sooner or later every bubble bursts. Sooner or later the bearish sellers outnumber the bullish buyers. Sooner or later greed turns to fear.”
― Niall Ferguson, quote from The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World

“Large numbers of under-capitalized banks were a recipe for financial instability, and panics were a regular feature of American economic life - most spectacularly in the Great Depression, when a major banking crisis was exacerbated rather than mitigated by a monetary authority that had been operational for little more than fifteen years.”
― Niall Ferguson, quote from The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World

“Although the court recognizes his right to insist on his bond - to claim his pound of flesh - the law also prohibits him from shedding Antonio’s blood.”
― Niall Ferguson, quote from The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World

“The subprime butterfly had flapped its wings and triggered a global hurricane.”
― Niall Ferguson, quote from The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World

“By discouraging saving and encouraging consumption, accelerating inflation had stimulated output and employment”
― Niall Ferguson, quote from The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World

“and a spike in extreme meteorological events,”
― Niall Ferguson, quote from The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World

“When bond prices fall, interest rates soar, with painful consequences for all borrowers.”
― Niall Ferguson, quote from The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World

“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, quote from The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World

“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, quote from The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World

“man who had exchanged his $1,000 of savings for gold in 1970, while the gold window was still ajar, would have received just over 26.6 ounces of the precious metal. At the time of writing, with gold trading at close to $1,000 an ounce, he could have sold his gold for $26,596.”
― Niall Ferguson, quote from The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World

“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, quote from The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World

“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 unloaded at their destination.13”
― Niall Ferguson, quote from The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World

“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, quote from The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World

“banks have evolved since the days of the Medici precisely in order (as the 3rd Lord Rothschild succinctly put it), to ‘facilitate the movement of money from point A, where it is, to point B, where it is needed’.48 Credit and debt, in short, are among the essential building blocks of economic development, as vital to creating the wealth of nations as mining, manufacturing or mobile telephony.”
― Niall Ferguson, quote from The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World

“only when savers can put their money in reliable banks that it can be channelled from the idle to the industrious.”
― Niall Ferguson, quote from The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World

“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, quote from The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World

“Its prime cause was the rise and fall of ‘securitized lending’, which allowed banks to originate loans but then repackage and sell them on. And that was only possible because the rise of banks was followed by the ascent of the second great pillar of the modern financial system: the bond market.”
― Niall Ferguson, quote from The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World

“As the banks took over the securities, the ratios between their capital and their assets lurched down towards their regulatory minima. Central banks in the United States and Europe sought to alleviate the pressure on the banks with interest rate cuts”
― Niall Ferguson, quote from The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World

“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 deposits of $15.6 billion and a decline in bank loans of $19.6 billion, equivalent to 19 per cent of 1929 GDP.91”
― Niall Ferguson, quote from The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World

“And from 1966, under Regulation Q, there was a ceiling of 5.5 per cent on their deposit rates, a quarter of a per cent more than banks were allowed to pay.”
― Niall Ferguson, quote from The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World

“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, quote from The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World

“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 half a per cent (50 basis points) in the past twenty years.”
― Niall Ferguson, quote from The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World

“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, quote from The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World

“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, quote from The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World

“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, quote from The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World

“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, quote from The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World

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“The Gospels were written in such temporal and geographical proximity to the events they record that it would have been almost impossible to fabricate events. Anyone who cared to could have checked out the accuracy of what they reported. The fact that the disciples were able to proclaim the resurrection in Jerusalem in the face of their enemies a few weeks after the crucifixion shows that what they proclaimed was true, for they could never have proclaimed the resurrection under such circumstances had it not occurred.

The Gospels could not have been corrupted without a great outcry on the part of orthodox Christians. Against the idea that there could have been a deliberate falsifying of the text, no one could have corrupted all the manuscripts. Moreover, there is no precise time when the falsification could have occurred, since, as we have seen, the New Testament books are cited by the church fathers in regular and close succession. The text could not have been falsified before all external testimony, since then the apostles were still alive and could repudiate any such tampering with the Gospels.

The miracles of Jesus were witnessed by hundreds of people, friends and enemies alike; that the apostles had the ability to testify accurately to what they saw; that the apostles were of such doubtless honesty and sincerity as to place them above suspicion of fraud; that the apostles, though of low estate, nevertheless had comfort and life itself to lose in proclaiming the gospel; and that the events to which they testified took place in the civilized part of the world under the Roman Empire, in Jerusalem, the capital city of the Jewish nation. Thus, there is no reason to doubt the apostles’ testimony concerning the miracles and resurrection of Jesus. It would have been impossible for so many to conspire together to perpetrate such a hoax. And what was there to gain by lying? They could expect neither honor, nor wealth, nor worldly profit, nor fame, nor even the successful propagation of their doctrine. Moreover, they had been raised in a religion that was vastly different from the one they preached. Especially foreign to them was the idea of the death and resurrection of the Jewish Messiah. This militates against their concocting this idea. The Jewish laws against deceit and false testimony were very severe, which fact would act as a deterrent to fraud.

Suppose that no resurrection or miracles occurred: how then could a dozen men, poor, coarse, and apprehensive, turn the world upside down? If Jesus did not rise from the dead, declares Ditton, then either we must believe that a small, unlearned band of deceivers overcame the powers of the world and preached an incredible doctrine over the face of the whole earth, which in turn received this fiction as the sacred truth of God; or else, if they were not deceivers, but enthusiasts, we must believe that these extremists, carried along by the impetus of extravagant fancy, managed to spread a falsity that not only common folk, but statesmen and philosophers as well, embraced as the sober truth. Because such a scenario is simply unbelievable, the message of the apostles, which gave birth to Christianity, must be true.

Belief in Jesus’ resurrection flourished in the very city where Jesus had been publicly crucified. If the people of Jerusalem thought that Jesus’ body was in the tomb, few would have been prepared to believe such nonsense as that Jesus had been raised from the dead. And, even if they had so believed, the Jewish authorities would have exposed the whole affair simply by pointing to Jesus’ tomb or perhaps even exhuming the body as decisive proof that Jesus had not been raised.

Three great, independently established facts—the empty tomb, the resurrection appearances, and the origin of the Christian faith—all point to the same marvelous conclusion: that God raised Jesus from the dead.”
― William Lane Craig, quote from Reasonable Faith

“L-am cunoscut pe Ruletist. De acest lucru nu mă pot îndoi. În ciuda faptului că era imposibil ca el să existe, totuşi el a existat. Dar există un loc în lume unde imposibilul e posibil, şi anume în ficţiune, adică în literatură. Acolo legile statisticii pot fi încălcate, acolo poate apărea un om mai puternic decât hazardul. Ruletistul nu putea trăi în lume, ceea ce e un fel de a spune că lumea în care el a trăit este fictivă, este literatură. Nu am nici o îndoială, Ruletistul este un personaj. Dar atunci şi eu sunt un personaj, şi aici nu mă pot opri să nu exult de bucurie. Căci personajele nu mor niciodată, ele trăiesc de câte ori lumea lor e "citită". Dacă nu îşi va săruta niciodată iubita, păstorul pictat pe urna greacă ştie măcar că o va privi veşnic. Iată pariul şi nădejdea mea.”
― Mircea Cărtărescu, quote from Nostalgia

“His lips covered hers swiftly, his tongue taking advantage of her gasp and sweeping in commandingly. He had asked for the caress earlier that morning, now he demanded. He conquered, he licked and stroked her tongue and gloried in her instant, if hesitant, response. She was shy. Wary. She wouldn’t give in to the heat pulsing between them easily. But she was curious enough about it to allow the kiss.”
― Lora Leigh, quote from Elizabeth's Wolf

“I'm not sure if I know any 'functional' families, if functional means a family without difficult times and members who don't have a full range of problems.”
― David Sheff, quote from Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

“Ah, lassies, be sure ye make good decisions, firm and fast. Those who don’t know what they want get what they deserve.

OLD WOMAN NORA OF LOCH LOMOND
TO HER THREE WEE GRANDDAUGHTERS ONE COLD NIGHT”
― Karen Hawkins, quote from How to Abduct a Highland Lord

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