Sublime

The central relationship that money crystallizes is between lender and borrower.

would be a mistake to assume that microfinance is the holy grail solution to the problem of global poverty, any more than is Hernando de Soto’s property rights prescription.

Credit and debt, in short, are among the essential building blocks of economic development, as vital to creating the wealth of nations

Once again, however, the opportunity for financial innovation was provided by war.

For American taxpayers, the Savings and Loans debacle was a hugely expensive lesson in the perils of ill-considered deregulation.

Financial history has not ended, any more than political history ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall. But the next financial crisis will not be like the last one. It will not be triggered by defaults in US subprime mortgages, nor transmitted round the world by under-capitalized banks. It will be different because no two financial crises are ever