Securitizations are often regarded as innovations of modern finance, products of the last three decades and not the last three centuries. In fact, pooling financial assets together and selling tradable instruments backed by that pool is not so novel a practice as one might think. Over two centuries ago, bankers were pooling life annuities, contracts…
The goldsmiths of 17th century London are among those who can be said to have invented modern banking. Though goldsmiths by trade, they played the part of bankers too, taking in deposits and loaning them out at interest to the public. Nonetheless, banks remained rare in Britain before 1750. That was soon to change however,…
For over a century, life annuities were sold as a means of financing government deficits. In the 18th century, the French state would sell these annuities to fund its wars in Europe and abroad, often at very generous implied interest rates. Though they experimented most with life annuities, in contrast to Britain’s perpetual consolidated annuities…
From the end of the Middle Ages to midway through the Industrial Revolution, ships passing through the narrow strait connecting the Baltic Sea to the North Sea were required to pay a toll to the Kingdom of Denmark. Seems mundane, but for centuries, this toll was perhaps the most controversial in the world, going so…
Life annuities have been used as a form of insurance for centuries. Insurance itself is one of the oldest financial services in existence. Its principles have not changed even if the nature of the products people buy have evolved. Yet there are two perspectives to all transactions; insurance contracts serve just as much a purpose…
Financial crises have the potential to change history. This is obvious in regards to true depressions, like that of the 1930s, but even smaller tremors can change the way economies are managed, or are left unmanaged. One of these lesser crises was the 1976 IMF Crisis in which Britain was forced to seek a…
In 1789, France overthrew its government, the replacement for which would be a work in progress for years. The various regimes established in the French Revolution faced daunting fiscal challenges, the very tremors that brought down the old regime. As with many states in financial distress, France turned to the debt markets first and the…
Not all financial products attempt to turn a sum of money today into a larger one tomorrow. Even retail banking grew more out of a desire to protect what one had rather than to acquire more. However, the need for protection features more prominently in the story of insurance than of almost any other financial…
During their last two decades under socialism, the economies of Eastern Europe struggled with current account deficits and limited access to credit with which to finance them. In most of these countries, this spawned efforts to acquire foreign ‘hard’ currency whenever it entered their borders, undertakings that involved a lot of creative thinking and government…
In 1992, the Maastricht Treaty committed the European Union to adopting a single currency, the euro. The most immediate precursor to the euro in existence then was the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) which pegged several European currencies to each other, creating a system of fixed exchange rates. The ERM was established in 1979 and disintegrated…
