Improvements in transportation and communication came quickly over the 19th century. Alongside railways and telegraphy, steamships were responsible for powering much of the change. Steamships themselves saw regular incremental improvement. Indeed, they were entirely different, in scale and design, at the end of the century than at the start. They were bigger, faster, costlier,…
During the 1920s stock market bubble, there were many listings of companies whose purpose was to profit from rising share prices. Some of the most notable of these were investment trusts raising money they could then leverage with debt or preferred stock to profit from rising prices for the securities they held. They were…
Winston Churchill may have been a great adventurer, writer, speaker, and leader. He was not so great in managing his personal finances. Indeed, he was perpetually in debt and almost always spent more than he earned. Of course, some of this may be a justifiable lifestyle preference, defensible since he always had friends around…
Speculative manias tend to attract their own victims and these victims can come from far away and from walks of life far removed from the source of the excitement. A bank formed in the Ottoman Empire in the 1850s and empowered to act as a central bank of sorts by the government in the…
In the late 17th century, European merchants were accumulating huge fortunes in India. Some of these were the employees of the official trading companies there, like the British East India Company. However, it was not by their salaries that they became rich but by their own private trade, which was often illegal since the…
Ships are large expensive assets that are financed over long periods of time. Therefore, in the case of warships, they are physical expressions of a state’s fiscal power. Meanwhile, cargo ships, including tanker ships, require private financing which has been leveraged to greater degree just in the past sixty years or so. However, shipping…
After the First World War, the world set about restoring the international gold standard that existed before the fighting. It took years to bring to fruition and the restoration fell apart almost as quickly. After the Second World War, the world once again went about recreating a monetary order largely along pre-war lines, albeit…
This is the second in a two-part post on Britain’s 1820s bubble in Latin American mining companies. The first post outlined the extraordinary rise in share prices, some 400% or so in just six months and the role of favorable financial conditions and the activities of promoters in bringing this about. Fortunately for those…
There was a sharp increase in financial globalization in the 19th century and London was the home of much of this. Increasingly, foreign governments were turning to London to raise capital. These included some of the first emerging market sovereign bond issuers, the newly independent countries of the Americas. However, government bonds were…
Population growth and rising living standards increased demand for meats in Britain during the Industrial Revolution; however, diseases that reduced cattle herds meant more imports were needed to satisfy demand. Some of this demand was met by imports of fresh beef from America. This was extraordinary considering that up to this moment in history,…
