David McWilliams > Quotes

“A similar dynamic played out after 2008 in most Western economies as central banks made very cheap credit available to banks and those banks lent this to “creditworthy” clients—namely the already rich who had invested in assets such as housing—driving up asset prices way above wages.”
― David McWilliams, The History of Money: A Story of Humanity

“Bitcoin is to money what Esperanto is to language.”
― David McWilliams, The History of Money: A Story of Humanity

“The oldest PR trick in the book is to deflect attention from your own wrongdoing”
― David McWilliams, The History of Money: A Story of Humanity

“One of the defining attributes of an innovator is an ability to combine various previous inventions and harness them into a new product through a process of trial and error.”
― David McWilliams, The History of Money: A Story of Humanity

“The evolutionary impact of fire is hard to overstate. Fire meant we could cook. Food is energy”
― David McWilliams, The History of Money: A Story of Humanity

“We could call it the bully and plunder economy. In feudal societies”
― David McWilliams, The History of Money: A Story of Humanity

“Decimalization of money made more people numerate”
― David McWilliams, The History of Money: A Story of Humanity

“Britain’s mastery of money was one of the critical factors in propelling the industrial revolution; it would not have taken off so spectacularly had it not been for the availability of investors and capital markets to finance the new technological innovations.”
― David McWilliams, The History of Money: A Story of Humanity

“Along with business connections, money also enhanced the Lydian gene pool. Unlike top-down economies of the past, people didn’t always have to marry within the tribe. Coin-based dowries allowed strangers to marry each other, have families with members of other tribes, and bring more people into contact with each other. Money bled into every area of society: religions accepted money as gifts, art and culture were valued with money, and disputes were settled with money. A person found guilty of a theft no longer had to be stoned to death for retribution. They could simply pay a fine.”
― David McWilliams, The History of Money: A Story of Humanity

“In a growing economy, limiting the money supply to something fixed such as gold has an automatically deflationary effect. Fixing the money supply, like fixing any supply, benefits those who already have it and penalizes those who don’t. As people’s incomes rise, the demand for money goes up and so too (unless supply responds) does its price. When the price of money goes up, it means the price of everything else goes down relative to money. This implies that people, you and me, will have to sell more of everything to get a fixed amount of money. When you think about it, what are most of us selling? We are selling our time and our talent. We are selling our time in exchange for a wage. If we are all chasing a fixed amount of money, we have to sell more of our time to get it. In the real world that means taking a pay cut. If people’s wages start to fall, prices will fall accordingly. It won’t be too long before people postpone spending today and hoard their money, hoping for yet more bargains—lower prices—tomorrow.”
― David McWilliams, The History of Money: A Story of Humanity

“Given that this book has focused on the transformative impact of money on our lives”
― David McWilliams, The History of Money: A Story of Humanity

“The development of this bottom-up technology allowed the market to challenge the old top-down economy”
― David McWilliams, The History of Money: A Story of Humanity

“Peter the Great failed to grasp this essential link between personal liberty”
― David McWilliams, The History of Money: A Story of Humanity

“Money can be more powerful than religion”
― David McWilliams, The History of Money: A Story of Humanity

“It might not be the most romantic origin story, but one of our most ingenious technologies, writing, came about because of another groundbreaking technology: money. Money was the first thing we wrote about.”
― David McWilliams, The History of Money: A Story of Humanity

“Tolerant Norman Sicily experienced a golden age of inquiry and innovation in architecture”
― David McWilliams, The History of Money: A Story of Humanity

“Rich people’s time horizons are longer. When you are not worried about paying bills today”
― David McWilliams, The History of Money: A Story of Humanity

“Over the past 5,000 years, money has profoundly altered humanity and our relationships with each other and with the rest of the planet. It is arguably the defining technology of Homo sapiens. We have coevolved with money: we have shaped money, but money has also shaped us. Anthropologists often refer to humans as a “pyrophyte” species, one that is shaped by fire.4 The thread linking the observations in this book is that in the course of the last five millennia we have become—and apologies to the linguistic purists as I made this word up—a plutophyte species, meaning a species that has adapted to and been adapted by money. For 400,000 years, the technology that most influenced human development was fire; the contention of this book is that the crucial technology shaping humanity in the last 5,000 years has been money. We were a pyrophyte species but we have gradually become a plutophyte species.This book is about the relationship between a curious ape and a wondrous technology.”
― David McWilliams, The History of Money: A Story of Humanity

“Rather than pushing money into the economy, the central bank is in reality pulled by finance and its form of bank-created money—credit. The inconsistency between the official push story and the unofficial pull story, pretending they have competence when in reality they don’t, undermines the high priests of money and so often renders them after-the-event explainers rather than masters of money’s destiny. When you ask yourself why we have recurrent banking and financial crises, this is the answer—the people in charge are not in charge. And behind all the central banking pomp and ceremony, which is dressed up as theory, almost catechism, there are mortal humans dealing with that most incendiary of substances: money. Bear in mind when you are looking for a mortgage that the price of it is determined by the credit cycle, that most unstable element of money, which is less governed by rational economics and more a function of the madness of crowds.”
― David McWilliams, The History of Money: A Story of Humanity

“Revolutions usually center on the questions of who has the money”
― David McWilliams, The History of Money: A Story of Humanity

“The Brahmins of economics might have played around with this idea in textbooks and on blackboards”
― David McWilliams, The History of Money: A Story of Humanity

“Quick-thinking Mercury, armed with his own cunning and smarts as well as his technology, money, dominated Pompeii’s markets and bazaars. The ordinary citizen understood the transformative power of commerce. In fact, our word “commerce” can be translated literally from the Roman phrase “com Merx” or “with Mercury,”
― David McWilliams, The History of Money: A Story of Humanity

“In every credit-driven upswing there are three types of borrower with three different underlying balance sheets. The first type of borrower is the hedge borrower.1 This person has enough income to be able to pay both the monthly interest payments on the loan and the annual principal on the capital. A second type of borrower is the speculative borrower. This player can only afford to pay the interest on the debt and will need to roll over her capital payments, hoping to sell the asset at the end for a large profit and only then pay off the capital. The third type of borrower is the Ponzi borrower, who can neither pay his interest nor his capital from his income and needs prices to keep rising to pay back anything. He is in the market to “flip” the condo onto the next person coming in. Fundamentally, the market, at these ridiculously high prices, makes no financial sense. The edifice is maintained only by mass delusion. It is at this point that we hear stories about new paradigms, newfangled theories about valuations, prices, and money. This is the moment of peak risk and yet it is the moment when most amateurs get into the game.”
― David McWilliams, The History of Money: A Story of Humanity

“For projects looking for investment”
― David McWilliams, The History of Money: A Story of Humanity

“A highly speculative company sat at the center of the French financial system”
― David McWilliams, The History of Money: A Story of Humanity

“The cooperative nature of the guilds amplified the impact of any invention. You could say that the guilds helped to turn invention into innovation—innovation being the commercial application of invention.4”
― David McWilliams, The History of Money: A Story of Humanity

“As everything could be valued against everything else”
― David McWilliams, The History of Money: A Story of Humanity

“If money can be dispensed into the hands of more people”
― David McWilliams, The History of Money: A Story of Humanity

“The plebeian class was kept onside with bread and circuses—subsidized or free wheat and free entertainment in the Colosseum—paid for by loot from the regions”
― David McWilliams, The History of Money: A Story of Humanity

“It’s not hard to see where some of today’s Republican Party thinking originated”
― David McWilliams, The History of Money: A Story of Humanity