LNSY

“Brougham’s comment reflects the rapid increase from around 1800 in the number of people in England who called themselves accountants without having any particular expertise in the field and who gave the nascent profession a bad name.”
― Jane Gleeson-White, Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance

“they tell you to love yourself before you let anyone else so now here I stand on this mountain of confidence and achievements I’ve spent my whole life building and I look around wondering if anyone will even know how to find me all the way up here”
― Katie Wismer, Poems for the End of the World

“When railway companies faltered in the late 1840s, struggling to return 10 per cent on investments, many began to fiddle their books. For example, they treated costs as capital investments rather than as expenses, thereby inflating their profits; and used fresh investments instead of profits to pay out dividends (a strategy now known as a Ponzi scheme, made infamous most recently by Bernie Madoff in 2009).”
― Jane Gleeson-White, Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance

“Seven months later, Enron filed for bankruptcy. The golden goose of corporate capitalism collapsed amid charges of ‘greed, bribery, corruption, deceit, parasitism, speculation, insider trading, scams, nepotism, tax avoidance, environmental destruction, human rights abuses, exploitation, theft of workers’ entitlements, job losses, use of state machinery against workers and Indigenous peoples, cosy relationships with government, and monopoly manipulation of prices and markets’.”
― Jane Gleeson-White, Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance