"Welcome to the world of money, bread, cash, dosh, dough, loot, lucre, moolah, the readies, the wherewithal." "Call it what you like, money can break us or it can make us." "In the past year, it's certainly broken more than a few of the biggest names on Wall Street and in the City of London." "And while former masters of the universe crash and burn, the rest of us are left worrying if our savings would be safer in a mattress than in a bank." "The great financial crisis that began in the summer of 2007 has most of us utterly baffled." "How on earth could a little local difficulty with sub-prime mortgages in the United States unleash an economic tsunami big enough to obliterate some of Wall Street's most illustrious names, to force nationalisations of banks on both sides of the Atlantic" "and to bring the entire world economy to the very brink of recession, if not downright depression?" "Shouldn't this series be called The Descent Of Money?" "Well, I want to explain to you just how money rose to play such a terrifyingly dominant role in all our lives." "What's more, I want to reveal financial history as the essential back story behind all history." "Banks financed the Renaissance while the bond market decided wars." "Stock markets built empires... and monetary meltdowns made revolutions." "From Ancient Mesopotamia right down to present day London, the ascent of money has been an indispensable part of the ascent of man." "But money's rise has never been a smooth, upward ride." "As we'll see, financial history has repeatedly been interrupted by gut-wrenching crises of which today's is just the latest." "From the fluctuating prices of the homes we own to the high-speed industrialisation of China, the power of finance is everywhere we look and it affects all of our lives." "But are you in on the secret?" "Do you know what causes a bank run or a monetary meltdown or a stock market crash?" "Can you tell the difference between a sub-prime loan and a prime loan?" "Well, I think these financial technicalities only really make sense once you know where they came from." "And that's why financial history is of more than merely academic interest." "Not knowing this stuff can seriously damage your wealth." "Crisis or no crisis, the amount of money sloshing around planet finance still boggles the mind." "By one measure, the US stock of money is now $8, 700,000,000,000, up 12% since last year." "And some people are still pocketing a huge share of that cash." "Last year, despite the onset of the biggest financial crisis since the Depression, his hedge fund paid George Soros a cool $2.4 billion." "That's roughly 41,000 times more than the average American family earned." "As they say on Wall Street, "Way to gol"." "Now, however, imagine a world with no money." "500 years ago, the most powerful society in South America, the Inca Empire, had no real concept of money." "The Incas appreciated the aesthetic qualities of rare metals - gold was the sweat of the sun, silver the tears of the moon - labour was the unit of value in the Inca Empire, just as it was later supposed to be in a communist society." "But in 1532, the Incas ran into a man whose hunger for money had led him across an ocean." "Francisco Pizarro and his fellow Conquistadores had come from Spain to what they called Upper Peru inspired by the legend of El Dorado, the realm of the gold-covered king." "After defeating the Inca army at the Battle of Cajamarca their quest began in earnest." "At Potosi, in what is now Bolivia, the Spaniards struck it rich." "They discovered the Cerro Rico, literally the Rich Hill." "Towering nearly 16,000 feet above sea level, it was a money mountain." "In their 250 years of Spanish rule, more than two billion ounces of silver were extracted from mines like this one, 14,000 feet up in the Andes." "What the Incas couldn't grasp was why the Europeans had such an insatiable lust for gold and silver." "They couldn't understand that to Pizarro and the Conquistadores, silver was much more than just shiny metal." "It could be made into money... a store of value, a unit of account, portable power." "I must say, I find this place pretty harrowing." "The Spaniards had a system of forced labour which meant that every able-bodied male in the native population had to do a stint down these mines." "And you can see why one in eight of them didn't survive the ordeal." "Today, 500 years later, conditions for miners in the Cerro Rico haven't improved much." "But at least they get paid for the work they do." "In those days, it was a way of making money that verged on genocide." "The silver ore was ground up, refined with mercury and then shipped to Europe as bars and coins." "Empire, it seemed, had made the Spanish crown rich beyond the dreams of avarice." "And yet, all the silver in the mines of Potosi couldn't halt the inexorable economic and political decline of Spain's empire." "Why was that, when Pizarro seemed to have struck it so incredibly rich?" "The answer is that the Spaniards had dug up so much silver to finance their wars of conquest, that the metal itself suffered an extraordinary decline in value." "More silver coins didn't make Spain richer." "They simply made prices higher as an increased quantity of money chased the same amount of goods." "What the Spaniards didn't get was that money is only worth what other people will give in exchange for it." "And, whether money takes the form of silver coins, seashells, bars of gold or bank notes, that's been true from ancient times right down to the present day." "Even lumps of clay can work better than silver coins, if people have enough confidence in them." "In Ancient Mesopotamia, nearly 4,000 years ago, people used clay tablets like these ones to commit themselves to particular financial transactions." "For example, this one, found a little south-west of Baghdad, specifies that a debtor will repay a lender 330 measures of grain on the harvest day." "But this one's even more fascinating, because what is says is that a debt of four measures of barley should be repaid to the bearer of the clay tablet and it's that idea of repayment to the bearer that really fascinates me." "If the phrase sounds familiar, then it should." "Just take a look at a £20 note." "Bank notes have next to no intrinsic worth." "They're simply promises to pay, just like the clay tablets of ancient Babylon four millennia ago." "On the back of the $10 bill it says, "In God We Trust"." "But it's not really God you're trusting in." "By swapping your goods or your labour for a fistful of these things, you're trusting the US Treasury Secretary not to repeat Spain's mistake and produce so many of the damn things that by the time you come to spend them," "they're worth even less than the paper they're printed on." "Today we're quite happy with paper money." "Even more amazingly, we're happy with money we can't even see." "Millions of dollars pass through this woman's hands every day... or rather, across her computer screen." "She's a foreign exchange dealer, whose business is literally buying and selling money." "Each day around $3 trillion changes hands in transactions like these around the world." "And it's all built on trust. it has to be when you can't even touch the stuff." "That's what the Conquistadores got wrong." "They failed to see that money is about trust - even faith." "Trust in the person paying you the money, trust in the central bank issuing the money, trust in the commercial bank that honours the cheque." "Money isn't metal." "It's trust inscribed." "And it doesn't much matter what it's inscribed on - paper, silver, clay, or a screen - provided the recipient believes in it." "There was one huge possibility created by the emergence of money as a system of mutual trust - a possibility that would revolutionise world history." "It was the idea that you could rely on people to borrow money from you and pay it back at some future date." "That's why the root of "credit" is "credo", the Latin for "I believe"." "Without the invention of credit, the entire economic history of our world would have been impossible." "Because we take it for granted, we tend to underestimate the extent to which our entire civilisation is based on the borrowing and lending of money." "No, it doesn't literally make the world go round." "But it does makes vast quantities of people, goods and services go around the world from Babylon to Bolivia." "The puzzle is that the early moneylenders got so little thanks for their services." "On the contrary, they were widely reviled as pariahs." "Why was that?" "Welcome to Northern Italy in the year 1200AD." "A land divided into multiple feuding city states." "A land where trust was in rather short supply." "Among the many remnants of the defunct Roman Empire was a numerical system singularly ill-suited to complex mathematical calculation, let alone the needs of commerce." "Nowhere was this more of a handicap than in Pisa, where merchants struggled to do business with seven different forms of coinage in circulation." "Even the simplest transaction could be a headache, requiring the use of an abacus." "By comparison, economic life in the Eastern world - in the Muslim caliphate or the Sung Chinese Empire - was far more advanced." "To discover modern finance, backward Europe needed to import it." "Enter a young mathematician called Leonardo of Pisa or Fibonacci." "The son of a Pisan customs official based in what is now Algeria," "Fibonacci is best remembered today for his sequence of numbers that mimic the properties of nature." "But the famous sequence was only one of many Eastern mathematical ideas that Fibonacci introduced to Europe with his path-breaking book the Liber Abaci " "The Book of Calculation." "Even more important was his demonstration of the superiority of Arabic numerals over Roman numerals." "And crucially, nearly all Fibonacci's examples related to business." "Since Roman times," "Europeans had been struggling to do simple arithmetic with these..." "The Hindu or Arabic numerals made all kinds of calculation easier." "In particular, Fibonacci showed how the new methods of calculation could be applied to commercial bookkeeping, to currency conversions and, crucially, to the computation of interest." "Just imagine trying to work out percentages in Roman numerals." "Fibonacci's Liber Abaci made it child's play." "This was to be the application of mathematics to making money." "The most fertile soil for such financial seeds proved to be the Italian city states." "Fibonacci's home town of Pisa was one." "But it was above all Venice - more exposed than any of the others to Oriental influences - that became the great money-lending laboratory... and the home of literature's most notorious moneylender " "Shylock, in William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice." "May you stead me?" "Will you pleasure me?" "Shall I know your answer?" "Crucially, Shylock's only prepared to lend the money if Bassanio's friend, the merchant Antonio, is providing the security." "Three thousand ducats for three months and Antonio bound." "Your answer to that." "Antonio is a good man." "By "good", Shylock doesn't mean virtuous, he means "good" for the money he's about to lend Bassanio." "In other words, creditworthy." "Have you heard any imputation to the contrary?" "Oh, no, no, no, no." "My reason in saying that he's a good man is to have you understand me that he is sufficient." "Three thousand ducats." "I think I may take his bond." "With any loan, things can go wrong." "Ships can sink." "And that is precisely why anyone who lends money to a merchant - if only for the duration of an ocean voyage - needs to be compensated." "We usually call the compensation "interest" - the amount paid to the lender over and above the sum lent or "principal"." "Overseas trade of the sort that Venice depended on couldn't operate without such transactions." "And they remain the foundation of international trade to this day." "But why does Shylock turn out to be such a villain, demanding literally "a pound of flesh" - in effect Antonio's death - if he can't fulfil his obligations?" "Why is Shakespeare's moneylender so heartless - the original of that bloodsucking financier who recurs time and again in Western literature?" "One clue is that Shylock is one of the many Jewish moneylenders in history." "Jews who stayed in Venice for more than two weeks were supposed to wear a yellow "No" on their backs or a yellow hat." "And they were confined to a special area which became known as the Ghetto Nuovo." "This is the entrance to the Jewish ghetto in Venice where Jews were obliged to live and indeed confined at night." "Jews were tolerated in Venice, but for a reason." "The key was that Jews could provide a service that Christian merchants were forbidden to do - they could charge interest on their loans." "Fibonacci might have figured out the mathematics of lending, but it took Shylock to do the deal." "This is where the Venetian Jews used to do business." "This building here was the old Banco Rosso and it was outside here that they used to sit behind their tables - their tavole - on their benches - their banchi, the root of the Italian word for banks." "Now, there was good reason why merchants came here to the Jewish ghetto to borrow money." "For Christians, what the Jews were doing, lending money at interest, was a sin." "The medieval Church's laws against usury - charging interest on loans - were a major obstacle to the development of finance in Europe." "After all, what God-fearing Christian merchant wished to risk the torments of Hell?" "This astonishing vision of eternal damnation was painted by Giorgio Vasari and Federico Zuccari on the inside of the great dome of Florence's Cathedral, the Duomo." "And below there's another fresco by Domenico di Michelino of Florence's greatest poet, Dante Alighieri, holding his masterwork, the Divine Comedy." "According to Dante, there was a special part of the seventh circle of Hell that was exclusively set aside for usurers." "There the moneylenders were eternally tortured with scorching earth and freezing snow, their necks weighed down with bulging purses." "Jews, too, weren't supposed to lend at interest." "But there was a convenient get-out clause in the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy, chapter 23, you weren't supposed to lend to your brother at interest, but to a stranger?" "Well, that was a different matter." "In other words, a Jew couldn't lend to a Jew, but he could lend to a Christian." "The price the Jews paid for performing this service was social exclusion." "Hence the ghetto." "And hence the centuries-long association between Jews and finance, one of the few forms of economic activity from which Jews were not once excluded." "In the end, of course, Shylock is thwarted." "For although the court recognises his right to a pound of flesh, the law also prohibits him from shedding Antonio's blood." "And, because he's a Jew, the law also requires the loss of his goods and life for so much as plotting the death of a Christian." "He only escapes by submitting to baptism." "It turns out to be a risky business to be a moneylender." "The Merchant of Venice raises profound questions about both economics and anti-Semitism." "Why don't debtors always default on their debts - especially when the creditors belong to unpopular ethnic minorities?" "Why don't the Shylocks always lose out?" "To get a better idea of how primitive moneylending works, you don't need to travel back in time." "There are plenty of modern-day Shylocks remarkably close to home." "And they don't need to be Jewish to suffer a similar fate to Shylock." "This is Shettleston in the East End of Glasgow." "It's actually where my grandmother used to live." "And I think with its distinctive steel shuttering, it's one of the grimmest places in the whole of Western Europe." "In fact, average male life expectancy here is just 64, which is slightly worse than Bangladesh." "That means that the average Shettlestonian doesn't actually live long enough to collect his state pension." "You might think nobody would be mad enough to try and provide financial services here." "But someone does." "That someone is a loan shark." "You give him your benefit card as security and he gives you a loan." "On the day your benefit arrives, he gives you back the card and you go to the post office to get your money, repaying him the interest. it's a modern version of Shylock's business model." "Usury is alive and well and living in Scotland." "These are some pages from the loan book of a Glasgow loan shark." "And it's kind of interesting to see how the business model works." "You lend out maybe £10 to someone and you expect to be paid back £12.50 at the end of the week." "Now that's 25% a week, but if you work that out at an annual rate it comes to 11 million per cent." "So why do people scraping by on just £5.90 a day pay such horrendous interest on loans?" "These, surely, are loans you'd be mad not to default on." "But here in Glasgow, defaulting on your loan is highly inadvisable." "You won't literally lose a pound of flesh, but grievous bodily harm isn't an unknown consequence of letting down the loan shark." "Quite simply, individual loan sharks have to be rapacious and ruthless because the costs to them of even a single defaulter are so high." "And that explains why, from Renaissance Italy to modern Scotland, the moneylender is so often a hated figure." "He's providing a service, but at a socially unacceptable price." "So how did lenders learn to overcome this fundamental problem?" "If they were too generous, they didn't make any money, but if they were too hard-nosed, borrowers would eventually default." "The answer was to get bigger and more powerful." "It was time to invent banks." "In 15th century Italy, the key financial service of providing credit moved out of the ghetto to become the legitimate preserve of banks." "This transition was symbolised by the rise of one family - the Medici." "With their ascent, credit came of age." "Moneylending ceased to be disreputable." "It became glorious - and the foundation of a new kind of power." "The dazzling legacy of the Medici family's power still surrounds you in Florence today." "In the space of 400 years, two Medici became Queens of France, three became Pope." "Appropriately, it was Machiavelli, the supreme theorist of power, who wrote their history." "Perhaps no other family left such an imprint on an age as the Medici left on the Renaissance." "You might even say that they paid for the Renaissance, their patronage running the gamut of genius from Michelangelo to Galileo." "And this, in the Uffizi Gallery, is the Medici's private art collection, one of the most spectacular ever assembled." "What the millions of tourists who flock here generally forget to ask is how the Medici paid for all this." "The simple answer is that they were foreign exchange dealers, members of the Arte de Cambio - the money changers' guild - who made it big." "They were known as banchieri or tavolieri because, like the Jews of Venice, they literally did their business sitting on benches behind tables." "Indeed, the original Medici bank - or bench - was located right here in the Via dell'Arte della Lana" " Wool Guild Street." "Prior to the 1390s, the Medici were Florence's answer to the Sopranos - a small-time clan notable more for low violence than for high finance." "In a 17-year period, no fewer than five Medici were sentenced to death by the criminal courts for capital crimes." "Then came Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici." "It was his aim to make the Medici totally legitimate." "Part of the secret of his success was an ingenious bit of creative accounting that got the Medici off the hook of the anti-usury laws." "These ledgers of the Medici bank make it clear how important commercial bills for financing foreign trade were to the bank." "True, the Church prohibited the collection of interest on loans." "But there was nothing to prevent a shrewd trader from making money on transactions like these, which involved multiple currencies." "There was no interest, and therefore no sin, simply a commission deducted for the conversion of one currency into another." "If money was advanced to a particular trader for any length of time, the commission was that bit larger." "In the same way, depositors who put their money in the Medici bank were given 'discrezione' to compensate them for risking their money." "This was credit, in other words, but with the interest payments discreetly concealed." "Now, for the first time, moneylending had evolved into banking." "The real story of the success of the Medici bank can be found here in the Libro Segreto - the Secret Book - of Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici." "The key was not so much size as diversification." "Earlier Italian banks had been monolithic and very vulnerable to default by a single bad borrower." "But the Medici bank was made up of multiple interlocking partnerships, each in some measure independent of the rest." "It was this decentralisation that was the key to their astonishing profits." "Under Giovanni's guidance, the Medici banking network extended from Florence, to Venice, to Rome." "The scale and diversity of the Medici's operations was the key to reducing the risks of moneylending, and therefore also the costs to borrowers." "That's the essential difference between loan sharks and banks - between Shylock and the Medici." "And here's the proof that it worked." "Page after page of Giovanni's assets, declared for tax purposes and culminating in the grand total of 91,089 florins." "In those days that was serious money." "When Giovanni died in 1429, his last words were an exhortation to his heirs to maintain his standards of financial acumen." "His funeral was attended by 26 men of the name Medici, all paying homage to the man who had made the business of banking respectable - and profitable - as it had never been before." "For his son Cosimo, the accumulation of wealth combined seamlessly with the accumulation of power." "Within 20 years of his father's death," "Cosimo de' Medici was the Florentine State." "As the Pope himself put it - "Political questions are settled at his house." ""The man he chooses holds office." ""He it is who decides peace and war and controls the laws." ""He is King in everything but name."" "This Botticelli is mainly famous for the beauty of its young subject." "But it's actually intended as a tribute to a dead banker, Cosimo de' Medici." "That's him there on the medallion, and you can just make out the inscription Pater Patriae - the father of his country." "In 150 years, the Medici had transformed themselves from backstreet moneylenders to the most powerful financial force in Europe." "But it's this painting, Botticelli's Adorazione dei Magi, which more than any other captures the transfiguration of finance the Medici had achieved." "On close inspection, the three wise men are Cosimo de' Medici, washing the feet of Christ, and his sons Piero and Giovanni." "The young man on the left is Lorenzo." "The painting had been commissioned by the head of the Bankers' Guild as a tribute to the family." "Perhaps it should really have been called The Adoration of the Medici." "Having once been damned, bankers were now close to divinity." "Nothing could better illustrate the extraordinary ascent of money." "For what the Medici had achieved was nothing less than the birth of modern banking." "Others had tried before, but the Medici were the first bankers to hit the political big time." "And they did it by learning one crucial lesson - in finance, small is seldom beautiful." "By making their bank bigger and more diversified, the Medici had found a way of spreading their risks." "And by focusing on currency trading rather than just lending, they'd reduced their exposure to defaults by borrowers." "For Cosimo and his family, it was a truly beautiful business model." "Yet not even the Medici were invulnerable." "The bank suffered heavy losses as a result of over-generous loans to blue-blooded debtors who felt no compunction about defaulting on their obligations and telling the bankers to get lost." "Bad debts - money owed by borrowers who go bust - are the perennial problem that any bank confronts." "Yet for a time, it seemed as if modern bankers had solved this age-old problem." "They really thought they were smarter than the Medici." "Memphis, Tennessee is a long way from Florence." "And the world economy has come a long way since the Renaissance." "A crucial part in that transformation has been played by the spread of modern banking from its Italian birthplace to a country where money has increasingly taken the form of easy credit." "The United States has been built on borrowed money." "But whereas the Medici tended to lend only to the relatively well off, until the present credit crunch at least, American banks seemed willing to give just about anyone a loan." "Memphis is famous for blue suede shoes, barbecued ribs and bankruptcies." "You can tell people here are a little..." "How shall I say it?" "...a little sub-prime." "You only need to look at the shopping mall for the seriously poor." "And the ubiquitous no-frills eatery." "Then there's a tax adviser who can tell you how to claim your low-income credits." "A shop where you can borrow money on the equity you own in your car." "And a place where they'll give you an advance on next week's pay cheque... not to mention a pawn shop the size of a department store." "And finally, when you've no possessions left to pawn or to sell, there's just one option left." "And that's to head on down to ZLB Plasma where you can sell your own blood for $25 dollars a pop." "Talk about being "bled dry"." "It's amazing really - an entire economic sector based on people who are broke." "In some ways, it rather reminds me of the East End of Glasgow." "Yet there's a world of difference between this world and the world where loan sharks extract their pounds of flesh from petty defaulters." "Here in sub-prime America, defaulting on your debts is easy." "Well, pretty easy." "This is Richie." "He's in the repo business - snatching cars from under their owners' noses when they haven't made their payments." "He grabbed that bolt action, he went "chh" and I watched the rifle shell go in the barrel and he lunged it towards me and hit me right here and almost knocked me down." "He said, "Either you drop the truck or I'm dropping you."" "And I said, "Yes, sir," and I dropped the truck." "You know, you make it sound so attractive, maybe I..." "I should switch jobs!" "I tell you what, it's interesting." "In the bankruptcy capital of America, repossessing cars is a routine matter." "$16,000..." "It's got the leather, the top..." "Each week, United Auto Recoveries sells 500 repossessed cars." "The cars are auctioned off to the trade, ending up in the same car lots, to be sold to much the same people and, when they can't keep up with their monthly payments, repo'd and recycled once again." "Technically the Memphis repo men are simply doing what debt collectors do the world over." "The difference, apart from the sheer mind-boggling scale of the thing, is the relative ease with which the bad debts are wound up and the collateral is sold off." "For the debtors, there's virtually no social stigma and nobody seems to be getting hurt." "The big mystery is why the world's most successful capitalist economy is based on a foundation of more or less painless economic failure." "Here in Tennessee, when the house has been stripped bare and the repo man has taken your car, you end up in the hands of one of Memphis's bankruptcy lawyers, along with around 13,000 other people who filed for bankruptcy here in the past year." "Of course that's one thing that's making you..." "Bumping your payments up so high." "Every week, bankrupts gather here with their lawyers to hammer out deals with their creditors." "There's even a fast track lane." "In this case it's a mortgage and it's a car, or two cars." "I can't see anything else in there that they're... they're having to pay off." " Actually there are three cars." " Three cars?" "The third car is..." "the neighbourhood title loans, has a... has a lien on the car, they are holding the title." "So putting this really simply, what were they supposed to be paying and what are they now paying?" "Well, that payment was reduced from 241.11..." " down to 107." " OK." "Quite an improvement." "Cutting their monthly obligations by more than half." "From 1996 to 2006 there were between one and two million bankruptcy cases a year in the United States, nearly all of them involving individuals who elected to go bust rather than meet their obligations." "In medieval Italy - or in the Glasgow of my youth, for that matter - bankruptcy was seen as a disaster." "But not here." "In fact, this ability to walk away unscathed from unsustainable debt and start again has been a defining characteristic of American capitalism." "There were no debtors' prisons here in the early 1800s, at a time when English debtors could languish in jail for years." "Since 1898, every American has been entitled to file for Chapter 7 - liquidation, or Chapter 13 - voluntary personal reorganisation." "For rich and poor alike, bankruptcy has become as much of an inalienable right as "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness"." "The theory is that American law exists to encourage entrepreneurship - to facilitate the creation of new businesses." "And that means giving people a break when things don't work out the first time, or even the second time." "The born risk-takers don't get wiped out as they learn through trial and error how to make that first million, because today's bankrupt might be tomorrow's billionaire." "It's a theory that seems to work." "Many of America's greatest successes failed in their early endeavours, including the author Mark Twain, the comedian Buster Keaton, and none other than the great industrialist Henry Ford himself." "All of these men eventually flourished not least because they were given a chance to try, fail and start over." "For their part, the banks simply assume that a proportion of the loans they make will go bad." "After all, most people going bankrupt owe relatively trivial sums." "A Chapter 13 doesn't wipe their debts out, it just reschedules them." "So it's a mistake to think, as Shakespeare's Antonio did, of moneylenders as mere leeches, sucking the life's blood out of unfortunate debtors." "Credit and debt are the building blocks of economic development." "But it takes banks to elevate that relationship beyond the tie between a loan shark and his hapless victim." "It's only when borrowers like the ones on this Glasgow housing estate have access to efficient credit markets that they can escape the clutches of the Shylocks and the loan sharks." "It's only when savers can put their money in dependable banks that it can be channelled from the idle to the industrious." "But wait, I hear you ask, if banks are the answer, how could so many have collapsed so spectacularly in the past year, throwing the financial world into turmoil?" "To understand why bad debts in places like Memphis could cause such chaos, you need to understand how the relationship between banks and borrowers broke down as loans came to be "securitised" and sold on to unwary investors." "Once upon a time, being a banker was really rather boring." "You lived by the 3-6-3 rule, which meant you paid 3% on deposits, collected 6% on loans and were on the golf course by 3 o'clock." "But in our time, banking became really rather too interesting." "A whole series of financial innovations made it possible for common or garden loans to poor folks in places like Memphis to metamorphose into weird and wonderful things with names like "collateralised debt obligations"." "Well, this financial alchemy - turning lead into gold or toxic waste into gilt-edged securities - was only possible because the ascent of banks was followed by the ascent of the second great pillar of the modern financial system - the bond market." "And for an explanation of how that came about, we'll turn to Mr Bond himself." "We may think power resides with presidents and prime ministers in palaces and parliaments." "Not so." "In today's world, real power lies in the hands of an elite group of unassuming men in anonymous, open-plan offices... the men who control the world's bond market." "Bill Gross is the boss of PlMCO, the world's biggest bond-trading operation, which manages a portfolio of bonds worth $700 billion." "Gross is widely regarded as the king of the bond market." "Just call him Mr Bond." "Bonds are the magical link between the world of high finance and the world of political power." "Governments will always spend more than they raise in taxation - sometimes shed-loads more - and they make up the difference by selling bonds that pay interest." "But - and here's the magic - if you want to get rid of a bond, the government doesn't have to give you the cash back." "You just take it to a bond market, like the one here at Tokyo Stock Exchange, and sell it." "After the rise of banks, the birth of the bond market was the next big revolution in the history of finance." "It created a whole new way for governments to borrow money." "The bond market funded the wars that plagued northern Italy 600 years ago." "It dictated the outcome of the Battle of Waterloo and created the world's greatest financial dynasty." "It ensured the defeat of the South in the American Civil War." "And in modern times, the bond market has brought once wealthy nations, like Argentina, crashing to their knees." "Today, governments and companies use bonds to borrow on an unimaginably vast scale." "All told, there are bonds out there worth around $85 trillion." "The fortunes of most of us, whether we like it or not, are directly linked to the bond market." "If the bond market tanks, then down goes the value of our pensions - and that's a huge part of our wealth as individuals." "In the financial crisis that has gripped the world since the summer of 2007," "US government bonds have been seen as a safe haven for investors seeking shelter from the storm of falling property and share prices." "So if Bill Gross were to lose faith in those bonds, it would hit the financial world like..." "well, a thunderball." "That's why this "Mr Bond"" "has become so much more powerful than the Mr Bond created by lan Fleming." "And that's why both kinds of bond have a license to kill." ""War, " declared the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus," ""is the father of all things."" "it was certainly the father of the bond market." "For much of the 14th and 15th centuries, the medieval city-states of Tuscany " "Florence, Pisa and Siena - were at war with each other." "This was war waged as much by money as by men." "In Pieter van der Heyden's Battle Of The Money-Bags And Strong-Boxes, piggy banks, treasure chests and barrels full of coins lay into one another with lances and swords in a chaotic free-for-all." "The Dutch verses inscribed at the bottom read," ""It's all for money and goods, this fighting and quarrelling."" "But what they might just as easily have said is that war is impossible if you don't have the money to pay for it." "And the way to do that - the ability to finance war through the bond market - was, like so much else, an invention of the Italian Renaissance." "Rather than require their own citizens to do the dirty work of fighting, each city hired military contractors - condottieri - who raised armies to annex land and loot treasure from the others." "Among the condottieri of the 1360s and 1370s, one stood head and shoulders above the others." "This is his portrait in Florence's Duomo - a thank-you from a grateful public." "Unlikely though it may seem, this master mercenary was an Essex boy." "So skilfully did he wage war that the Italians called Sir John Hawkwood Giovanni Acuto " "John the Acute." "This castle was one of many pieces of prime real estate the Florentines gave him as a reward for his services." "But Hawkwood was a mercenary who was willing to fight for anyone who'd pay him " "Milan, Padua, Pisa or the Pope." "These dazzling frescoes in Florence's Palazzo Vecchio show the armies of Pisa and Florence clashing in 1364." "At that time, Hawkwood was fighting on the side of Pisa." "But 15 years later, he'd switched sides." "Why?" "Because Florence was where the money was." "The cost of these incessant wars plunged Italy's city-states into crisis." "Expenditures, even in years of peace, were running at double or more tax revenues." "To pay the likes of Sir John Hawkwood, Florence was drowning in deficits." "This wonderful document in the Florentine State Archive shows how the city's debt had exploded from around 50,000 florins at the beginning of the 14th century to five million by 1427." "It was quite literally a mountain of debt, hence the name - the Monte Commune." "But from whom could the Florentines possibly have borrowed such a vast sum?" "The answer is right here - from themselves." "It was a revolutionary idea that would change the world of money for ever." "Rather than paying direct tax, citizens were now effectively obliged to lend money to their own government." "In return for these forced loans, they received interest." "These debt instruments - simple lines in a ledger - were the original government bonds." "And the wonderful thing about them was that if you needed your money in a hurry, you could sell your bonds to other citizens." "They were liquid assets." "What this record tells us is how Florence turned its citizens into its biggest investors." "This wartime expedient marked the birth of the modern bond market." "Everyone was a winner." "Bonds had saved the city-state from bankruptcy." "The citizens were happy earning their interest." "And the bond market let them buy or sell as they saw fit." "It seemed as if the problem of public debt had been solved, allowing the citizens of Florence to turn their minds to higher things." "But there was just one problem with this brilliant idea." "There was a limit to how many more or less unproductive wars could be waged." "The larger the debts of the Italian cities became, the more bonds they had to issue, and the more bonds were issued, the less valuable they looked to investors." "And that was exactly the sequence of events in Venice." "By the early 16th century, the city had suffered a series of military reverses, and the value of Venetian bonds had taken a hammering." "At their nadir between 1509 and 1529," "Venetian Monte Nuovo bonds were trading at just 10% of their face value." "Now, if you buy a bond when war is raging, you're taking a risk - the risk that the city won't pay you back or pay your interest." "On the other hand, remember that the interest is paid on the face value of the bond, so if you can buy it at just 10% of its face value, you're earning a handsome return of maybe 50%." "And that is how the bond market works." "In a sense, you get return for the risk you're prepared to take." "At the same time, it's the bond market that sets interest rates for the economy as a whole." "If the state has in effect to pay 50%, then so do all the other borrowers." "The bond market had been invented to help pay for Italy's wars." "But now it was setting interest rates for everyone." "Its rise to power had begun." "Over the next two centuries, bonds would come to rule the world." "This house was built by the financial dynasty that helped decide the Battle of Waterloo - the dynasty that produced the man they called the Bonaparte of finance, the emperor of the 19th-century bond market." ""He is master of unbounded wealth," ""he boasts that he is the arbiter of peace and war," ""and that the credit of nations depends upon his nod." ""Ministers of state are in his pay."" "Those words, spoken in 1828 by the Radical Member of Parliament Thomas Duncombe, were describing Nathan Rothschild, bond trader extraordinaire and founder of the London branch of what became the biggest bank in the world." "The bond market made the Rothschilds stupendously rich - so rich that they could afford to build 41 stately homes all over Europe." "This is number 29 - Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire, which has been restored in all its gilded glory by Jacob Rothschild, Nathan's great-great-great-grandson." "Well, he was short, fat, obsessive, extremely clever, wholly focused." "I can't imagine he would have been a very pleasant person to have had dealings with." "Between around 1810 and 1836, the five sons of Mayer Amschel Rothschild rose from the obscurity of the Frankfurt ghetto to attain a position of unequalled power in international finance." "It was the third son, Nathan, who orchestrated this family triumph from London." "Evelyn de Rothschild is Nathan's great-great-grandson." "He recently retired as chairman of Rothschild's - the bank that Nathan built." "He was very ambitious and he moved to London." "I think he was determined." "I don't think he suffered fools lightly." "Maybe that's a family trait." "This is one of the few surviving letters from Nathan Rothschild to his brothers written, as always, in Judendeutsch - that was German transliterated into Hebrew characters - and it gives you an idea of what an extraordinary work ethic the man had" "and how he tried to impose it on his poor, long-suffering brothers." "Just listen to this." ""Dear Amschel, I am writing you my opinion because it's my damned duty to do so." ""I read your letters, not once, but often 100 times," ""because you can well imagine that after dinner I don't read books," ""I don't play cards, I don't go to the theatre." ""My only pleasure is my business."" "it was this phenomenal drive, allied with innate financial genius, that propelled Nathan from obscurity to mastery of the London bond market." "Once again, however, the opportunity for a financial breakthrough came from war." "On the morning of June 18th, 1815, 67,000 British, Dutch and German troops under the Duke of Wellington's command looked out across the fields of Waterloo, not far from Brussels, towards an almost equal number of French troops" "commanded by the French Emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte." "The Battle of Waterloo was the culmination of more than two decades of intermittent conflict between Britain and France." "But it was more than just a battle between two armies." "It was also a contest between rival financial systems." "One, the French, based on plunder." "The other, the British, based on debt." "To pay for the war, the British government had sold an unprecedented amount of bonds." "According to a long-standing legend, the Rothschild family made their first millions by speculating on how the outcome of the Battle of Waterloo would affect the price of these bonds." "It was this legend of Jewish profiteering that, a century later, the Nazis did their best to embroider." "In 1940 Josef Goebbels approved the release of this film, Die Rothschilds." "Nathan is seen bribing a French general to ensure the Duke of Wellington's victory, and then deliberately misreporting the outcome of the battle in London." "This triggers panic selling of British bonds, which Nathan then snaps up at bargain-basement prices." "What happened here in 1815 was altogether different." "Far from making money from Wellington's defeat of Napoleon, the Rothschilds were very nearly ruined by it." "Their fortune was made not by Waterloo, but despite it." "This is how it really happened." "Selling bonds to the public had raised plenty of cash for the British government." "But neither bonds nor bank notes were any use to Wellington." "To provision his troops and pay Britain's allies against France he needed a currency that was universally acceptable." "Nathan Rothschild was given the job of taking the money raised on the bond market and delivering it to Wellington - as gold." "The success of this operation would determine the fate of the warring empires and of all Europe." "This letter marks a turning point in the history of both the Rothschild family, and the British government." "It's dated the 11th of January 1814, and it's an order from the Chancellor of the Exchequer to the Commissary-in-Chief telling him to appoint Nathan Rothschild " "Mr Rothschild - as a British government agent." "Nathan's job was to gather together as much gold and silver as he could find on the European continent and make sure it got to the Duke of Wellington and his army who had just fought their way out of Spain into the South of France." "It was an operation that relied heavily on the Rothschilds' unique pan-European credit network and on Nathan's ability to mobilise gold the way Wellington could mobilise troops." "Shifting such vast amounts of gold in the middle of a war was hugely risky." "Yet, from the Rothschilds'point of view, the hefty commissions they were able to charge more than justified the risks." "The Rothschilds soon became indispensable to the British war effort." "In the words of the British Commissary-in-Chief..." ""Rothschild of this place has executed the various services" ""entrusted to him in this line admirably well, and though a Jew," ""we place a good deal of confidence in him."" "The Rothschilds were so effective as war financiers because they had a ready-made banking network within the family " "Nathan in London, Amschel in Frankfurt," "James in Paris, Carl in Amsterdam and Salomon roving wherever Nathan saw fit." "If the price of gold was higher in, say, Paris than in London," "James in Paris would sell - and Nathan in London would buy." "I think their edge over families like the Barings, with whom they were competing, was that they had their brothers in very important financial centres in countries." "Now whether that was pre-meditated, whether they thought that through as they got out of the ghetto, it's hard to believe that they went as far as that." "But that's what happened and once they saw that it was an advantage, they worked on that advantage." "In March 1815, Napoleon returned to Paris from exile in Elba determined to revive his imperial ambitions." "The Rothschilds immediately ramped up their gold operation, buying up all the bullion and coins they could lay their hands on." "Nathan's reason for buying this huge stock of gold was simple." "He assumed that, as with all Napoleon's wars, this would be a long one." "His gold would be more and more sought after and it would rise in value." "It proved to be a near-fatal miscalculation." "Wellington famously called the Battle of Waterloo," ""The nearest-run thing you ever saw in your life."" "After a day of brutal charges, counter charges and heroic defence, the late arrival of the Prussian Army finally proved decisive." "For Wellington, it was a glorious victory." "But not for the Rothschilds." "No doubt it was gratifying to Nathan Rothschild to be the first to hear the news of Napoleon's defeat." "Thanks to the swiftness of the Rothschild couriers, he heard it fully 48 hours before Major Henry Percy delivered Wellington's official despatch to the British Cabinet." "But, no matter how early he heard it, the news of Waterloo was anything but good from Nathan's point of view." "He had bargained for something much more protracted." "Now he and his brothers were sitting on top of a pile of cash that nobody wanted, to pay for a war that was over." "With the coming of peace, the great armies that had fought Napoleon could be disbanded." "That meant no more gold for soldiers' wages and it meant the price of gold, which had soared during the war, would fall." "Nathan was faced with heavy and growing losses." "There was only one possible way out." "Nathan could use the Rothschild gold to make a massive and hugely risky bet... on the bond market." "On July 20, 1815, the evening edition of the London Courier reported that Nathan had made "great purchases of stock", meaning British government bonds." "Nathan's gamble was that the British victory at Waterloo would send the price of British bonds soaring upwards." "Nathan bought, and as the price of bonds began to rise, he kept on buying." "Despite his brothers' desperate entreaties to sell, Nathan held his nerve for another year." "Eventually, in July 1817, with bond prices up by 40%, he sold his holding." "His profits were worth approximately £600 million today." "The Rothschilds had shown that bonds were more than just a way for governments to fund their wars." "They could be bought and sold in a way that generated serious money." "And with money, came power." "Mayer Amschel Rothschild had repeatedly admonished his five sons," ""if you can't make yourself loved, make yourself feared."" "As they bestrode the mid-19th century financial world as masters of the bond market, the Rothschilds were already more feared than loved." "But now, they had become hated too." "The fact that the Rothschilds were Jewish gave a new impetus to deep-rooted anti-Semitic prejudice." "Just a few months ago a colleague of mine in my office, who collects posters, found these..." "Well, this particular, rather extraordinary example of anti-Semitism in a stark form, about the Rothschilds, who were as it were epitomised, to them and others at times, the most extreme forms of undesirable capitalism as practised by Jews." "It was, above all, the Rothschilds' seeming ability to permit or prohibit wars that aroused the most indignation." "You might have thought that the Rothschilds actually needed war." "After all, some of Nathan's biggest deals had been produced by war." "If it hadn't been for war, 19th-century states wouldn't have needed to issue bonds for the Rothschilds to buy and sell." "But the trouble with war, and even more so with revolution, was that increased the risk that a debtor state might fail to meet its commitments." "And that hit the price of existing bonds." "By the mid-19th century, the Rothschilds were no longer mere traders, they were fund managers, carefully tending to a vast portfolio of their own government bonds." "Now, they stood to lose much more than to gain from conflict." "The Rothschilds had helped decide the outcome of the Napoleonic Wars by putting their financial weight behind Britain." "Now they would help decide the outcome of the American Civil War - by choosing to sit on the sidelines." "Once again, it was the masters of the bond market who would be the arbiters of war." "50 years after the Battle of Waterloo, and on the other side of the world, another great war would be decided by the power of the bond market." "But this time, it would be the vanquished who made the big bet and lost." "The traditional view is that the key turning point in the American Civil War came in June 1863, two years into the conflict." "That was the month when Union forces captured Jackson, the Mississippi state capital, and forced a Confederate army to retreat westward to Vicksburg, their backs to the Mississippi River." "Surrounded, with Union gunboats bombarding their positions from behind, the Southerners held out for a month before laying down their arms." "After Vicksburg, the Mississippi was firmly in the hands of the North." "The South was literally split in two." "Yet this military setback wasn't the decisive factor in the South's ultimate defeat." "The real turning point came earlier." "And it was financial." "200 miles downstream from Vicksburg, where the Mississippi joins the Gulf of Mexico, lies the port of New Orleans." "This is Fort Pike, built after 1812 to protect New Orleans from a future British attack." "But 50 years later, it wasn't able to protect the South from a Northern attack when Captain David Farragut seized New Orleans on April 28th, 1862." "It was a crucial moment in the Civil War as New Orleans was the principal outlet for the South's most important export... cotton." "Without control over the cotton trade the South's cause was doomed - because cotton had become the essential ingredient in an ambitious scheme to bring the bond market into the war." "Like the Italian city states 500 years before, the Confederate Treasury had initially raised money for the war by selling bonds to its own citizens." "But there was a finite amount of capital available in the South." "To survive, the Confederacy looked to Europe in the hope that the world's greatest financial dynasty might help them beat the North as they had helped Wellington beat Napoleon." "Initially, the Confederacy had grounds for optimism." "In New York, the Rothschilds' agent was sympathetic, having opposed the North's leader, Abraham Lincoln in the presidential election of 1860." "But still the Rothschilds hesitated." "Lending to the British government to help defeat Napoleon had been one thing." "But buying bonds from a bunch of breakaway Southern slave states seemed a risk too far." "The Rothschilds decided to stay out." "Yet despite this setback, the Confederate government had an ingenious trick up their sleeves." "The trick, like the sleeves themselves, was made of cotton." "The South's idea was to use cotton as collateral to back its bonds." "Investors would be comforted to know that if the interest payments dried up they could still demand their cotton instead." "The South's agents went to work selling the bonds in the financial centres of Europe." "When the Confederacy tried to market conventional bonds in European financial centres like Amsterdam's, investors wouldn't touch them with a bargepole." "But when an obscure French firm named Emile Erlanger and Company offered cotton-backed bonds, it was a completely different story." "The key to the success of the Erlanger bonds was that they could be converted into cotton at the pre-war price of six pence a pound." "These cotton bonds formed the basis of the South's new financial strategy." "If they could restrict the supply of cotton, its value, and the value of the bonds, would increase." "At the same time, the Confederates set out to use cotton to blackmail the most powerful country in the world " "Britain." "The routes to the United States of America provided Liverpool with growing volumes of trade and new docks opened on the Mersey in quick succession during the 1800s." "In 1860, the Port of Liverpool was the principal gateway for imports of cotton to the British textile industry, then the mainstay of the Victorian industrial economy." "More than 80% of the cotton came from the Southern United States." "Now that gave the Confederate leadership hope that they had the leverage to bring in Britain on their side in the Civil War." "To ratchet up the pressure, they decided to impose an embargo on all shipments of cotton to Liverpool." "For a while, the South's strategy worked brilliantly." "Cotton prices soared." "So did the value of the Confederates' cotton-backed bonds." "And the cotton embargo devastated the British economy." "Mills were forced to lay off workers." "Eventually, in late 1862, production all but ceased." "This cotton mill in Styal, south of Manchester, employed around 400 workers, but that was just a fraction of the 500,000 people employed by King Cotton across Lancashire." "Obviously, with no cotton there was nothing for people to do." "By the end of 1862, half the entire workforce of Lancashire had been laid off." "A quarter of the population was on poor relief." "They called it the "Cotton Famine", but this really was a man-made famine." "Britain was in the doldrums." "And the South's cotton bonds were riding high." "Yet the South's ability to manipulate the bond market depended on one over-riding condition - that investors could be sure of taking physical possession of the cotton which underpinned the bonds if the South failed to make its interest payments." "And that's why the fall of New Orleans on April 28, 1862, was the real turning point in the American Civil War." "Now that the South's main port was in Union hands, any investor who wanted to lay his hands on Southern cotton had to run the Union's formidable naval blockade." "The Confederates had overplayed their hand." "They had turned off the cotton tap, but then lost the ability to turn it back on." "By 1863, the mills of Lancashire had found new sources of cotton in China, Egypt, and India and investors were rapidly losing faith in the South's cotton-backed bonds." "The consequences for the Confederate economy were disastrous." "With its domestic bond market exhausted and only two paltry foreign loans, the Confederacy really had no alternative but to print paper dollars, like these ones here in the Louisiana State Museum, to pay for the war." "In all, 1. 7 billion dollars' worth." "Now, it's true that the North also printed paper money, but by the end of the war its "greenbacks" were still worth around 50 pre-war cents, whereas a Southern "greyback" was down to just one cent." "What's more, with more and more of this cash chasing fewer and fewer goods, inflation in the South simply exploded." "By January 1865, the price of some goods was up by a factor of 90." "The South had bet everything on manipulating the bond market and had lost." "It would not be the last time in history that an attempt to do so would end in ruinous inflation." "Today the global market for bonds is still bigger than the all the world's stock markets put together." "It's still a market that can make or break governments." "Does it surprise you that its key player began his money-making career in the casinos of Las Vegas?" "I was a blackjack player." "One of the first professional blackjack players, not to brag, but in the late '60s, I went to Vegas and applied a card-counting system to try and beat Vegas." "Now this master of understatement is the King of the Bond Market, controller of the biggest bond fund in the world." "So what has this got to do with you and me?" "Well, when Gross buys or sells bonds, it doesn't just affect financial markets and government policy, it affects the value of our pension funds and the interest rates we pay on our mortgages." "There's only one thing that Mr Bond is afraid of and it's not Goldfinger." "Rather, it's inflation." "The lethal danger that inflation poses is that it undermines the value of being paid a fixed rate of interest on a bond." "If inflation goes up to 10% and the value of a fixed-rate interest is only five, then that means that the bond holder is falling behind inflation by 5%." "That's why, at the first whiff of higher inflation, bond prices fall, and in some cases, keep falling." "To see just how bad things can get when the inflationary genie escapes from the bottle you just have to look at the example of Argentina." "Many Argentines date the steady decline of their economic fortunes to a day in February, 1946, when the newly elected President, General Juan Domingo Peron came here to the Central Bank in Buenos Aires." "He was astonished at what he saw." ""There is so much gold, " he marvelled," ""you can hardly walk through the corridors."" "The very name Argentina suggests wealth and plenty - it means "The Land Of Silver"." "The river flowing past the capital is the Rio de la Plata, "The Silver River"." "Once upon a time, there used to be two Harrods in the world." "One in London, in Knightsbridge, and the other here, in the Avenida Florida, in the heart of Buenos Aires." "Founded in 1912, this other Harrods is a reminder that Argentina used to be a rich country." "At one time, its per capita income was 18% less than that of the United States." "Investors who flocked to buy Argentine bonds hoped that Argentina would become the United States of South America." "Well, Argentina's history since then is a classic illustration that all the resources and talent in the world can be set at nought by chronic financial mismanagement." "There have been many financial crises in Argentine history." "But the crisis that hit the country in 1989 was unparalleled." "At the beginning of February, the country was suffering one of the hottest summers on record." "In Buenos Aires, the electricity system just couldn't cope." "Five-hour power cuts were commonplace." "But these, as it turned out, were the least of Argentina's problems." "As is almost always the case, there were several well-trodden steps to monetary hell." "In step one, the government spends more, much more, than it can raise in taxation." "Usually, but not always, it's because of a war." "In Argentina's case, there were two." "One, a civil war between Generals and the Left in the 1970s, the other a foreign war against Britain over the Falkland Islands in 1982." "By 1989, the financial system was about ready to blow." "By February, inflation had already reached 10% - per month." "Banks were ordered to close as the government tried to lower interest rates and stop the currency's exchange rate from collapsing." "It didn't work." "In just a month, the austral fell 140% against the dollar." "At the same time, the World Bank froze lending to Argentina, saying that the government had failed to tackle the root cause of inflation - a bloated public-sector deficit." "With no cheap loans forthcoming from the World Bank, the government tried to finance its deficit by selling bonds to the public." "But investors were hardly likely to buy bonds with the prospect that their real value would be wiped out by inflation in just a matter of days." "Nobody was buying." "The government was running out of options." "In April, furious customers overturned shopping trolleys after one supermarket announced over the loudspeaker that prices were being raised by 30% immediately." "Shops emptied of goods as owners weren't making enough money to buy new stock." "Government bond prices plunged as fears rose that the Central Bank's reserves were running out." "With no foreign loans and no-one willing to buy bonds, there was only one thing left for an increasingly desperate government to do - get the Central Bank literally to print more money." "But they couldn't even get that right." "On Friday April 28th, Argentina literally ran out of money." ""it's a physical problem,"" "the Central Bank Vice-President told a news conference." "What he meant was that Argentina's mint had run out of paper to print new notes, and the printers had gone on strike." ""I don't know how we'll do it," ""but the money has got to be there on Monday, " he declared." "Yet the faster the printing presses rolled, the less the money was worth." "The government was forced to print higher and higher denominations of notes." "In May, the price of coffee went up by 50% in a week." "Farmers stopped bringing cattle to market as the price for one cow was now the same as for three pairs of shoes." "By June 1989, inflation in Argentina had reached a monthly rate of 100%, an annual rate of roughly 12,000%." "To put that into concrete terms, if you wanted to go out for dinner in Buenos Aires on a Saturday night, in May you'd pay 10,000 australes." "By June, you'd have to pay 20,000 for the same meal." "And by the following month, it would take 60,000." "You've heard of a fistful of dollars." "Well, you needed a drawer full of australes just to buy a square meal." "In June, popular frustration erupted in two days of intense rioting and looting by hungry mobs." "At least 14 people died." "In a country where a steak and a bottle of wine were on practically every table every day, thousands were eating in soup kitchens or going hungry." "It's obvious enough who loses from hyperinflation." "Very rapidly rising prices are bound to wipe out anybody who's dependent on an income that's fixed in cash terms." "Groups like academics and civil servants on inflexible monthly salaries, old-age pensioners and, particularly, bondholders living off the interest on their investments." "Buenos Aires is absolutely full of antique shops like this one, laden down with jewellery and watches and cutlery, all sold off by middle-class families who just ran out of cash." "In the 1920s, the great economist John Maynard Keynes had predicted the euthanasia of the bondholder, anticipating that inflation would eat up the paper wealth of financial families like the Rothschilds." "As inflation swept through the world in the 1970s," "Keynes seemed to be proved right." "In our time, however, we've seen a miraculous resurrection of the bondholder - a comeback by Mr Bond..." "even in Argentina." "The bond market is back, terrifying American officials as they try to fund a massive financial bailout by - you guessed it - selling billions of dollars of freshly minted bonds." "The key to Mr Bond's revival has been a growth in the number of bondholders... which brings us back to Italy, where the bond market was born 600 years ago." "Italy is now a country with one of the most rapidly ageing populations in Europe." "In such a greying society, there is a growing demand for fixed-income securities like bonds." "But there's also a strong fear of inflation eating up the real value of pensions and savings." "Central bankers suspected of being soft on inflation have to answer to the pensioner's friend - the bond market." "And treasuries planning to spend billions to bail out banks that have gone bust in the current credit crunch have to tread warily, too, if they expect to raise the money by selling yet more bonds." "In modern Europe, as in Renaissance Italy, an equilibrium has been struck between political power and financial exposure." "Today, as much as ever, it seems it's the bond market, our old friend Mr Bond, that really rules the world." "But what if, rather than lending to governments, you prefer to use your money to buy a share in a company?" "Would that be more or less risky?" "More or less profitable?" "In the next episode of the Ascent Of Money, we'll discover why we find it so hard to learn from financial history, despite nearly 300 years of stock market bubbles and busts." "Some people today say that companies - and particularly multinational corporations - rule the world." "It's pretty hard to believe that any kind of human organisation could tame the vast natural barriers of South America." "But one company believed it could." "By constructing a 1.5 billion dollar gas pipeline from Bolivia right across the South American continent to the Atlantic coast of Brazil." "By running gas along the longest pipeline in the world 4,000 miles from the tip of Patagonia to the Argentine capital Buenos Aires." "Such schemes exemplify the vaulting ambition of modern capitalism, but they're only possible because of one invention - the joint stock company." "If the 16th century had seen a revolution in money and credit, and the 17th had witnessed the birth of the bond market, then the next step in the story of the ascent of money was the rise of the joint stock limited liability company." "But the ability of the company to transform our lives would depend on another innovation..." "The stock market." "The price that people are prepared to pay for a company's shares in the market tells you how much money they think it'll make in the future." "But as we have discovered in recent months of financial turmoil, stock markets can also be shock markets." "The future is always uncertain." "But we human beings are prone to over-optimism." "When prices here on the New York Stock Exchange surge upwards in synch, it's as if investors are gripped by a kind of collective euphoria - what the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, once famously called "irrational exuberance"." "So stock markets really can be like soap bubbles." "We never quite know when they're gonna burst." "The exuberance was especially irrational and the burst especially painful for the company that proposed those vast projects in Latin America." "Enron became the biggest corporate fraud in modern American history." "But Enron was very far from the only corporate scam since shares were first bought and sold 400 years ago." "And the shady practices it epitomised live on." "Indeed, they've been a key cause of the financial crisis we're living through now." "Cooked books?" "Stock prices rigged?" "Been there." "Done that." "For centuries." "Nothing illustrates more clearly than the history of stock market bubbles how hard human beings find it to learn from history." "Hidden away among the many splendours of Venice is a small clue to one of the most astonishing tales of adventure in all financial history." ""To the honour and memory of John Law of Edinburgh," ""most distinguished controller of the treasury of the Kings of the French."" "This is the final resting place of the man who invented the stock market bubble." "An ambitious Scot, a convicted murderer, a compulsive gambler and a flawed financial genius, he not only caused the first true boom and bust in asset prices, he also indirectly caused the French Revolution." "There was a time when John Law owned a quarter of what is now the United States, only to lose it all in history's first great crash." "From Edinburgh to Amsterdam to Paris, all the way here to New Orleans, and finally to Venice, Law's story is a classic tale of boom and bust." "It's also very much a story for our own times." "Hidden away here in the warehouse of the Louisiana State Museum is the only known painting of John Law." "Here he is." "With that lean and hungry look, he really is, for all the world, a Scotsman on the make." "The path that led Law "from obscurity to celebrity, to notoriety" is a path that many of the great stock market players have followed since." "Law was born here in Edinburgh in 1671, the son of a successful goldsmith and heir to the estate of Lauriston." "In 1694, while living in London," "Law killed a man in a duel over a woman and was sentenced to death." "Somehow, Law managed to escape from prison and fled to Amsterdam." "He couldn't have picked a better town to lie low in." "By the 1690s, Amsterdam was the world capital of financial innovation." "To help finance their war against Spain, the Dutch had introduced one of the world's first national lotteries." "To protect their merchants from dodgy coinage, they'd created the world's first central bank." "But the one that had the biggest impact on Law was the single greatest Dutch invention of them all - the company." "The story of the company had begun 100 years before Law's arrival as Dutch traders spread out all over the world, from Manhattan island to the Cape of Good Hope." "But it was Asia that became the primary target of Dutch commercial expansion." "Why?" "The East Indies were so alluring because of these - spices - pepper, cloves, nutmeg, ginger." "Europeans craved them to flavour their food, but also to preserve it." "Traditionally, they'd come overland by the Spice Road." "But the Dutch plan was to fetch them the longer, but quicker way, by sea." "And that pungent aroma was the smell of money to be made." "This painting shows the return of one of the first Dutch fleets from the East." "The inscription reads, "Four ships sailed to go and get the spices towards Bantam" ""and also established trading posts." ""And came back richly laden to the poles of Amsterdam." ""Departed 1 st May 1598." ""Returned 19th July 1599."" "The Asian spice trade was so profitable that just one return trip could pay for the construction costs of a ship like this." "But so prolonged was the journey round the Cape of Good Hope to the East and so hazardous that merchants had to pool their resources and their risk." "The result was around six fledgling East India enterprises." "In 1602, at the instigation of the Dutch government, these various companies came together to form the United Dutch East India Chartered Company, or Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie for short." "And this is its original charter, which spells out that the company was to enjoy a monopoly on all trade from the Cape of Good Hope all the way east to the Straits of Magellan." "Pretty much half the world." "The structure of the new entity was novel." "The capital of the company was divided unequally between all the major Dutch cities." "Citizens were invited to participate in the new venture by investing." "It was the form of this investment that was the real novelty." "This rather wonderful painting is of the family of one of the founders of the Dutch East India Company, Dirck Bas." "For 6,000 guilders, he and 16 other so-called "participants", became the firm's managing directors, the bewindhebber." "After 1606, however, anyone who put his money into the East India Company received an "aktie" - literally an "action", or as we would say, "a piece of the action" " "a share in the company's future profits." "And here it is, the world's very first share certificate, issued by the world's very first multinational company." "Almost exactly four centuries ago." "Three years later, Bas and his fellow directors declared that any shareholders who wanted their cash back could not have it refunded, but would have to sell their shares to another investor." "Overnight, a market for the company's shares was born - the world's first true stock market." "This invention was to change the face of finance for ever, because it created a mechanism whereby the price of shares was determined by the laws of supply and demand, sellers and buyers." "And as the renegade Scotsman John Law couldn't help but notice, the trading of these company stocks was making the world's first shareholders very rich indeed." "By 1610, the world's first joint stock company, the Dutch East India Company, was ready to conquer the world." "It had a new charter, new shareholders and a burgeoning trade in these shares." "But it had to fight to survive, literally." "Having established a string of factories and warehouses across South Asia from Java to India, the company had to struggle to keep the Spaniards and their English competitors at bay." "With 40 warships and a private army of 10,000 soldiers, the directors of the East India Company were the original corporate raiders." "For the Dutch East India Company, firepower and foreign trade went hand in hand." "But the key to the company's success wasn't just its cannons like these ones aboard The Batavia, the pride of its fleet." "Like all big companies, it was able to combine economies of scale with reduced transaction costs and what economists call "network externalities" - the ability to pool information between multiple employees and agents." "The Batavia was part man-of-war, part multinational corporation." "The big networked company was simply more efficient." "That was why, by the 1620s, it had established a virtual monopoly on spice exports from Asia to Europe." "The world's first multinational was making its shareholders enormously wealthy." "I'm looking here at the original shareholders' register of the Dutch East India Company, and literally every name in here was a winner." "If you'd put 1,000 guilders into the company at its very inception, by 1736, your investment would have been worth 7,000." "Over its entire lifetime, the company paid an average annual dividend of 16.5%." "Virtually all its profits were paid back to the shareholders." "Dirck Bas's original shareholding of 6,000 guilders had been transformed into a 500,000 guilder fortune." "To John Law, lying low in Amsterdam having escaped the gallows in London, the workings of the Dutch East India Company came as a revelation." "Law was living off his winnings at the gambling table." "But he was fascinated by the relationships between the company, with its splendid offices in the Hoogstraat, the nearby stock exchange, where dealers busily traded the company shares, and the Bank of Amsterdam." "Yet this Dutch financial system struck Law as not quite complete." "To Law's financially supercharged mind, the Dutch were missing a trick, or two." "For one thing, it seemed completely nuts to restrict the number of East India Company shares when the markets were so clearly enamoured of them." "Law was also puzzled by the conservatism of the Bank of Amsterdam." "It had created an internal system which allowed merchants to settle their accounts by direct cashless transfers, but it hadn't issued any real banknotes to the public." "The idea was already taking shape of a breathtaking modification of the institutions that Law had first encountered here in Amsterdam." "Only combine the properties of a monopoly trading company and a public bank and the sky really would be the limit." "Law was preparing to unleash a whole new system of finance on an unsuspecting nation." "In 1716, John Law arrived in Paris." "He had identified France as the ideal laboratory for what would be the biggest experiment in the history of the stock market." "But why did the French give him his chance?" "The answer is that France's fiscal problems were exceptionally desperate." "The country was saddled with enormous public debts as a result of the wars of Louis XlV." "When the Sun King died in 1715, the Duke of Orleans, who was acting as Regent for the under-age king Louis XV, faced a country on the brink of its third bankruptcy in less than a century." "It was the perfect opportunity for Law, the maverick self-taught economist who'd developed his theories somewhere between the casino and the stock market." "Law's ambition was to revive economic confidence in France by establishing a bank on the Dutch model, but with the difference that this bank would issue paper money like this 100 Iivres note." "As money was invested in the bank, the government's huge debt would be consolidated." "But at the same time, and this was the really important part of Law's system, paper money would revive French trade, and with it French economic power." "The Royal Government gained doubly." "Consolidation simply meant that its onerous debts were magically transformed into shares in Law's bank." "At the same time, the monarch gained the ability to print as much money as he liked." "As Law wrote - "I maintain that an absolute prince who knows how to govern" ""can extend his credit further and find needed funds at a lower interest rate" ""than a prince who is limited in his authority." ""In credit, supreme power must reside in only one person."" "That absolute power was in the hands of the Duke of Orleans who lived here in the Palais Royal, just a short step from Law's apartment in the Place Vendome." "It was to him that Law now unfolded his scheme." "The prize was nothing less than the revival of French power through financial engineering." "But that was only half of Law's ingenious plan." "As Law wrote," ""The bank is not the only, nor the grandest of my ideas." ""I will produce a work which will surprise Europe" ""by changes more powerful than were produced by the discovery of the indies."" "The second part of Law's idea was that a huge monopoly trading company should be established, the Compagnie d'Occident, the Company of the West." "As he put it, the whole nation would become a body of traders and Law himself, named here as the company's chief director, would be at its head." "The focus for this wildly ambitious scheme would be in America, where the French laid claim to a vast tract of land either side of the Mississippi - Louisiana." "The Regent gave Law's company, what was to become the Mississippi Company, a monopoly on trade with the new colony." "Frenchmen, regardless of rank, were encouraged to buy shares in the company." "Law's name headed the list of directors." "In modern parlance, what these documents tell us is that Law was attempting a reflation." "And why not?" "France in 1716 was in a depression and Law's banknotes helped stimulate a recovery." "At the same time, what he was doing was effectively transforming a burdensome and badly managed public debt into shares in what was a privatised tax-gathering and trade company." "Well, what was not to like about that?" "In a fever of mass speculation, the Mississippi Company's share price soared, from the original price of 500 livres to 5,000 on September 4th." "By December 1719, it had reached 10,000." "And this is where it all happened." "This was where Law's share issuing office was located, the Rue Quincampoix." "You can imagine the scenes of frenzy here as half of Paris descended on this narrow alleyway all desperate for a piece of the action." "The higher the share price went, the more they wanted to buy." "It was a classic stock market feedback loop." "It was in these heady times that the word "millionaire" was first coined." "Yes, millionaires, like entrepreneurs, were invented in France." "And by January 1720, John Law was the richest of them all." "Louis XlV had said "L'etat, c'est moi" - "I am the state."" "Now the renegade Scotsman, John Law, was able to say," ""L'economie, c'est moi" " ""I am the economy."" "Ensconced in his palatial suite, here in the Place Vendome, that's the Ritz Hotel over there," "Law had achieved a greater concentration of financial power in his hands than any individual in all French history." "As Controller-General of French Finances, he was literally in charge of the collection of all France's indirect taxes, the entire French national debt, the 26 mints that produced the country's gold and silver coinage, the Company of the Indies - better known as the Mississippi Company " "which had a monopoly on the import of tobacco, all of France's trade with Africa and Asia, oh, and the Louisiana colony, which covered around a quarter of what is today the United States." "In his own right, Law also owned the Mazarin Palace, more than a third of the buildings around the Place Vendome, more than 12 country estates, several plantations in Louisiana, and a hundred million livres of shares in the Mississippi Company." "Not bad going for a man who, when he'd first come here 12 years before, had been identified as a joueur - a professional gambler and a possible spy." "By January 1720, Law's triumph seemed complete." "A Scots murderer was, in effect, Prime Minister of France." "Law's problem was that he had no clear idea where to stop." "On the contrary, he had a strong personal interest in printing more money, which his own bank controlled, to drive up the price of his own company's shares." "Fortunately for Law, both his bank and his company were now operating out of the very same building, the Mazarin Palace, which he himself happened to own." "So all he had to do in order to drive up the company's share price was to take a walk down the corridor from the office where the shares were issued, to the office where the money was printed." "You could say that Law had become the ultimate insider trader." "At root, Law's system was what we nowadays call a Ponzi scheme, after the legendary ltalian-American conman, Charles Ponzi." "To pay out the generous returns it's promised to the first lot of suckers, a Ponzi scheme needs to take in more money from the next lot of suckers." "In John Law's scheme, the acquisitions of other companies and the generous dividends Law paid were financed not from company profits, but simply by selling new shares." "Like all Ponzi schemes, however, the effect of Law's system was to generate an unsustainable bubble." "Law had reflated the French economy with a combination of paper money and public confidence." "Now, unfortunately, his bubble was about to go pop." "By the beginning of 1720," "France was in the grip of a mania - the Mississippi Bubble." "But the man responsible, the renegade Scots murderer and gambler, John Law, who'd risen to become master of the entire French economy, was about to discover an inviolable law of finance..." "Trees don't grow to the sky." "According to Law's PR campaign, the huge profits he was projecting would come from the French colony of Louisiana, which he painted as a veritable Garden of Eden, inhabited by friendly noble savages willing to exchange a cornucopia of exotic goods." "These would flow to France through a new city at the mouth of the Mississippi, New Orleans, named to flatter the always susceptible French Regent, the Duke of Orleans." "All the colony lacked was settlers." "Grasping that Frenchmen were more interested in stock market speculation than the hard graft of colonisation," "Law launched a recruitment drive in the Franco-German borderlands." "Several thousand bold Germans signed up and set sail to the promised land." "They ended up here." "This was the unfortunate immigrants' first glimpse of Louisiana, an insect-infested swamp." "Within a year, 80% of them had died of starvation or tropical diseases like yellow fever." "Sadly for Law, the Mississippi Company's principal asset, its monopoly on trade with Louisiana, looked like being more or less worthless." "As the inscription on this Dutch cartoon put it," ""This is the wondrous Mississippi land made famous by her share dealings," ""which through deceit and devious conduct has squandered countless treasures." ""However men regard the shares, it is wind and smoke and nothing more."" "To Law, economic success was all about confidence." "But this was a confidence trick." "In Paris, the first rumours began to circulate that all was not well with Law's system." "The share price of the Mississippi Company began to slide." "In a desperate bid to avert meltdown, Law called on the Duke of Orleans to cut the official share price from 9,000 livres to 5,000." "This was when the limits of royal absolutism, the foundation of Law's system, suddenly became apparent." "Within weeks, the share price was in freefall." "Angry crowds gathered outside Law's bank." "Stones were thrown, windows broken." "By December, the shares had lost more than 90% of their value." "This French map from 1730 gives an absolutely wonderful visual representation of the world's first stock market bubble." "Here at the top is the goddess Fortuna, pouring down goodies from her horn of plenty." "Here are the happy investors receiving their shares in the Mississippi Company from flying cherubs." "But down below, there are some other cherubs chopping up the shares beside a shattered printing press." "And there are two more cherubs blowing bubbles." "To the right, there are four very unhappy looking men, one of whom is preparing to commit suicide by falling on his sword." "As if pricked by a sword, the Mississippi Bubble had now burst." "It was at this moment that Law, vilified by the French people, fled the country." "He never saw his wife and daughter again." "He spent the rest of his life in Venice, dividing his time between writing long, self-justifying letters and gambling." "He died in 1729." "In France, however, his devastating legacy lived on." "Law's bubble and bust fatally set back France's financial development, putting Frenchmen off paper money and stock markets for more than a generation." "The French monarchy's fiscal crisis went unresolved and for the rest of the reign of Louis XV and Louis XVI, the crown lived from hand to mouth." "Eventually, France was driven by royal bankruptcy to revolution." "The Mississippi Bubble of 1719 was the first stock market bubble in history." "But it's been by no means the largest." "When we think of stock market bubbles, we think of this." "The nightmare that haunts the world of finance, which has returned to haunt us in the last few months, is that there could ever be a bust to match the Great Wall Street Crash, which began on October 24th 1929, Black Thursday." "Over the next three years, the US stock market declined a staggering 86%, reaching its nadir in June 1932." "What was worse, this asset price deflation was accompanied by the worst depression in all history." "In the United States, output collapsed by nearly a third." "Unemployment reached a quarter of the civilian labour force." "Why did the 1929 crash happen?" "Why, indeed, does any crash happen?" "This remains one of the most hotly debated questions in financial history." "There are all kinds of technical explanations for stock market crashes." "But at root, it's all about herd psychology." "In a bull market, that's when share prices are rising, even the smartest investors can succumb to what the former chairman of the American Federal Reserve," "Alan Greenspan, famously called "irrational exuberance"." "But when the herd changes direction, sometimes in reaction to nothing more than a change in the wind, their mood can also change from euphoria to gloom." "The herd stampedes." "One cow gets scared, and that fear just translates to the whole herd and they all take off." "And the rest of them don't know why they're scared." "They just feel that fear and they run." "Fear overwhelms all rational thinking." "Until it's over." "In market jargon, the buyers have turned into sellers, the bulls into bears." "Despite the zoological imagery, the point is that markets are mirrors of the human psyche." "Like homo sapiens, they are prone to mood swings, from greed to fear." "They can suffer from depression." "And sometimes they can experience complete breakdowns." "That happens rather more often than some financial theories would lead you to expect, but not so often that we're ever quite ready for the next breakdown." "If movements in financial markets were statistically distributed like human heights, there would hardly be any crashes." "Most months would be clustered around the average, with only a tiny number witnessing extreme ups or downs." "Let's face it, not many of us are below four feet in height or above eight feet." "This is the classic bell-shaped curve, where things are distributed according to their frequency - the most commonly occurring clustered here around the middle and the relatively rare dwarves and giants out here at the extremes." "That's why it's quite a steep curve, because most human heights are quite close to the average." "But if you do the same thing for financial markets, for daily moves in the stock market, you end up with something that looks more like this, with relatively fewer small movements and relatively more big movements down or up." "And these are what the statisticians mean when they talk about long or fat tails." "If stock market movements were distributed like human heights, a drop of 10% would happen only once every 500 years." "And stock market crashes of 20% in a year would be unheard of, rather like people just six inches tall." "Whereas in fact, there have been seven such crashes in the past century." "As it turned out, those who feared that the brief panic of October 1987 would turn into the next great crash were proved wrong." "The market had one really bad month, then rallied." "But that bubble provided a golden opportunity for corporate crookery." "What John Law's Mississippi Company had been to the bubble that launched the 18th century, so another company would be to the bubble that ended the 20th." "It was a company that promised its investors wealth beyond the dreams of avarice." "It was a company that claimed to have reinvented the entire financial system." "And it was a company that used its impeccable political connections to ride all the way to the top of the bull market." "Named by Fortune Magazine as "America's Most innovative Company"" "for six consecutive years, that company was..." "Enron." "Seven years after its collapse, most of us have consigned Enron to the dustbin of financial history." "Yet it pioneered many of the dubious business practices that continue to plague us today." "In the three years up to August 2000, shares of the Houston energy company had gone through the roof." "Once a small-time gas company in Nebraska," "Enron was now the fifth largest company in the United States, with stated revenues of 111 billion dollars." "Enron was the darling of Wall Street." "Yet a little historical knowledge might have made Enron's investors think twice." "Indeed, the story of Enron was like a re-run of the Mississippi Bubble 280 years before." "John Law's plan had been to revolutionise French government finance." "Ken Lay, the chairman of Enron, planned to revolutionise the global energy business." "For years, the industry had been dominated by huge utility companies, which both produced the energy, pumped the gas and generated the electricity, and sold it on to consumers." "Lay's big idea was to create a kind of energy bank, which would act as the intermediary between suppliers and consumers." "His dream was to make Enron the greatest energy company in the world." "Caught up in the heady spirit of the times was senior Enron executive, Sherron Watkins." "It was very electric." "You felt like you could..." "If you came up with a good idea," "Enron would give you the money and you could go for it at a very young age." "Like John Law, Ken Lay had friends in high places." "He contributed generously to George HWBush's presidential campaign." "As President, Bush duly pushed through legislation that deregulated the energy industry." "Riding a global wave of energy privatisation," "Enron snapped up assets all over the world." "In Latin America alone, the company had interests in Colombia, Ecuador," "Peru and Bolivia, where they laid a huge pipeline across the continent to Brazil." "And thanks to the intervention of Ken Lay's personal friend, George W Bush," "Enron was able to acquire a controlling stake in the largest natural gas pipeline network in the world, here in Argentina." "Above all, however, Enron traded." "Not only in energy, but in virtually all the ancient elements of earth, water, fire and air." "It even traded in internet bandwidth." "Enron led a Wall Street surge unnervingly reminiscent of the Mississippi Bubble." "Despite his half-hearted warnings against "irrational exuberance", this bull market was propelled upward by the chairman of the US Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan." "As in John Law's time, a stock market bubble could only happen if money was abundant." "And by raising interest rates only once between February 1995 and June 1990," "Greenspan made sure that it was." "The rewards for investors were immense, and also for the managers here at the company's Houston headquarters, who were generously incentivised with share options." "In the space of just three years after 1997, the Enron stock price rose by a factor of very nearly five, from below 20 dollars a share to above 90." "It was the Mississippi Company all over again." "Even a city used to extravagant oil-fired living had seen nothing like it." "This is where Ken Lay and his Enron executives used to live, in River Oaks, Houston's most exclusive neighbourhood." "In the final year of its existence, Enron paid its top 140 executives an average of 5.3 million dollars each." "Luxury car sales went through the roof." "You got multiples of your annual base pay." "You were really less thought of if you got a percentage, even if it was 75% of your annual base pay." "Oh, you were getting a percentage." "You wanted multiples." "You wanted two times your annual base pay, three times, four times your annual base pay, as a bonus." "And Lay, the pillar of society, espoused the highest moral standards for his company." "Enron is a company that deals with everyone with absolute integrity." "We play by all of the rules, we stand by our word, we mean what we say, we say what we mean." "The only problem was that, like John Law's system, the Enron system was an elaborate fraud." "In this tape, an Enron trader is discussing with the El Paso Electric Company how to hold California's consumers to ransom by closing power stations to restrict the supply of electricity." "OK." "The results were not only the higher prices Enron wanted, but also, despite there being plenty of power available, repeated blackouts for consumers." "Enron's money was stolen in more ways than one." "The company's stated assets were vastly inflated." "But its key financial innovation was to remove its debts from the balance sheet and hide them in so-called "special purpose entities", dubious names like Chewco and Raptor." "Each quarter, the company's executives had to use more smoke and more mirrors to make actual losses look like bumper profits." "It couldn't last." "When you cook the books and then you try to hide it, you're toast." "When they sensed the game would soon be up," "Lay and his cronies started to unload hundreds of millions of dollars worth of shares, while at the same time reassuring the public that the share price would continue to soar." "Like John Law's desperate attempts to stem the freefall of Mississippi Company shares, all Ken Lay's reassurances were in vain." "On November 15th 2001, Alan Greenspan, head of the US Federal Reserve, received the Enron Prize for Distinguished Public Service, adding his name to a roll of honour that included Mikhail Gorbachev and Nelson Mandela." "Greenspan deserved it, because without his monetary policies in the late '90s, the Enron bubble, and the dotcom bubble that coincided with it, would surely have been impossible." "Just two weeks after the award ceremony, Enron filed for bankruptcy." "The company owed billions." "But just how many billions?" "When Enron declared bankruptcy, December 2001, they met with their creditors to say," ""Erm, guys, I know on our balance sheet," ""we have reported 13 billion dollars of long-term debt." ""Our true long-term debt picture is 38 billion dollars." ""There's 25 billion dollars in off-balance-sheet debt"." "Did those numbers come as a shock to you?" "You knew there were problems, but not on that scale." "Yes, I mean, I think we were all flabbergasted." "The day before 4,500 employees at Enron's HQ were given their marching orders, a final round of bonus cheques were issued to grateful executives." "In May 2006, Ken Lay was convicted on all six counts of securities and wire fraud." "His sidekick, Jeffrey Skilling, was sentenced to 24 years in prison." "Lay died before sentencing, while on holiday in Aspen, Colorado." "Yet the fraudulent practices that propelled Enron's rise and fall didn't die with Ken Lay." "On the contrary, the habit of hiding debt off-balance-sheet that Enron pioneered subsequently spread throughout the Western financial system." "The unravelling of this dodgy accounting has been a key component of the current crisis." "In many respects, I think the Enron problem was in a Petri dish and the germ has spread throughout the financial markets." "Some of which comes from Enron traders and finance folks that are gainfully employed at banks and energy trading houses." "So that rot is everywhere in the financial markets." "The joint stock limited liability company truly is a miraculous institution." "And yet throughout financial history, there have always been a few crooked companies, just as there have occasionally been irrational markets." "Indeed, the two go hand in hand, because it's precisely when the bulls are stampeding most enthusiastically that people are most likely to get taken for the proverbial ride." "As we've seen in the past year, the path of financial markets can never be as smooth as we would like." "Since the current credit crunch began, some stock markets around the world have fallen by as much as 50%." "So long as human expectations of the future veer from the over-optimistic to the over-pessimistic, from greed to fear, stock prices will tend to trace a line not unlike the jagged and irregular peaks of the Andes." "As an investor, you just have to hope that when you have to come down from the summit of euphoria, it'll be on a nice, smooth ski-slope, and not over a sheer cliff." "But is there nothing we can do to protect ourselves from real and metaphorical falls?" "As we'll see in the next episode of The Ascent Of Money, finance is as much about risk as it is about return." "And the big question is, are you insured?" "Or are you hedged?" "The most basic financial impulse of all is to save for a rainy day." "Because, as we've been painfully reminded by the recent months of financial turmoil, the future is so unpredictable." "The world really can be a dangerous place." "Not many of us get through life without a little bad luck." "Some of us get a lot." "It's all about being in the wrong place at the wrong time, like New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit." "The question is, how should we deal with the risks and uncertainties of the future?" "Should the onus be on the individual to insure against disaster?" "Should we be able to rely on the voluntary charity of our fellow human beings when calamity strikes?" "Or should we be able to count on the state - in other words, the compulsory contributions of our fellow taxpayers - to bail us out when the flood comes?" "That's a long way of asking a simple question - are you insured?" "The British certainly think they are." "Today, we pay a larger proportion of our income on insurance than any other people in the world." "It's rather odd, because Britain is one of the safest countries on Earth." "The struggle to overcome risk has been a constant theme of the history of money, from the invention of life insurance by two hard-drinking Scots clergymen, to the rise and fall of the welfare state, to the explosive growth of hedge funds and their multi-billionaire owners." "At the core of our struggle with risk is an insoluble conflict - we want to be financially secure, and so we yearn for a predictable world." "But the future always seems to come up with new and unpleasant ways to take us by surprise." "We want calculable risk." "We're stuck with random uncertainty." "When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in the last week of August 2005, it caused death and destruction." "Yet it's not a natural catastrophe that now threatens the survival of the city." "The real lesson of the disaster is about money." "How the risk management system we call insurance simply failed when faced with a calamity on this scale." "The hurricane didn't hit New Orleans directly." "The main force of the storm passed to the north-east of the city." "But just as the residents breathed a sigh of relief, the real catastrophe began." "This Industrial Canal links Lake Pontchartrain to the Mississippi." "After the hurricane, the huge storm surge raised the water level in the canal so high that it broke the levee, pouring umpteen gallons of the lake over here, into the Ninth Ward of New Orleans." "Just to the east of the Ninth Ward is St Bernard, a blue-collar community of homeowners all, on paper at least, covered by private insurance." "Councillor Joey DiFatta refused advice to leave the city, staying put during the storm." "Eventually, he was forced to retreat to the roof of the town hall as the waters kept rising." "And as you can see," " this is the water line." " That's the water line." "Where it came up to." "The water came in this building in, er...." " 14 feet of water in 15 minutes." " Wow." "From the second floor of this building," "I could see, coming down Judge Perez, a wall of water." "In that wall of water was debris - cars, vehicles, pieces of roofs." "And this wall of water, you know, you guestimate, had to be maybe 15 to 20 feet tall." " And moving fast." " Moving quickly." "Just coming down this boulevard street, and taking everything with it as it came." "The whole of St Bernard Parish was inundated in just 15 minutes." "Only five houses out of 26,000 weren't flooded." "More than 2,000 people were killed in Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent flooding." "Here in St Bernard Parish, 148 people lost their lives, mostly because they became trapped in their houses as the flood waters rose." "The painted signs on these abandoned houses say whether dead bodies were found after the flood waters receded." "A little bit like medieval London in the time of plague." "Yet three years later, it's not flooding or plague that's killing New Orleans." "A harsh financial reality has emerged." "People can't live here any more because they can't insure their homes." "One man made it his mission to show the limits of private insurance when it comes to a really big crisis." "He's former navy pilot Richard F Scruggs, one of those lawyers that only America seems to produce." "Dickie Scruggs took $50 million off the asbestos industry, then $248 billion off tobacco companies for failing to warn smokers of the danger of lung cancer." "This kind of work has its rewards." "Scruggs's share in fees on the tobacco case was $1.4 billion." "Scruggs's latest target has been America's insurance companies." "His clients, hundreds of homeowners whose houses were destroyed by Katrina, argued that the companies were refusing to pay up on genuine claims - a view the insurers disputed." "There was a house there?" "There was a house here, a house next to it, where you see the trailer." "Scruggs had a dog of his own in this fight." "His own home on Pascagoula's Beach Boulevard, here on the Mississippi coast, was so badly damaged by Katrina that it had to be demolished." " This is the..." " The front door?" "This is the front door, right here." "The edge of the slab, if you will." " You were slabbed." " We were slabbed." "If you could fix the system..." "But I'm fortunate enough that I have the means to..." " To lose a house and build it." " Most people here don't." "If you had the power to change the system so that people really were insured, how would you do that?" "Is there a way of making insurance work again?" "There is, and it's disclosure of what... what you're buying." "Er, so that, you know... like..." "like a drug." "There's a black box warning on there." ""This is what it does, this is what you should watch out for."" "As opposed to this device, which is called a modern insurance policy, which no-one can interpret or understand." "It seemed as if the insurance companies had been well and truly "Scrugged"." "One of America's biggest insurers settled hundreds of cases brought by Scruggs on behalf of clients whose claims had been turned down." "But in this bitter, high-stakes battle, the insurance companies had the last laugh." "After winning the case, Scruggs was convicted and sentenced to five years for attempting to bribe a judge and influence the distribution of legal fees." "And the big insurance companies responded to the weight of post-Katrina claims by, in effect, declaring parts of the Gulf Coast a no-home-insurance zone." "Today, as Councillor Joey DiFatta has found out, insuring a house in this part of New Orleans is virtually impossible." " They can't get a mortgage either?" " That is correct." "They have to make a choice." "Do I build a house here?" "Or do I relocate to an area where insurance may be a little cheaper and I can afford it?" "That is hurting our community, it's taking our people away, the nucleus of this parish, and pulling them away." "Three years after disaster struck," "St Bernard Parish has only a third of its pre-Katrina population." "Of course, life has always been dangerous." "The real lesson of Katrina, or any big disaster, is that even when we think we're protected against risk, sometimes it turns out we're not." "Even making quite modest insurance claims can seem more trouble than it's worth." "It leaves you wondering why we bother spending so much on insurance policies every year." "Where did this strange habit come from?" "Saving up for the proverbial rainy day is the first principle of insurance, but the trick is knowing what to do with your savings so that, unlike in New Orleans after Katrina, they're in the kitty when you really need them." "But to do that, you need to be more than usually canny, and that gives us a valuable clue as to where the history of modern insurance has its origins." "Where else but in bonny, canny Scotland?" "They say the Scots are a pessimistic people." "Maybe it's the weather - all those hundreds of rainy days." "Maybe it's the endless years of sporting disappointment." "Or maybe it was the Calvinism we picked up at the time of the Reformation." "Certainly, it's two Church of Scotland ministers who deserve the credit for inventing the first true insurance fund, back in 1744, and fathering a multi-billion-pound industry." "The Kirkyard of Greyfriars is best known for the grave-robbers, the Resurrection Men, who came here in the late 18th century to supply the Medical School at Edinburgh University with corpses for dissection." "But Greyfriars' lasting importance comes from the work of the minister here, Robert Wallace, and his friend, Alexander Webster." "It's somehow appropriate that it was Scottish ministers who invented modern insurance." "After all, we tend to think of them as the embodiment of prudence and thrift, weighed down with an anticipation of impending divine retribution for every tiny transgression." "But, in fact, Robert Wallace was a hard drinker, as well as a mathematical prodigy, who liked nothing better than knocking back magnums of claret with his bibulous buddies." "Wallace and Webster were unhappy at the way the widows and children of their fellow clergymen were treated when the Grim Reaper struck." "They often found themselves homeless and penniless." "The plan Wallace and Webster came up with was ingenious - the first true insurance fund in history." "These are some of the voluminous calculations that Robert Wallace did, now housed at the National Archives Of Scotland." "You can see how he ran the numbers over and over again, making very careful assumptions about the maximum number of widows and orphans that would have to be provided for." "The key point was that, from now on, ministers wouldn't just pay money in that would be paid out when one of their number died." "Rather, they would pay premiums that would be used to create a fund, and the fund would then be invested for profitable purposes." "The widows and orphans, henceforth, would be paid out of the returns on that money, leaving the premiums to accumulate." "All that was required for the scheme to work was an accurate projection of how many widows and orphans there would likely be in the future." "A calculation which Wallace and Webster made with extraordinary precision." "The creation of the Scottish Ministers' Widows' Fund was a milestone in financial history, for it provided a model not just for Scottish clergymen, but for everyone who aspired to provide for life's eventualities." "By 1815, the principle of insurance was sufficiently widespread to be adopted for the widows of men who lost their lives fighting against Napoleon." "At the Battle of Waterloo, your chances of getting killed were up to one in four, but at least if you'd taken out insurance, you had the consolation of knowing your wife and children wouldn't be thrown out onto the street." "Gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "take cover"." "The Scottish ministers' fund grew into the world-famous Scottish Widows." "Even novelists, not renowned for their financial prudence, could join." "Walter Scott took out a policy in 1826, to reassure his creditors they'd be paid in the event of his death." "By the mid-19th century, being insured was as much a badge of respectability as going to church on Sunday." "What no-one anticipated back in 1744 was that the careful calculations of two Scottish ministers would grow into today's huge insurance industry." "As Robert Wallace understood 250 years ago, size matters in insurance, because the more people are paying into a fund the easier it becomes, by the law of averages, to predict how much will have to be paid out each year." "Although no individual's date of death can be known in advance, actuaries can calculate the likely life expectancy of a large group of individuals with quite astonishing precision." "In other words, insurance is all about trying to cope with the risks of the future." "If, that is, you're insured in the first place." "No matter how many private funds like Scottish Widows were set up, there were always going to be people beyond the reach of insurance, who were either too poor or too feckless to save for that rainy day." "The lot of the poor was once a pretty harsh one - either dependence on private charity, or the harsh regime of the workhouse, like this typically austere one here in the heart of Edinburgh." "Yet by the 1880s, people began to feel that life's losers somehow deserved better." "The seed was planted of an entirely new approach to risk, a seed that would ultimately sprout into the modern welfare state." "The state system of insurance was designed to exploit the ultimate economy of scale, by covering literally every citizen from the cradle to the grave." "Yet while we tend to think of the welfare state as a British invention, in fact, the world's first welfare superpower was Japan." "Disaster just kept striking Japan in the first half of the 20th century." "In 1923, a huge earthquake devastated Tokyo." "As in New Orleans, private insurance policies turned out to be worth little more than the paper they were printed on." "A new idea began to emerge in Japan - that the state should take care of risk." "But this was to be state protection allied with imperial ambition." "The Japanese set up a welfare state." "And they did it to promote warfare." "It was the mid-20th-century state's insatiable appetite for able-bodied young soldiers and workers, not some kind of bleeding-heart altruism, that inspired the rise of welfare." "State healthcare would ensure a fitter populace and a steady supply of able-bodied recruits to the Emperor's armed forces, and deliver him an empire." "The wartime slogan "All people are soldiers"" "was adapted to become "All people should have insurance"." "The only problem was that Japan had gone to war with the world's economic colossus - the United States." "Japan's warfare state proved to be a massive mistake." "Quite apart from the nearly three million lives lost in Japan's doomed bid for empire, by 1945, the value of Japan's entire capital stock seemed to have been reduced to zero by American bombers." "Cities built largely out of wood were incinerated." "Nearly a third of the urban population lost their homes." "Practically the only city to survive intact was Kyoto, the former imperial capital." "1945 may have seen the end of the Japanese warfare state, but it wasn't the end of the Japanese experiment with state-sponsored welfare." "In Japan, as in most competent countries, the lesson was clear - the world was just too dangerous a place for private insurance markets to cope with." "With the best will in the world, people couldn't be expected to insure themselves against the US Air Force." "The answer, practically everywhere, was the same - for government to step in." "In effect, to nationalise risk." "Perhaps the most familiar sub-system of welfare from the cradle to the grave, also born in the ruins of war, was devised by the British economist, William Beverage." "When the Japanese came up with their own comprehensive welfare system in October 1947, their advisory committee in social security recommended what amounted to "Bebariji no Nihon-ban"," ""Beverage for the Japanese"." "And yet, they went even further than Beverage had intended, as this copy of their report, here in the library of the Japanese National Parliament, makes clear." "It called on the government to provide against every cause of poverty." "Sickness and injury, disability, death, childbirth, large families, old age and unemployment." "Whatever the reason, the needy would be guaranteed the minimum standard of living by national assistance." "The Japanese would no longer have to rely on the benevolence of a feudal lord or the luck of the gods - the welfare state would cover them against all the vagaries and vicissitudes of the modern world." "If they couldn't afford education, the state would pay." "If they couldn't find work, the state would pay." "If they were too ill to work, the state would pay." "When they retired, the state would pay." "And when they finally died, the state would pay their dependents." "So what happened after the war in Japan was merely the extension of the warfare welfare state." "The slogan now became "All people should have pensions"." "The Japanese welfare state seemed to be a miracle of effectiveness." "In public health and education, Japan led the world." "By the late 1970s, the Japanese could boast that their country had become the welfare superpower." "Run like this, the welfare state seemed to make so much sense." "Japan had achieved security for all, the elimination of risk, while at the same time growing so rapidly that by 1968 it had the second-largest economy in the world." "One US economist even predicted that Japan's per-capita income would overtake America's by the year 2000." "Welfare was working where warfare had failed - to make Japan top nation." "The key turned out to be not a foreign empire, but a domestic safety net." "And yet, there was a catch, a fatal flaw in the design of the post-war welfare state." "Just what was it that caused those predictions of Japan's ultimate triumph to fail to come true?" "The welfare state looked to be working smoothly enough in 1970s Japan." "But elsewhere, there were signs that all was not well." "In Britain and throughout the western world, the welfare state, it seemed, had removed the incentives without which a capitalist economy simply cannot function - the carrot of serious money for those who strive, the stick of hardship for those who are idle." "The result was stagflation - low growth and high inflation." "What was to be done?" "One man and his pupils thought they knew the answer." "Thanks in large measure to their influence, one of the great economic trends of the past 25 years has been for the welfare state to be dismantled - reintroducing people with a sharp shock to the unpredictable monster they thought they had escaped from..." "Risk." "In 1976, a diminutive professor called Milton Friedman, working here at the University of Chicago, won the Nobel Prize in Economics." "Milton Friedman won his place in the economic hall of fame by restating this simple equation." "MV = PQ, where M is the money supply," "V is the velocity at which it circulates," "P is the price level and Q is the quantity of expenditures." "Friedman's observation was simple - if the money supply went up, then so did the price level." "Hence, the Quantity Theory of Money." "But you needed much more than a piece of chalk and a blackboard to answer the second crucial question of Milton Friedman's career - what had gone wrong with the welfare state?" "In Chile, he found the perfect laboratory to test his theories." "In September 1973, tanks had rolled through Santiago to overthrow the government of Chile's Marxist president, Salvador Allende, whose attempt to turn the country into a communist state had ended in total economic chaos and a call by the Chilean Parliament for a military coup." "Up there on the balcony of the Carrera Hotel, opponents of the Allende regime celebrated with champagne as air force jets flew overhead to bomb the Moneda Palace." "Here in the palace, Allende prepared to make a desperate last stand, armed with an AK-47 presented to him by his Cuban role model, Fidel Castro." "Looking out the palace window and seeing the tanks literally rolling in," "Allende realised that it was all over for his dream of a Marxist Chile." "Cornered here in what was left of the presidential quarters, he took the decision to shoot himself." "35 years later, you can still see the bullet holes in some of the buildings around the square." "What happened here in September 1973 in many ways epitomised a worldwide crisis of the welfare state, and posed a stark choice between alternative economic systems." "With output collapsing and inflation rampant," "Chile's system of universal benefits was effectively bankrupt." "For Allende, the only solution was full-blown, Soviet-style takeover of the entire economy." "The generals and their supporters knew they didn't want that, but what did they actually want, given that the status quo was unsustainable?" "Enter Milton Friedman." "In March 1975," "Friedman flew from Chicago to Chile to answer that question." "In addition to giving lectures and seminars," "Friedman came here, to the Moneda Palace, for a meeting with the new Chilean president, General Augusto Pinochet." "Friedman spent three-quarters of an hour with Pinochet, urging him to reduce the government deficit that he'd identified as the main cause of Chile's sky-high inflation - then running at an annual rate of 900%." "A month after Friedman's visit, the Chilean junta announced that inflation would be stopped at any cost." "The regime cut government spending by 27%." ""This problem of inflation is not of recent origin." ""it arises from trends towards socialism that started 40 years ago," ""and reached their logical and terrible climax in the Allende regime."" "For tendering this advice, Friedman found himself denounced for acting as a consultant to a military dictator responsible for the executions of more than 2,000 real and suspected communists, and the torture of nearly 30,000 more." "Chicago's role in Chile's new regime consisted of more than just a visit by Milton Friedman, however." "Since the 1950s, there'd been a steady stream of bright, young economists going from this place, the Catholic University in Santiago, to study in Chicago, and they'd come back convinced of the need to balance the budget," "tighten the money supply, and liberalise trade." "These were the Chicago Boys, Friedman's foot soldiers." "And yet the most radical of their ideas went beyond what Friedman had recommended to Pinochet." "It amounted to a full-scale rolling back of the welfare state." "The conservative economic revolution didn't begin in Thatcher's Britain, or Reagan's America." "It began right here in Chile." "The mastermind behind this wholesale dismantling of the welfare state was a young economist called Jose Pinera." "Chile's economy was destroyed." "We have had 50 years of protectionism, state intervention - like socialism, if you want - and that was exacerbated during the Allende government." "We had created a sort of welfare state, and that, of course, was going bankrupt in Chile." "Between 1979 and 1981," "Pinera and his colleagues erected a radically new pension system for Chile, giving every worker the chance to opt out of the old pay-as-you-go state system." "Instead of a payroll tax, each worker now could put 10% of his wages aside into an individual personal retirement account, to be managed by private competing companies." "There was also a small premium for disability and life insurance." "The idea was to give each worker a sense that the money being put aside was his own property, his own capital." "Pinera gambled." "He gave workers a choice - stick with the old system of pay as you go, or opt for the new personal retirement accounts." "It paid off." "Convinced by Pinera's argument, 80% made the switch to a private pension plan." "But was it worth it?" "Was it worth the huge moral compromise that the Chicago Boys and the Harvard man made when they got into bed with a torturing, murderous dictatorship?" "The answer to that question very much depends on whether you think their reform has helped pave a peaceful way back to a sustainable democracy in Chile." "And I think they did." "In 1980, Pinochet conceded a new constitution that prescribed a ten-year transition back to democracy." "Ten years later, he stepped down as president." "Democracy was restored, and by that time, the economic miracle was under way that helped to ensure its survival." "For the pension reform not only created a new class of property owners, each with his own retirement nest egg, it also gave the Chilean economy a massive shot in the arm." "These brokers at the Banco de Chile are investing Chilean workers' pension contributions into the stock market." "And they've been doing a pretty good job of it." "Average returns on the personal retirement accounts has been over 10%, reflecting the fact that in the 20 years after 1987, the Chilean stock market has gone up by a factor of 18." "There is a downside to the system, to be sure." "Since not everyone in the economy has a regular full-time job, not everyone ends up participating in the system." "Which leaves a substantial chunk of the population with no pension coverage at all." "I'm standing in front of the Communist Party headquarters here in La Victoria, a suburb of Santiago, which was once one of the hotbeds of opposition to the Pinochet regime." "Because most people here are either unemployed or work in the informal sector, they don't, or can't, pay into the pension system which means they don't get anything out of it." "This is the kind of neighbourhood where Che Guevara is still the local hero, not Jose Pinera." "The poor of Chile may not have a private pension plan, and may have to make do with a meagre government handout in their old age... but even they've benefited from Chile's rapidly growing economy." "Growth makes a difference in the life of every citizen." "The poverty rate in Chile has gone down from about 50% to 13%." "So this has been really a huge success and the pension reform has been a critical element in this." "The improvement in Chile's economic performance since the Chicago Boys' reforms is really very hard to argue with." "In the 15 years before Milton Friedman's visit, the growth rate here was a measly 0. 17% a year." "In the subsequent 15 years, it increased by a factor of nearly 20." "The poverty rate here's down to 15%, compared to 40% in the rest of Latin America." "And when you look down at Santiago's shiny new financial district, you can see why the Chilean pension reform has been imitated right across the region and, indeed, around the world." "For Britain's Margaret Thatcher, the general from Chile and the professor from Chicago were heroes, who demonstrated that only by rolling back the welfare state could governments revive economic growth." "Yet one country where this recipe has not been tried is the country that's come to need it most." "Japan." "So successful was the Japanese welfare superpower that by the 1970s, life expectancy was the longest in the world." "The problem was that Japan's welfare state was too successful." "Today, the programmes run here at Japan's Ministry of Welfare rely on an ever-smaller number of active workers to support an ever-rising population of retirees." "Back in 1960, there were something like 11 active workers for every one retired person." "But by 2025, that number could sink as low as two." "In other words, there'll be one old-age pensioner for every two bureaucrats working here at the Ministry." "In just 30 years, the cost of social security benefits has risen in relation to Japan's national income by a factor of four." "Today, virtually all Japan's health insurance societies are in deficit." "And the pension funds are nearly out of money too." "Japan's once so-super welfare state is threatening to bankrupt the nation." "Insurance. it seemed such a brilliant idea in the calculations of those Scottish ministers, and even more brilliant in Japan's all-encompassing welfare state." "But as we've seen, the best-laid schemes can be thrown into disarray by an unexpected turn of events." "So is there any better way of managing risk in an uncertain world?" "Disasters like 9/11 and Katrina expose the limits of both traditional insurance and the welfare state." "But insurance and welfare aren't the only ways to buy yourself protection against future shocks." "These days, the smart way of doing it is by being hedged." "Now, everybody's heard of hedge funds, but what exactly does "hedging" mean and where did it come from?" "To most of us, hedge funds are a mystery." "But the one thing we do know is that they can make you stupendously rich." "One hugely successful hedge fund manager paid $60 million for this Cezanne." "And he owns this Degas too." "Not to mention a Jasper Johns he paid $80 million for." "He's also given hundreds of millions of dollars to charity." "Ken Griffin is the founder of the Citadel investment Group, one of the world's biggest hedge funds." "Last year, he navigated his way through the credit crunch so successfully he was able to pay himself more than a billion dollars." "To most of us, risk is scary, but all of Griffin's vast wealth has come because he's found a way of managing risk, with a mixture of mathematical precision and brilliant intuition." "Nothing is constant." "Nothing is the way it's always been." "So what I find is that people who are really good at this have great intuition, great instinct." "Their gut actually tells them something." "The mathematics are important because they demonstrate you understand the problem." "But ultimately, the decision about whether or not to take a given risk" "I think is really a human judgment call in every sense of the word." "The origins of hedging, appropriately enough, are agricultural." "For a farmer, nothing is more important than the future price of his crop after it's been harvested and brought to market." "But that can be higher, or much lower, than he expects." "A futures contract allows him to protect himself by committing a merchant to buy the crop when it's brought to market at a price agreed when the seeds are being planted." "The farmer gets a floor below which the price can't sink." "The merchant gets a ceiling above which it can't rise." "By signing a futures contract, both the farmer and the merchant have hedged their bets." "Both parties are better off, and because of that, the world as a whole is much better off." "It encourages capital formation, it encourages investment, it encourages people to do what is needed to be done to make the world a better place." "With the development of a standardised futures contract, agreed rules, and an effective clearing house, the first true futures market was born." "And its birthplace was here in the Windy City." "Chicago." "After the city's futures exchange was established in 1874, hedging commodities became standard practice." "The next step was for a conditional kind of future to evolve." "The option." "Some of this really is the financial equivalent of rocket science, but the underlying principle is simple." "Because they're derived from underlying assets, all futures contracts are known as "derivatives"." "But an even smarter kind of derivative is an "option"." "The buyer of a call option has the right, say, to buy a barrel of oil for $120 in a year's time." "Now, if the price of oil rises to $150 a barrel, then the option is in the money and the smart guy makes a profit of $30." "But if that doesn't happen, if the price of oil stays the same, or actually declines, he's under no obligation to carry through the deal." "All he does is to write off the cost of the option itself." "Well, it's by buying and selling complex smart derivatives like options that Ken Griffin has become a billionaire." "In theory, derivatives offer a new way to hedge against an uncertain future." "A much smarter way than boring old insurance." "And much more profitable." "In the past decade, derivatives have seemed to take over the world of finance." "By the end of 2007, the notional value of all derivatives contracts reached a staggering $596 trillion." "That's 43 times the size of the American economy." "There are tremendous economic benefits for people that work here." "$20 billion in the hands of 1,000 people is really a 21st century phenomenon." "This never happened 50 years ago." "Yet there are downsides to hedging too." "When billionaire investor Warren Buffet described derivatives as "financial weapons of mass destruction", he all but prophesised the downfall of American insurance giant AIG." "Their European headquarters are there behind me." "Brought low not by selling insurance policies, but by selling derivatives that blew up in its face." "Our basic human urge to protect ourselves against risk has proved frustratingly difficult to satisfy." "Insurance companies let us down." "Welfare states sink into insolvency." "And derivatives turn out to be a double-edged weapon too." "And so for many families, providing for the future now takes one very simple form - an investment in a house, the value of which is supposed to keep going up until the day the breadwinners need to retire." "If the pension plan falls short, never mind." "There's always home, sweet home." "As a pension or an insurance policy, this strategy has one very obvious flaw - it represents a one-way, totally unhedged bet on a single market, the property market." "But as we'll see in the next episode of The Ascent Of Money, a bet on bricks and mortar, or good old Japanese wood, is anything but as safe as houses." "It's the English-speaking world's favourite game... property." "And today the stakes in the game are higher than ever." "The original property game we know today as Monopoly was actually invented back in 1903 to expose the unfairness of a social system where a small minority of landlords screwed the majority of tenants." "30 years later, an unemployed plumber named Charles Darrow patented a new version of the game, with the board based on the streets here in Atlantic City." "It was Darrow who introduced the little houses and hotels." "What the game of Monopoly tells us, contrary to its inventor's intentions." "Is that it's smart to own property." "And if it's smart to own property, it's even smarter to lend money to the people who own property." "That's because the phrase, "Safe as houses"" "has a rather special meaning in the world of finance." "What it means is there's nothing safer than to lend money to people who own real estate." "Why?" "Well, because if they default on the loan, you can always repossess the property." "Even if they run away, the house can't." "What's more, the English-speaking world's obsession with property has been the foundation for a unique economic and political experiment - the property-owning democracy." "Some say it's a model the whole world should adopt." "The growth of property ownership gave rise to a new era in the history of finance." "On the back of property, literally trillions of dollars have been borrowed, some of it by so-called sub-prime borrowers - people who'd previously been content to rent rather than own their homes." "So it's come as rather a shock to millions of people that real estate is fundamentally no different from any other financial asset." "Its price can go down as well as up." "It turns out that no amount of financial alchemy can turn little suburban boxes into treasure chests with roofs." "Which raises the question, is property really as safe as houses?" "Or could it be that we've let our love affair with real estate get completely out of proportion?" "Property ownership was once the preserve of an aristocratic elite." "Estates were passed down from father to son, along with titles and political privileges." "Everyone else was a mere tenant, paying rent to their landlord." "Even the right to vote in elections was originally a function of property ownership." "In one respect, not much has changed in Britain since those days." "Of 60 million acres of British land, around 40 million are owned by just 189,000 families." "The difference is that they no longer monopolise the political system." "Indeed, thanks to reform of the House of Lords, the hereditary peerage is being phased out of Parliament." "Now, you can explain the decline of the aristocracy in many ways." "But, as far as I'm concerned, the main driver was finance." "Until the 1830s, fortune smiled on the British land-owning elite - the 30 or so families with gross annual income from their lands above £60,000 a year - roughly £ 150 million pounds today." "With such vast property assets backing them and income from agriculture booming, it was hard to see how the aristocracy could fail to flourish." "Yet, by ignoring a fundamental truth about property, they ensured their own decline." "Like many of us today, the great magnates saw the value of their property as a cash cow and used it to borrow to the hilt... often more than the property was worth." "What they'd failed to understand is that property is only a security to the person who lends you money." "As a borrower, you still have to earn the money to pay back the loan." "And for the great landowners of Victorian Britain, that suddenly became a very difficult thing to do." "Nowhere was the pain more acute than here in the heart of rural Buckinghamshire." "There's something undeniably magnificent about this huge, neoclassical palace " "Stowe House - arguably the greatest private residence built in England in the 18th century." "Just look at these extraordinary scagliola pillars or the stunning elliptical plaster ceiling." "And yet there seems to be something missing." "Or rather many things." "Because once in each of these alcoves there was a Roman statue." "The exquisite Georgian fireplaces have been ripped out and replaced by bog-standard ones like this." "Why?" "How did this most stately of stately homes become a mere shell of its former self?" "The answer is that this house belonged to the principal victim of the first modern property crash " "Richard Plantagenet Temple-Nugent-Brydges-Chandos-Grenville, 2nd Duke of Buckingham." "Stowe was only part of the Duke's vast empire of real estate." "In all, he owned around 67,000 acres in England, Ireland and Jamaica." "These immense properties seemed more than adequate to back his extravagant lifestyle." "And he spent money as if it might go out of fashion on mistresses, on illegitimate children, on anything that he felt was compatible with his standing as a Duke of the Realm." "By 1845, the jig was up." "Grain prices had begun their long slide downwards, and so had the income from agricultural land." "Rural property prices plummeted." "Suddenly, the aristocracy found that their borrowings had outrun the value of their estates." "The Duke was spending far more than his income and most of that was being absorbed by interest payments." "But there was to be one final bout of conspicuous consumption." "In preparation for a visit by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, the Duke decided to splash out and refurbish Stowe House from top to bottom." "15 saloons were stuffed full of the most expensive furniture that money could buy." "The floorboards were groaning under the weight of Genoa velvet, embroidered satin and gold brocade." "When the Queen saw the results, she commented rather waspishly," ""I am sure I have no such splendid apartments in either of my palaces."" "Sadly, the cost of this mega-makeover proved to be the final straw for the ducal finances." "In August 1848, to the Duke's horror, his son had the entire contents of Stowe House auctioned off." "Now, his ancestral stately home was thrown open for throngs of bargain-hunters to bid for the silver, the wine, the china." "Today, Stowe is a private boarding school." "It's a poignant symbol of the transience of landed wealth." "In the modern world, it turned out, a regular job and a steady income mattered more than an inherited title - no matter how many acres you owned." "Divorced by his long-suffering and much-betrayed Scottish wife, whose entire wardrobe had been seized by Sheriffs Officers in London, the Duke was finally forced to relinquish Stowe and move into rented accommodation." "He eked out his days at his club, the Carlton, writing a succession of highly unreliable memoirs and incorrigibly chasing actresses and other men's wives." "The fall of the Duke of Buckingham was a kind of harbinger for a new democratic age in which every adult would be given the vote whether they owned a stately home or paid rent for a humble flat." "As aristocratic fortunes from agriculture declined, so the franchise was widened." "Yet the advent of universal suffrage didn't mean that property ownership had become universal." "On the contrary, as recently as 1938, less than a third of the UK housing stock was in the hands of owner-occupiers." "It was on the other side of the Atlantic that the first true property-owning democracy would emerge." "And it would emerge from the biggest financial crisis ever seen." "An Englishman's home is his castle and Americans know that there's no place like home too, even if all the homes are rather similar." "Today we take the universal right to own our own home for granted." "But before the 1930s, no more than two-fifths of American households were owner-occupiers." "If the old class system, based on elite property-ownership was distinctively British, the revolution that created a new property-owning democracy was born out of a great American financial crisis." "When the Depression struck in 1929, the US economy nose-dived." "The minority of people who did own their own homes couldn't afford the mortgage payments." "Tenants too struggled to pay the rent when all they had coming in was the dole." "Nowhere were the effects of the Depression more painful than in Detroit." "Soon the automobile industry here employed only half the number of workers it had in 1929, and at half the wages." "By 1932, the dispossessed of Detroit had had enough." "On March 7th, 5,000 workers laid off by the Ford Motor Company marched to the factory to demand unemployment relief." "What followed would force Americans to completely rethink their attitude to property ownership." "As the unarmed crowd reached Gate 4 of the company's River Rouge plant in Dearborn, scuffles broke out." "Suddenly, the factory gates opened and a phalanx of police and security men rushed out and fired into the crowd." "Five workers were killed." "Days later, 60,000 people sang The Internationale at their funeral." "The Communist Party newspaper accused Edsel Ford, son of the firm's founder, Henry, of allowing a massacre." "Could anything be done to defuse what was beginning to seem like a revolutionary situation, pitting the seriously propertied Fords against their property-less ex-employees?" "In a remarkable gesture of conciliation," "Edsel Ford turned to a Mexican artist named Diego Rivera." "He invited him to paint a mural that would show Detroit's economy as a site of cooperation, not class conflict." "Diego Rivera was a lifelong Communist." "His ideal was of a society in which there would be no private property, in which the means of production would be commonly owned." "In his eyes, Ford's River Rouge plant was the very opposite, a capitalist society in which the workers worked and the property owners, who reaped the rewards of their efforts, merely watched." "When the murals were unveiled in 1933, the city's dignitaries were appalled." "They saw them as Communist propaganda, "a travesty on the spirit of Detroit"." "The power of art is a wonderful thing." "But it was clearly going to take something rather more powerful than art to heal a society so deeply split by the Depression." "Other countries turned to the extremes of totalitarianism." "But in the United States the answer was the New Deal." "And that included a New Deal on housing." "In radically increasing the number of Americans who could hope to own their own homes, the Roosevelt administration pioneered the idea of a property-owning democracy." "It proved to be the perfect antidote to Red revolution." "In effect, the government would rig the housing market to incentivise Americans to become property owners." "Customers at local mortgage lenders, known as savings and loans, the equivalent of British building societies, would have their deposits guaranteed by the Government even if a bank went bust." "Crucially, a new Federal Housing Administration was set up to offer larger, longer and lower-interest loans." "After the 1930s, most mortgages in the United States were fixed for 20 or 30 years." "A new Federal National Mortgage Association, nicknamed Fannie Mae, was set up to create a nationwide market for home loans." "This couple is going through a model house now." "The husband, apparently, isn't very keen about it all, but his wife is entranced by such convenient features as the sturdy built-in ironing board." "By reducing the monthly cost of a mortgage, these reforms made home-ownership possible for many more Americans than ever before." "They both would like to have this place for their very own." "Too bad they can't afford it." "Ah!" "But maybe they can." "For according to this sign, they can buy this house with monthly payments that are less than they now spend for rent!" "It's not too much to say that the modern United States, with its seductively samey suburbs, was born out of these New Deal reforms." "From the 1930s then, the US Government effectively underwrote the mortgage market, bringing borrowers and lenders together." "And that was the reason for the big explosion in property ownership and mortgage debt in the decades after World War II." "There was just one catch - not everyone in American society had an invitation to the property-owning party." "When these houses were built in Detroit back in 1941, whether you got the money or not for a mortgage depended on which side of this divide you lived." "It was a real estate developer who built this six-foot high wall right through the middle of Detroit's 8 Mile district." "He had to build it in order to qualify for loans from the Federal Housing Administration." "The loans were to be given for construction on that side of the wall, which was a predominantly white neighbourhood." "On this side, on the black side, there was to be no federal credit, because African Americans were regarded as fundamentally uncreditworthy." "It was part of a system that divided the whole city - in theory by credit-rating, in practice by colour." "Segregation, in other words, wasn't accidental, but a direct consequence of federal policy." "This map by the Federal Home Loan Board shows the predominantly black areas of Detroit, the lower east side and so-called colonies like the one we're in now in Birwood-Griggs, marked with a letter D and coloured red." "You can see why the practice of giving whole neighbourhoods a negative credit rating came to be known as "red-lining"." "The result was that when people from round here needed mortgages, they had to pay significantly higher interest rates than the folks in the white part of town." "Half a century later, the two categories of borrowers would come to be known euphemistically as prime and sub-prime." "But in the 1960s, this divide was the hidden financial dimension of the Civil Rights struggle." "Blacks were to be excluded from the new property-owning society." "There would be a heavy price to pay for this exclusion." "On July 23rd 1967, property in Detroit literally went up in flames." "Four days of rioting, looting and arson rocked the city of Detroit in the worst outbreak of urban racial violence this year." "Anger at economic discrimination spilled over into five days of rioting that left 43 people dead." "Significantly, most of the violence was directed not against people, but against property." "Nearly 3,000 buildings were looted or burned." "The real lesson for policy makers was that excluding ethnic minorities from the property-owning democracy was a fast track to trouble." "To make people feel like stakeholders in the social status quo, you had to make them property owners." "Indeed, widening home ownership might even turn the malcontents into conservatives." "This was a lesson that Margaret Thatcher was quick to learn." "Here in Britain, the idea of the property-owning democracy became a keystone of 1980s Conservatism." "By selling off council housing at bargain-basement prices," "Thatcher ensured that more and more British couples had a home of their own." "That also meant that more people than ever had mortgages." "Up until the 1980s, government incentives to borrow money and buy a house made pretty good sense for the average British family." "Interest rates were relatively low in the '60s and '70s, and the inflation rate tended to creep up, so that the real value of mortgage debt tended to fall." "But there was a sting in the tail." "The very same governments that professed their faith in the property-owning democracy were also committed to fighting inflation, and that meant raising interest rates." "The British and American policy of encouraging people to take out mortgages and then cranking up interest rates led in the late '80s to one of the most spectacular booms and busts in the property market's history." "It was to the '80s what the sub-prime meltdown has been in our own time - the first, but not the last time that America's mortgage market has gone stark raving mad." "To many of us, it's come as a shock that a crash in the American property market could trigger a major financial crisis." "In fact, as so often in the ascent of money, it's happened before." "In March 1984, American government regulators received a copy of a video showing mile after mile of half-built houses and condominiums along interstate 30, just outside Dallas in Texas." "You can still see the empty slabs today." "The investigation triggered by these un-built homes would expose one of the biggest financial scandals of all time - a scam that would make a mockery of the idea of property as a safe form of investment." "This isn't a story about real estate - more like surreal estate." "Savings and loan associations - America's building societies - were not only central to Roosevelt's New Deal on housing." "By the 1970s, they were the foundation of America's property-owning democracy." "Then, in the 1970s, the savings and loan industry was hit first by double-digit inflation and then by higher interest rates." "It was a lethal double punch for institutions that were forbidden by law to raise the rates they paid to savers, and which were receiving interest payments from local mortgage borrowers that had been fixed decades before." "The response in Washington was to remove nearly all these restrictions." "When deregulation was enacted in 1982," "President Reagan was cock-a-hoop." "All in all, I think we hit the jackpot." "Well, some people certainly did." "Liberated from the old constraints, the people running savings and loans suddenly saw a chance to make some serious money from the once boring business of mortgage lending." "By raising savings rates, they could attract much more money from depositors." "Then they could use these deposits as the basis for as many loans as they liked." "Crucially, though, one thing didn't change." "Savers' deposits were still insured by the government." "It was an invitation to a gigantic free lunch for financial cowboys." "This is the Wise Circle Grill just outside Dallas, filled every lunchtime with local citizens of unblemished integrity." "Twenty years ago, the clientele was rather different." "The city of Dallas had more than its fair share of fraudulent savings and loans, and this was where the Dallas property cowboys came to hang out." "The Wise Circle Grill was the place to have brunch when they weren't whooping it up on their Southfork-style ranches." "It was all very, very 1980s." "To one group of Dallas developers, the Empire Savings and Loan Association offered the perfect opportunity to make money out of thin air... or rather, out of flat, Texan land." "The surreal saga of Empire Savings and Loans began when chairman Spencer Blain teamed up with a flamboyant high-school dropout turned property developer named Danny Faulkner, whose speciality was extravagant generosity... with other people's money." "The money in question came in the form of deposit accounts on which Empire paid alluringly high interest rates." "This is Faulkner Point, one of the very first developments that Danny Faulkner ever built, and it spawned a veritable empire of Faulkner Crest, Faulkner Creek, Faulkner Crescent," "Faulkner Fountains, Faulkner Oaks." "Danny Faulkner's favourite trick was "the flip"." "He'd buy some parcel of land for peanuts, and then sell it on to naive investors who got the money lent to them by - you've guessed it - Empire Savings and Loans." "Danny Faulkner may have claimed that he was illiterate, but he certainly wasn't innumerate." "Many investors never even got a chance to view their properties close up." "Faulkner would simply fly them over in his helicopter without landing." "By 1984, property development in Texas was out of control, paid for by government-guaranteed deposits that were effectively going straight into the pockets of the developers." "On paper at least, the assets of Empire had grown from $12 million to $257 million in just over two years." "The trouble was that the demand for condos by Interstate 30 could never possibly have kept up with the vast supply that was being generated by Faulkner, Blain and their cronies." "When the regulators finally blew the whistle in 1984, that reality could no longer be escaped, and hundreds of the buildings that they erected ended up being bulldozed or burnt to the ground." "Today, 24 years on, it's still a Texan wasteland." "In 1991, Faulkner and Blain were both convicted and jailed for fraud." "One investigator called Empire "one of the most reckless" ""and fraudulent land investment schemes in American history."" "In all, nearly 500 savings and loans collapsed." "According to one official estimate, nearly half had seen "criminal conduct by insiders"." "The full cost of the crisis was $153 billion, making it one of the most expensive financial crises in American history." "And the federal government which had deregulated the savings and loans in the first place had to pick up the bill, which is another way of saying that taxpayers forked out." "It was the first clear sign that there might be a downside to the idea of the property-owning democracy." "Yet the savings and loans crisis was a mere tremor compared with the property earthquake that would strike the US market 20 years later." "Savings and loans was an all-American crisis." "But the sub-prime quake would shake the entire world of finance to its very foundations." "When this wall was built to divide white homeowners from black renters in the 1940s, black families found it virtually impossible to get mortgages." "Sixty years later, that had all changed." ""We want everybody in America to own their own home,"" "President George WBush declared in October 2002, challenging lenders to create 5.5 million new minority homeowners by the end of the decade." "Positively encouraged by the federal government to relax lending standards, mortgage companies swarmed into areas like this one, offering all kinds of alluring deals." "Because so many of the new borrowers had patchy credit histories, these loans came to be known as "sub-prime"." "That made you a perfect candidate for a NlNJ A loan." "The problem was that behind low introductory payments, these new mortgage loans were very different from the old," "30-year fixed-rate repayment loans of the past." "Since the 1980s, the housing game has radically changed throughout the English-speaking world." "Mortgages are for shorter and shorter durations and more and more borrowers are opting for interest-only mortgages." "That makes households far more sensitive than they were to interest-rate hikes." "So how come the lenders didn't worry that these sub-prime borrowers were almost certain to default if interest rates rose?" "The answer to that question and the key to the sub-prime crisis was another "S" word..." "Instead of putting their own money at risk, sub-prime lenders immediately sold the loans on to banks here, in and around Wall Street." "And the banks then securitized the loans, which means they bundled them together and then sliced and diced them so that at least the top tier could be classified as triple-A-rated, "investment grade" securities." "And the banks then sold these securities to investors 1,000 miles away from Detroit who were happy to pay for just a few extra hundredths of a percentage point in interest." "The key to securitization was the distance between the mortgage borrowers in, say, Detroit, and the people who ended up receiving their interest payments." "By the time small towns in Norway bought these securities, they had no idea what was really behind their investment." "Financial alchemy?" "Well, it was a business model that worked beautifully as long as interest rates stayed low, people kept their jobs, and real-estate prices continued to rise." "Unfortunately, none of these things happened in Detroit." "In 2006 alone, sub-prime lenders injected more than a billion dollars into those areas of the city where home values were already falling and unemployment and mortgage rates were already rising." "Where Detroit led, other cities soon followed." "It's Thursday at noon and I'm witnessing a twice-daily ritual here on the steps of the Memphis Courthouse." "About 30 homes are about to be auctioned off here, and the reason is that the mortgage lenders have foreclosed on the homeowners for failing to keep up with their interest payments." "2926 South Radford Avenue..." "Memphis is really becoming Foreclosure City these days." "In the past five years, something like one in four households has received a notice threatening them with foreclosure." "Since the sub-prime mortgage market began to turn sour in the early summer of 2007, shockwaves have been spreading through all the world's financial markets, wiping out hedge funds, obliterating venerable investment banks and costing the survivors hundreds of billions of dollars." "Remember that pillar of the 1930s New Deal mortgage market," "Fannie Mae?" "With its younger brother, Freddie Mac, it grew to own or guarantee around half of all American home loans." "In September 2008, Fannie and Freddie were effectively nationalised to avoid a complete collapse of the mortgage market." "Established Wall Street names like Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch have vanished." "Unlike savings and loans, this crisis extends right around the world." "The four Norwegian municipalities of Rana, Hemnes, Hattfjelldal and Narvik, which had invested their citizens' taxes in sub-prime backed securities, are now sitting on an investment worth roughly 15% of what they paid for it " "a loss of $100 million." "In the English-speaking world, we tend to think of property as a one-way bet." "The simplest way of getting rich is to play the property market." "In fact, you'd be a mug to invest your money in anything else." "But the remarkable thing about this supposed "truth"" "is how often reality gives it the lie." "For like stock markets, property can soar in value only to crash in the most spectacular way." "In Britain, between 1989 and 1995, the average house price fell by 18%." "But that was nothing compared with what happened here in Japan." "The view's good." "Very Austin Powers decor." "I'm loving that." "Oh, that's the boiler." "OK, well, let's cut to the chase." "How much is this place going to cost if I put the money down now?" "So that would be close to $2 million." "OK, that's like a million... a million pounds buys me this bijou apartment in Tokyo." "But this is a smart neighbourhood, right?" "That may sound like a lot, but in recent Japanese history, it's a real bargain." "Between 1985 and 1990, property prices in Japan rose by a factor of roughly three." "Banks fell over themselves to ride this wave." "But it wasn't a wave." "It was a bubble." "And in 1990 it burst." "Prices here in Tokyo fell... by 75%, wiping out all the previous gains." "This costs £1 million now." "How much did it cost back in 1990, at the peak of the property bubble?" " So roughly three times the value." " Three times?" "So close to... possibly $6 million." "£3 million." "Wow!" "We think we've had a property crash in the West, but this is a real property crash." "So no, property isn't a uniquely safe investment." "House prices can go down as well as up." "And as assets go, houses are pretty illiquid, which means you can't unload them in a hurry if you get into a financial jam." "And that, pretty much, is the downside of the idea of a property-owning democracy." "The question now is whether we English-speakers have any business trying to export our model to the rest of the world." "The real flaw in the property-owning democracy, as recent events have proved, is that the housing market, like any asset market, is prone to booms and busts." "But maybe there's another way of looking at property - as a means of unlocking new wealth by providing collateral for aspiring entrepreneurs." "Could property ownership be the answer to the problems of the world's poorest countries?" "You've heard of sub-prime borrowers." "Well, welcome to a sub-prime country..." "Argentina, where economic underachievement has been a way of life for a century." "These slums on the outskirts of Buenos Aires seem a million miles from the elegant boulevards of the Argentine capital's centre." "But are people here really as poor as they look?" "One man didn't believe so." "Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto saw the shabby residences like these in developing countries all over the world as representing literally trillions of dollars of unrealised wealth." "The problem is that the people who live here, and in countless shanty towns around the world, don't have secure legal title to their homes." "That's bad, because without a legal title to property, you can't use it as collateral to borrow money." "And if you can't borrow money, then you can't possibly raise the capital you need to start a business." "Part of the trouble is that in poor countries, it's a bureaucratic nightmare to establish secure legal title to property." "It can take months - sometimes years - longer than in the English-speaking world." "For Hernando de Soto, breathing financial life into all this dead capital is the key to providing the poor with a more prosperous future." "The shanty town of Quilmes, on the southern outskirts of Buenos Aires, provides a natural experiment to test De Soto's theory." "On one side of the town, there are some of the most squalid slums I've ever seen." "But just a few miles away, it's a very different story." "It was in the early 1980s that a group of squatters here lobbied the government for secure legal title to their homes." "They were successful, and those willing to pay a nominal rent were granted leases which, after 20 years, converted into full ownership." "You can tell they're owner-occupied by the fact that there's a fence, the walls are painted, there's even a rather excitable guard dog." "After all, owners tend to look after properties better than tenants." "And some of the owners here are even realising the value of their properties by putting them up for sale." "Yet there seems to be a flaw in the theory, for owning their own homes hasn't made it significantly easier for people here to borrow money." "Just 4% of them have managed to secure a mortgage." "The reality is that owning property doesn't give you security - it just gives your creditors security." "Real security comes from having an income, as the Duke of Buckingham discovered in the 1840s, as Detroit homeowners are discovering today, and as I suspect the people of Quilmes would probably agree." "For that reason, it probably isn't necessary for every entrepreneur in the developing world to take out a mortgage on his home or, for that matter, on her home." "In fact, property ownership may not be the key to wealth-generation at all." "This is Betty Flores." "She runs a small coffee shop in El Alto, a poor suburb of the Bolivian capital, La Paz." "Betty is one of an increasingly large number of women around the world who have borrowed money with no security at all." "She's the personification of an extraordinary new financial movement known as microfinance." "Did you borrow the money to set up this coffee stand?" "Yes, to make the... the stand." "She borrowed money to make the stand." "Has she paid it all back?" " She's paid it off a long time ago." " Oh, I see." "Stories like Betty's point to one of the great revelations of the microfinance movement in a country like Bolivia." "It turns out that women are actually a better credit risk than men, with or without a home as security for the loan." "It all rather flies in the face of the conventional image of the spendthrift female." "These women are hardly what you would call good financial risks." "They probably have just a few dollars between them." "Yet with no security, they are being lent money." "Here in Bolivia, lenders have come to realise that creditworthiness may in fact be a female trait." "Carmen Velasco set up Pro Mujer to provide finance to poor but enterprising women." "Because the loans are unsecured by property, the challenge is to get the women to pay them back... but they do." "From day one, they have to know that they have to repay on time, that they have interest rates and they have to save." "So it's a process of learning, and at the beginning it's very difficult, because they are not used to handling a loan." "But little by little, they get used to it, and they feel so proud when they repay." "I must say, I'm hugely impressed by what I'm seeing here at Pro Mujer." "You can sense in this hive of activity the transformation that microfinance has brought into these women's lives." "And behind me you can see the bottom line... women lining up to repay their loans punctually." "Maybe it's time to change that old catch phrase from "as safe as houses"" "to "as safe as housewives"." "Of course, it would be a mistake to assume that microfinance is some kind of economic magic bullet." "Just giving out loans won't necessarily consign poverty to the museums." "But then, betting everything on the house won't do that, either." "Financial illiteracy may be rampant, but somehow we were all experts on one branch of economics - the property market." "We all knew that property was a one-way bet." "Except that it wasn't." "All over the world, it seems, property prices are falling... from Memphis to Santiago, from London to La Paz." "Encouraging home ownership may well create a political constituency for capitalism." "But it also distorts the capital market by persuading people to bet the house on... well, the house." "People need to borrow money, of course, to start up businesses or to buy expensive assets." "But it seems dangerous to lure them into staking everything on the far from risk-free property market." "From Buckinghamshire to Bolivia to bonny Scotland, the key is to strike the right balance between debt and income." "And next week I'll be suggesting that the entire world economy is in the process of getting that balance perilously wrong." "In our time, we've witnessed the zenith of global finance." "In 2006, the world's total economic output was worth around $47 trillion - that's 47 followed by 12 zeroes." "The total value of stock and bond markets was roughly $119 trillion - more than twice the size." "And the amount outstanding of the strange new financial life form known as derivatives was $473 trillion - ten times larger." "By the summer of 2007, it seemed as if the Earth had turned into Planet Finance." "As never before, the world was interconnected, but not just by cables, container ships and jet planes." "By 24/7 dealing rooms and international investment banks." "In this series, we've seen how the markets for credit, bonds, stocks, insurance and real estate all evolved in Europe and North America." "Well, now it's time to tell the story of how those financial innovations conquered the world." "This is the story of financial globalisation." "Globalisation is something we take for granted today." "And yet for all the advantages of an interconnected world, perfectly exemplified by Hong Kong's astonishing humming container port, there's a downside to globalisation, and that is its vulnerability - its vulnerability to financial shocks, because finance isn't an exact science," "and its vulnerability to political forces beyond the control of the bankers." "The ascent of money has seldom been smooth." "Time and again, it's been punctuated by big and painful crises." "Just ten years ago, it seemed that these crises were more likely to blow up in emerging markets, like Asia." "Yet today, it's the West that's caught up in a full-blown credit crunch, while Asia seems scarcely to have noticed." "Indeed, a new phenomenon has come to define the world economy." "American borrowers have come to rely on Chinese savers - a symbiotic relationship between China and America that I call "Chimerica"." "But can we be sure that Chimerica will save this era of financial globalisation?" "The chilling reality is that a hundred years ago, another age of financial globalisation ended not with a whimper, but with a bang." "And there's no reason why that shouldn't happen again in our time." "It used to be said that "emerging markets"" "were places where they have emergencies." "Investing in faraway places can make you rich, but when things go wrong, it's often been a fast track to financial ruin." "That's why many of today's apparently unstoppable emerging markets are really re-emerging markets." "These days, of course, the ultimate re-emerging market is China." "To talk to some people, there's simply no limit to the amount of money to be made here." "And it's certainly true that over the past 20 years, the mainland has followed the example set here in Hong Kong, and boomed." "And yet this isn't the first time that foreign investors have piled into China, aiming to make megabucks from the world's most populous nation." "And the last time, those foreign investors lost almost as many shirts as the local tailors here can stitch together in a week." "The key problem with overseas investment, then as now, is that it's hard for an investor in London or New York to see what a foreign government or company is up to when they're an ocean or more apart." "If the foreign borrower decides to default on its debts, what's an investor to do?" "The answer before 1914 was brutally simple but effective." "Get your government to send in the navy." "By guaranteeing European political control, gunboat diplomacy provided reassurance for British investors even at the remotest extremities of the world economy." "The Royal Navy provided the firepower that underwrote the first age of globalisation... and its pioneers, like William Jardine..." "and James Matheson." "Jardine and Matheson were buccaneering Scots who'd set up a trading company in the southern Chinese port of Canton in 1832." "Not to put too fine a point on it, their most profitable line of business was drug dealing." "They shipped opium produced under British Government control in India to China's population of addicts - a trade that China's Emperor had banned." "On March 10th, 1839, an imperial official named Lin Zexu arrived in Canton under orders from the Emperor to stamp out the trade." "He besieged the British opium warehouses, blocking any further imports." "20,000 chests of opium valued at £2 million were confiscated and literally thrown in the sea." "Faced with catastrophic losses, Jardine hurried to London to lobby the British Government to send a gunboat." "Well, Jardine got his wish granted." "On August 23rd, 1840, British gunships landed here on Hong Kong Island." "The Qing Empire was about to feel the full force of history's most successful narco-state." "As Jardine had predicted, the Royal Navy made short work of the Chinese defences." "With south-western China under British control, the opium trade was given free rein." "Drug addiction exploded." "Large tracts of the country slid into rebellion and anarchy." "But for Jardine Matheson, with their head office now established in Hong Kong, the glory days of Victorian globalisation had arrived." "By1900, the firm had diversified into more respectable lines of business." "It had its own breweries, its own cotton mills, its own insurance company, and its own railways, like the one they built from Kowloon to Canton." "Back in 1913, an investor in London had an extraordinary range of foreign opportunities, and nothing illustrates that better than the ledgers of N M Rothschild  Sons." "Just a single page from 1913 lists no fewer than 20 different foreign securities, including bonds issues by Chile, Egypt, Germany, Hungary, Italy, not forgetting 11 different railway companies, including four from Argentina, two from Canada and, down here," "the good old Kowloon to Canton railway line." "For the first time in history, the world economy was truly united by a combination of low trade and high finance." "Yet this first era of financial globalisation was to be brought to a violent halt by the world's first truly global conflict." "On June 28th, 1914, the heir to the Austrian throne, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated in the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo." "Initially, financial markets shrugged off the news as just another bout of Balkan bloodshed." "In reality, the assassination had sparked off a chain reaction in the world's financial markets." "As investors belatedly grasped the likelihood of a full-scale European war, liquidity - the ability to borrow money or sell assets - was sucked out of the world economy as if the bottom had dropped out of a bath." "The resulting disruption to international finance shattered globalisation." "It's absolutely fascinating to follow the outbreak of the First World War through the financial pages of the London Times." "It wasn't until July 22nd, 1914, that anybody appreciated that the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, three weeks before, might have some financial repercussions." "Just ten days later, on August 1st, 1914, the Times had to report the closure of the Stock Exchange, and closed it remained until January 4th, 1915." "Why were investors so seemingly oblivious to Armageddon just days before the outbreak of world war?" "Well, the answer is that a combination of financial innovation and global integration had made the world seem reassuringly safe." "The lights in financial markets were flashing green, not red, until the very eve of destruction." "There may be a lesson here for our time, too." "Financial globalisation mark one took a generation to engineer." "But it was blown apart in a matter of days." "And it would take more than a generation to repair the damage done by the guns of August 1914." "The First World War had put an end to the first age of globalisation." "Until the late 1960s, international finance slumbered." "Some even considered it dead." "In 1944, the soon-to-be-victorious Allies gathered to devise a new financial architecture for the world." "Trade would be free, but capital movements would be subject to tight regulation." "When money did flow across national borders, it would go from government to government." "This new financial order was to have two guardian sisters, established here in Washington DC - the international Monetary Fund and the international Bank for Reconstruction and Development, later known as the World Bank." "By the 1970s, however, vast sums of money were being accumulated by the oil exporters of the Middle East." "With Western bankers desperate to reinvest the money as loans, the guardian sisters relaxed their grip." "Financial globalisation was reborn." "The region where the bankers chose to lend the petrodollars seemed to promise the best returns." "Not for the first time in financial history, it also posed the biggest risks." "In seven years, Latin America quadrupled its borrowings from foreigners to more than $315 billion." "Then, in 1982," "Mexico declared that it would no longer be able to service its debt." "Soon, the entire continent teetered on the verge of bankruptcy." "But the days had gone when investors could confidently expect their governments to send a gunboat to get their money back when foreign borrowers misbehaved." "Now responsibility for such debt crises fell on the lMF and the World Bank." "They didn't have gunboats." "But in return for new loans, they could insist that Latin American governments adopt painful "structural adjustment programmes" - impose fiscal discipline." "To American economists, these programmes all made perfect sense." "But not everyone agreed." "To the increasingly vocal critics of global finance, the two guardian sisters of the post-war order were being transformed into economic hit men." "They were holding a financial gun to the heads of Third World governments... propping up dictators and furthering the interests of Yankee imperialism." "And woe betide those who resisted the hit men." "Conspiracy theories flourished in the anti-globalisation movement." "According to one popular theory, two Latin American leaders " "Jaime Roldos of Ecuador and Omar Torrijos of Panama - were actually assassinated for resisting the demands of American imperialism." "And yet there's something about this story of a World Bank-IMF plot against Third World leaders that doesn't quite add up." "After all, it's not as if the United States had lent that much money to Ecuador and Panama." "In the 1970s, they accounted for just 0.4% of total US grants and loans." "Nor were they particularly big customers for the United States." "Again, less than 0.4% of total US exports." "Now, those just don't strike me as figures worth killing for." "To say the least, the idea of lMF-sponsored assassinations is a stretch." "Nevertheless, this new phase in the story of globalisation did see the emergence of a new and more plausible kind of economic hit man, armed with a financially lethal weapon - the hedge fund." "The men who ran the hedge funds were far more intimidating precisely because they didn't even need to threaten violence to get their way." "And their distinctive contribution to globalisation was to speed it up." "Whereas the World Bank lends money to countries for periods of years, hedge funds are more likely to put their money in for just weeks, or even days." "The grandmaster of the new economic hit men was George Soros." "A Hungarian Jew by birth, but educated in London and based in New York," "Soros brought to global finance a brand-new theory of economic behaviour that underlined the fallibility of human nature and the instability of financial markets." "Your actions will have unintended consequences, so the outcome will not correspond to your expectations." "And that is the way human affairs generally work." "According to Soros's Theory of Reflexivity, financial markets can't possibly be perfectly efficient, much less rational, for the simple reason that prices are just the reflection of the ignorance and the biases, mostly completely irrational, of millions of investors." "In Soros's eyes, markets are bound to go through cycles of boom and bust, as surely as the human temperament is prone to bouts of euphoria and despondency." "Soros's Quantum Fund had made millions from short selling, a type of dealing which borrows stocks or currencies and sells them for future delivery on the calculation that they'll go down in value." "His biggest coups came from being right about losers, not winners." "And the greatest of these was among the most momentous speculative hits in all financial history." "On September 16th, 1992, with the British pound in big trouble," "I watched as Soros put out a contract on the Bank of England." "I became convinced that speculators like Soros were bound to win if it came to a straight showdown with the British Government." "It was a matter of simple arithmetic - a trillion dollars of currency traded every day on foreign exchange markets against the meagre hard currency reserves of the UK Treasury." "At that time, the British pound was tightly linked to the German mark through the ERM - the European Exchange Rate Mechanism." "As German interest rates rose in the wake of that country's hugely expensive reunification," "Britain's rates had to rise too, hurting home-owners and businesses." "Soros calculated that the British Chancellor, Norman Lamont, would be forced to withdraw from the ERM and devalue the pound." "It was the biggest bet of Soros's life." "So sure was he that the pound would drop that he bet $10 billion - more than the entire capital of his fund." "The risk-reward was disproportionate." "And therefore it seemed like a good speculation, or investment, if you like, shorting the pound." "I was equally convinced that sterling would have to be be devalued, though all I had to bet was my credibility." "That evening, I headed to the opera to see Verdi's The Force Of Destiny." "It proved exceedingly appropriate." "At the interval, they announced that Chancellor Norman Lamont had appeared in there, in the Treasury courtyard, to say that Britain was withdrawing from the ERM." "How we all cheered." "Today has been an extremely difficult and turbulent day." "Massive speculative flows have continued to disrupt the functioning of the Exchange Rate Mechanism." "Soros made a billion dollars that day, and that was only 40% of his fund's annual profits." "Do you feel..." "or did you feel a sense of triumph when your prophecy came true and the bet paid off hugely?" "Of course." "It was like when you're betting and you win, naturally, you have that satisfaction and also the profit." "Soros owed his success to a kind of gut instinct about the way the "electronic herd" would move." "But even his instincts are sometimes wrong." "So what if instinct could somehow be replaced by mathematics?" "What if you could write an algebraic formula that guaranteed double-digit returns?" "Well, on the other side of the financial galaxy, such a formula had just been devised." "As the new era of globalisation increased trade and growth, it also increased the world economy's vulnerability to financial shocks that could spread rapidly to the four corners of the Earth." "But what if we inhabited another completely different kind of planet?" "A planet without all the complicating frictions caused by subjective, sometimes irrational human beings." "One where the inhabitants instantly absorbed all new information and used it to maximise profits, where amid the turbulence of everyday life all was calm and predictable." "In such a perfectly observed, efficiently interconnected world, an unpredicted catastrophic stock market crash would be about as common as an adult shorter than one-and-a-half feet in our own world." "It would happen only once in four million years of trading." "This was the planet imagined by some of the most brilliant financial economists of modern times." "And this is what their planet looked like." "In 1993, two mathematical geniuses came to Greenwich, Connecticut, with a big idea." "Stanford University's Myron Scholes had invented a revolutionary new theory of pricing things called "options"." "He and Harvard's Robert Merton were the original "quants" - a new breed of speculators using quantitative mathematics to make money." "From this nondescript office they plotted a global financial revolution." "Merton and Scholes's idea was based on the simple option contract." "Take the case of a stock that's worth $100 today." "Now, suppose I think that stock's going to be worth 200 in a year's time." "Wouldn't it be nice to have the option to buy it at today's price in a year's time?" "If I'm right, I make a tidy profit of $100." "But if I'm wrong, well, who cares?" "It was only an option." "The only cost to me is the price of the option itself." "The big question is, what should that price be?" "$5?" "$10?" "The answer was to be found in a magic formula." ""Quants" sometimes refer to this formula as a "black box"." "Well, let's look inside the box." "The challenge Merton and Scholes faced was how to price an option to buy a particular stock on a particular date in the future, taking into account the unpredictable movement of the price of the stock in the intervening period." "Work that option price out accurately, rather than just relying on guesswork, and you truly deserve the title "rocket scientist"." "With wonderful mathematical wizardry, the quants reduced the price of the option to this formula." "Feeling a little bit baffled?" "Finding the algebra rather tricky to follow?" "Well, that was just fine by the quants." "In order to make money from this kind of thing, they needed markets to be full of people who had no idea how to price options." "In its first two years, Merton and Scholes's company," "Long Term Capital Management, made megabucks by selling options that were never exercised because the buyers had guessed wrong and Long Term had got it right." "They also made a killing by buying up all kinds of different securities that the rocket scientists thought were mispriced." "Greenwich's luxury car dealers had never had it so good." "Admittedly, to generate these huge returns, Long Term had to borrow." "This additional "leverage", or gearing, allowed them to bet more than just their own money." "By August 1997, the fund's capital was just under $7 billion, but the assets funded by borrowing amounted to 126 billion." "You might have thought that a couple of academics like Merton and Scholes would have been scared silly by this enormous pile of debt." "But not a bit of it." "According to their magical mathematical formula, there wasn't the slightest risk in being so highly geared." "Apart from anything else, Long Term was pursuing multiple, supposedly uncorrelated trading strategies, around a hundred in all, with over 7,600 different positions." "One of these might go wrong, or possibly even two." "But surely all the bets they'd placed couldn't possibly go wrong simultaneously." "Long Term was trading in markets all over the world." "But the firm's biggest business was selling options on American and European stock markets... options that would be cashed in if there were big future stock price movements, up or down." "At the time, the high prices these options were fetching implied that the markets would become particularly volatile." "But Long Term thought this was wrong." "According to their calculations, market volatility would actually decline, and that meant the chances of investors exercising their options would be low too." "So Long Term piled the options high and sold them cheap." "Sounds risky?" "They estimated their risk of going bust at one in ten to the power of 24." "In other words, virtually zero." "It was as if they really were on another planet, far from the mundane ups and downs of terrestrial markets." "In October 1997, as if to prove that Long Term really was the ultimate Brains Trust," "Merton and Scholes were awarded the Nobel Prize in economics." "It seemed as if intellect had triumphed over intuition, as if rocket science had taken over from risk-taking." "Equipped with their magical black box, the partners in LTCM seemed poised to make money far beyond the wildest imaginings of even George Soros." "And then, in the summer of 1998, when every self-respecting hedge fund manager should have been playing with his yacht, something happened that threatened to blow the lid right off the Nobel Prize-winners' black box." "Reality started to misbehave." "In evolution, big extinctions tend to be caused by outside shocks, like an asteroid hitting the Earth." "On Monday August 17th, 1998, a giant asteroid smashed into Planet Finance." "And - surprise, surprise - it struck on the other side of the world in an especially flaky emerging market." "Weakened by political upheaval, declining oil revenues and a botched privatisation, the ailing Russian financial system collapsed." "A desperate Russian government was driven to default on its debts, fuelling the fires of volatility throughout the world's financial system." "Stock markets plunged." "Remember all those low-cost options Long Term had sold based on their prediction of low stock market volatility?" "The ones they thought no-one would ever exercise?" "Well, now they did." "The quants had predicted that Long Term was highly unlikely to lose more than $35 million in a single day." "On Friday August 21 st, it lost $550 million - 15% of its entire capital." "Now that, according to the Long Term risk models, was next to impossible." "The traders in Greenwich stared slack-jawed and glassy-eyed at their screens." "It couldn't be happening." "But it was." "By the end of the month, Long Term was down 45%." "The only chance of survival was to find a financial white knight to rescue them." "And the most powerful knight in town was none other than George Soros." "It was the ultimate humiliation - the quants from Planet Finance begging for a bail-out from the prophet of irrational, unquantifiable reflexivity." "That must have been a very tense meeting." "Do you remember the atmosphere in the room, or am I...?" "I remember he came for breakfast and it wasn't at all tense, because..." "Of course, he was tense but I wasn't because I wasn't putting in the money." "There was to be no white knight for Long Term." "I felt that it was too dangerous and that I didn't have enough capital and, in fact, it really required the coordinated actions of all the banks to bail out LTCM." "And that's precisely what happened." "Fearful that Long Term's failure could trigger a general financial meltdown, the New York Federal Reserve hastily brokered a multi-billion-dollar bail-out by 14 Wall Street banks." "What on earth had happened?" "Why was Soros so right and the giant brains at Long Term so wrong?" "For one thing, this wasn't a coolly logical Planet Finance." "It was still dear old Planet Earth, inhabited by emotional human beings with a stampede mentality." "There was, however, another reason why Long Term failed." "Their risk models were working with just five years' worth of data." "If they'd gone back even 11 years, they'd have captured the 1987 stock market crash." "And if they'd gone back 80 years, they'd have captured the last great Russian default after the 1917 revolution." "To put it bluntly, the Nobel Prize-winners had known plenty of mathematics, but not enough history." "They'd perfectly grasped the beautiful theory of Planet Finance, but not the messy reality of Planet Earth." "And that, quite simply, is why Long Term Capital Management turned out to be Short Term Capital Mismanagement." "The big question is whether such a crisis could replay itself today, ten years on, only this time involving so many hedge funds, and on such a large scale, that it simply couldn't be bailed out?" "Well, the answer to that question lies not on another planet, but on the other side of this one." "To some, financial history is just so much water under the bridge - ancient history, like the history of imperial China." "Some young traders don't even remember the 1997 / 98 Asian crisis." "In fact, if they came into the markets after 2000, they had seven bumper years." "Stock markets worldwide boomed." "So too did bond markets." "So did commodity markets." "So did derivatives markets." "In fact, every kind of asset market boomed." "And so too did the markets for those products that are in demand when the bonuses are big, like vintage Bordeaux and luxury yachts." "But these boom years were also mystery years." "For markets soared at a time of rising short-term interest rates, glaring trade imbalances and escalating political risk." "The key to this seeming paradox lay here in China." "Chongqing, on the banks of the mighty River Yangtze, is deep in the heart of the Middle Kingdom, over a thousand miles from the coastal enterprise zones most Westerners visit." "Yet this is the fastest-growing city on the planet." "I've travelled all over the world making this series, and I must say, I have never seen anything like this." "Welcome to Chongqing, the fastest growing city in the world." "It's construction heaven." "If you look over through the fog, you can just about make out one of the 30 bridges they're currently building, and down there, one of the ten light railways." "All around me, there used to be prime farmland, until six months ago, when they started constructing literally millions of square metres of new office space." "The aim is to turn Chongqing into the financial capital of western China." "Well, if they keep this up, it'll soon be the financial capital of the world." "Thanks to growth like this, there are now 345,000 dollar millionaires in China and over 100 billionaires." "Not only has China left the colonial era far behind, the fastest-growing economy in the world has also managed to avoid the kind of crisis that has periodically blown up in the other emerging markets." "One reason for China's crisis-free ascent has been the fact that most Chinese investment hasn't been financed by foreigners, but out of China's own savings." "There has been foreign investment, but most of it has been direct investment in the form of things like factories which you can't easily liquidate and send home in a crisis." "Indeed, so enormous have China's savings become in recent years that they have enabled globalisation to do the most almighty U-turn." "Previously, it was the rich English-speakers who lent money to the poor Asian periphery." "But now it's the Chinese who are lending money to rich Americans." "Welcome to the strange new hybrid country of China and America." "I call it "Chimerica"." "This extraordinary place is the South Western Stock Exchange." "It's where hundreds of Chongqing's residents come to have lunch, play ping pong and invest - or is it gamble?" " their savings on the stock market." "This is what defines the Chinese economy today." "Increasingly, it's what defines the world economy." "Chinese investors trying to work out what to do with their abundant savings." "After years of instability," "Chinese households save an unusually high proportion of their rapidly rising incomes, in marked contrast to Americans, who these days save none at all." "So plentiful are Chinese savings that for the first time in centuries, the direction of capital flow is not from West to East, but from East to West." "And it is a mighty flow." "In 2007, the United States needed to borrow around $800 billion from the rest of the world." "That's more than $4 billion every working day." "China, by contrast, ran a current account surplus equivalent to more than a quarter of the US deficit." "And a remarkably large proportion of that surplus has ended up being lent to the United States." "In effect, the People's Republic of China has become banker to the United States of America." "It may seem a little bizarre." "The average American has an income of around $44,000 a year, whereas the average Chinese, despite this country's 100-plus billionaires and all the ostentatious signs of new money here in central Chongqing, is on around $2,000." "So why would the latter want to lend money to the former who's roughly 22 times richer?" "Well, here's how it works." "Until recently, from China's point of view, the best way of employing its vast population was through exporting manufactures to the insatiably spendthrift US consumer." "To ensure that those exports were irresistibly cheap," "China had to stop its currency strengthening against the dollar by buying literally billions of dollars on world markets." "And, until recently, this seemed to be to America's benefit too." "Here in America, the best way to keep the good times rolling in recent years has been to import cheap Chinese goods by the container-load and sell them in out-of-town superstores, like this one." "For companies like Wal-Mart, outsourcing to China has been a way of reaping vast profits from cheap Chinese labour." "In 2006 alone," "Wal-Mart out-sourced no less than $9 billion-worth of goods from China." "But at the same time, by selling billions of dollars of bonds to the People's Bank of China, the United States has been able to enjoy much lower interest rates than would otherwise have been the case." "It's what they call at business school a win-win situation." "This is the wonderful dual country of "Chimerica", accounting for 33% of the world's economic output and more than half of all global growth in the past eight years." "Chimerica seemed like a marriage made in heaven." "The East Chimericans did the saving." "The West Chimericans did the spending." "But there was a catch." "The more China was willing to lend to the United States, the more Americans were willing to borrow." "Chimerica, in other words, was the underlying cause of the flood of new bank loans, bond issues and derivative contracts that swept Planet Finance after 2000." "That, in turn, was the underlying reason why the US mortgage market was so awash with cash in 2006 that sub-prime mortgages were being sold to people with no income, no job and no assets" " Ninjas." "It wasn't as if the sub-prime mortgage crisis of 2007 was hard to predict." "Months before it blew up, I was in Tennessee and in Michigan, seeing for myself how many poorer households were heading for mortgage default and foreclosure." "What was much harder to predict was how a small tremor in America's very own home-grown emerging market would cause a financial earthquake all around the world." "Not many people foresaw that defaults on sub-prime mortgages would send such a shockwave around the world that a British bank would suffer the first run since 1866 and end up being nationalised, or that one of the greatest names in American investment banking," "Lehman Brothers, would go bust." "And not many people saw that as other banks started to write down hundreds of billions of losses, inter-bank lending would simply seize up, driving the US Treasury to propose a $700 billion bail-out for the financial system as a whole." "Certainly, by June 2008." "An American recession seemed more or less inevitable." "But the end of the world?" "Looking around the streets of Hong Kong," "I don't see much sign of a recession here." "Can it be that the Chinese half of Chimerica has successfully decoupled itself from the American half?" "The idea that China can somehow walk away unscathed from the American crisis is certainly seductive." "Despite declining exports to the recession-hit West, and a stock market crash, booming domestic demand seems set to keep China's economy growing at at least 8% a year." "But remember, we've been here before." "A hundred years ago, in the first age of globalisation, many investors thought there was similarly symbiotic relationship between the world's financial centre, Britain, and Europe's most dynamic industrial economy." "That economy was Germany's, and the breakdown of that relationship ended in war." "As before 1914, there's a fine line that separates symbiosis from rivalry and conflict." "According to one estimate, China's gross domestic product could exceed that of the United States as early as 2027." "By that time some critics of free trade argue that virtually nothing may remain of American manufacturing industry." "And the worse things get in the United States, the louder such complaints will grow." "On a day like today, when the Hong Kong stock market is down sharply, it's tempting to ask whether anything could trigger a comparable breakdown in globalisation like the one that happened in 1914?" "The obvious answer is some kind of conflict between the United States and China, whether over trade, Taiwan, Tibet, or some other unforeseeable bone of contention." "What starts with competition for Olympic medals could end in a battle over dollars if the Chinese one day decide to cut off their credit line to the American empire." "Maybe, as its name suggests," "Chimerica is nothing more than a chimera - the mythical beast of ancient legend that was part lion, part goat, part dragon." "A Chinese-American conflict may sound implausible, but one of the key points of this series is that the really big crises come just seldom enough to be beyond the living memory of the people who run today's companies, banks and funds." "Just because all the swans you've ever seen are white doesn't mean there are no black swans." "Today's financial world is the result of four millennia of economic evolution." "Yet despite the unprecedented complexity and diversity of the modern financial system," "Planet Finance remains as vulnerable as ever to the age-old problem of booms and busts, irrational exuberance and manic depression." "Maybe all this complexity has actually increased our vulnerability to crisis." "For 4,000 years, from ancient Mesopotamia to modern China, the ascent of money has been one of the key factors in human progress, an extraordinary story of innovation, intermediation and integration that had done as much as anything" "to help people escape from the drudgery of subsistence agriculture." "And yet Planet Finance can never quite escape from the gravitational force of Planet Earth, because the quants can never take full account of the human factor - our tendency to underestimate the probability of black swans, our propensity to veer from euphoria to despondency," "our chronic inability to learn from history." "And that's why the course of financial history - like that most human of emotions, love - never runs smooth, and never will, not even here, on the magical and quite possibly mythical country of Chimerica."