Historical Perspectives

I’m just getting around to reading a 2014 book some Creditslips readers may be familiar with, Debt: The First 5000 Years. In this utterly fascinating work, Anthropologist David Graeber exhaustively recounts the history of debt and money. He begins by debunking the myth of barter, the story told in introductory economics textbooks that money was spontaneously invented to permit merchants to exchange goods and services in imaginary markets, as an improvement over primitive market economies based on barter.

My coauthor Ed Balleisen has co-founded a program on consumer lending of interest to Credit Slips readers. Its initial data collection is particularly useful in documenting the North Carolina experience and its implications for other states.

Concentrating on just about anything during these days of the coronavirus, let alone academic writing, has been a trifle difficult these.  A splendid new paper on Boer Bonds by Kim Oosterlinck and Marie Van Gansbeke (here) did, however, get me focused (for a bit).  And that’s in part because their paper has potentially turned upside down what I thought was an established part of customary international law.  That is, the law of

Inspired by Tracy Alloway's recent piece on antique Chinese bonds (here), a group of my students has gone deep down the rabbit hole of the question of how one might recover on them (or, from the Chinese government’s perspective, how one would block recovery).  If I’m reading Michael, Charlie and Andres correctly, they think that the probability of recovery via litigation is near zero on almost all of the antique Chinese bond