Venice’s failed war against Constantinople led to the first bond market (bigthink.com)
46 points by RickJWagner 8 hours ago
veqq 10 minutes ago
The author was on Top Tradders Unplugged 2 weeks ago, giving a nice hour long summary, which inspired me to read the book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsOUuihvpzs
fuzzfactor 10 minutes ago
Compare this to the US Civil War and the depth of perpetual debt before and after.
interdrift 2 hours ago
the story of the constantinople riots is really interesting. A foolish treaty established this unequal relationship between constantinople and venice that would later indirectly lead to the destruction of the empire through the fourth crusade and the weakening of the trade rights of its own citizens. The emperor who made that treaty was equally desperate and stupid.
alephnerd 9 minutes ago
The Byzantine "Empire" in 1204 was barely an empire at that point anyhow. It was essentially a rump state consisting of Greece and small portions of Anatolia.
Or, if the Byzantine Empire can be treated as an empire in 1200, the Kingdom of Hungary or the Kingdom of Poland should be treated as an empire as well.
mono442 2 hours ago
Technically bond markets with fiat currencies are unnecessary but for some reason they still exist.
smallmancontrov 16 minutes ago
"Some reason" is Separation of Power applied to money printing. The Federal Reserve is an independent body guarding the money printer from the politicians.
Congress (and, increasingly, the executive) can't simply choose to print and spend. They can choose to spend in excess of revenue, but to do this they must sell treasuries, they must borrow and spend, but the bond market is allowed to say "no." We are seeing this in real time as interest rates rise. In contrast, if the politicians want to print and spend they have to beg/pressure/persuade the Federal Reserve to run the money printer and buy the treasuries.
Whether this is good or bad depends on your politics. I like separation of powers. I'm not keen on the idea of handing congress/executive the power of the printer, people in the US are very sanguine about how that can go. I'm also not keen on destroying the money printer, because the events of 100 years ago showed us what deflationary shocks look like (even worse than the inflationary shocks) and unlike my goldbug relatives and crypto-pilled friends I payed attention. The mechanism of having an independent body that guards the printer is the best compromise I have heard, so personally I'm glad it's the one we have.
Challenge: propose something better.
nostrademons 2 hours ago
Why? The purpose of the bond market isn't to supply the government with currency, but rather to distribute risk and capital payments to those most willing to bear them.
mono442 43 minutes ago
The main purpose is definitely to supply the government with currency. Many countries put imo unnecessary restrictions on themselves and do not borrow directly from the central bank which would be simpler and cheaper.
nostrademons 19 minutes ago
Ekaros 40 minutes ago
pm90 2 hours ago
[flagged]
dang 2 hours ago
This comment got flagged by our software which classified it as genai, which isn't allowed in HN comments (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079.)
But is an interesting border case - it's in the DMZ of mostly-genai-but-with-a-human wrapper. We don't know what to do with those yet, and neither do the classifiers.
In this specific case I suppose it's probably better not to paste the output of an LLM into an HN thread, since anyone who wants to can ask one themselves. But if you wanted to rephrase what you learned in your own words, that would presumably be ok.