Finansplaneten

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

This book is about the history of mankind as a function of finance and economics. It was a good and interesting book.

🎨 Impressions

✍️ My Top Quotes

• 60% of male deaths in the Jivaro tribe in Ecuador are caused by violence.
• The silver city of Potosí in Peru was one of the most important cities in the Spanish Empire, with a population of between 160,000 and 200,000 inhabitants. 45,000 tons of silver were extracted from the mines there. "Vale un Potosí" was a Spanish expression meaning to be worth a fortune, referring to the city's wealth.
• The concept of interest likely originated from the natural increase in livestock herds. The word "credit" comes from the Latin "credo," which means "I believe."
• Liber Abaci ("The Abacus") is a book on mathematics by Leonardo Fibonacci. Fibonacci introduced the Arabic numeral system and double-entry bookkeeping to Europe.
• The Banco Rosso were Venetian moneylenders who loaned money from their "bancos" (benches). The word "ghetto" comes from the word for "foundry." Jews in Venice were forced to settle in an area with an old foundry called "Getto Nuovo."
• "The function of a bank is to move money from A, where it is, to B, where it is needed." - Lord Rothschild the Third. "Money is the god of our time, and Rothschild is his prophet." - Heinrich Heine (1841)
• The Battle of Vicksburg in 1863 was considered the turning point in the American Civil War. 80% of Liverpool's port imports in 1860 were cotton from the Southern states.
• "The printing press is a machine gun for the finance ministry that pumps fire into the backside of the bourgeois system." - Jergenji Preobrazhenskij. The game Monopoly was originally designed to show the unfairness of a system where a small minority of property owners profited from rental income.
• On March 7, 1932, 5,000 laid-off workers from the Ford Motor Company marched in Detroit. As they approached River Rouge Gate 4, security guards and armed police opened fire on them. Five workers were killed. Rachmanism was a term for exploitative practices by landlords, exemplified by Peter Rachman who used threats to evict tenants.
• "The best way to rob a bank is to own one." - William Crawford. "Property rights will ultimately lead to democracy, because you cannot maintain a market-oriented system for the exchange of property if you do not have a democratic system." - Hernando de Soto
• NINJA loans ("No Income, No Job or Assets") were risky loans given out before the 2007 financial crisis. When Hernando de Soto tried to get permission to build a house on public land in Peru, it took six years and 11 months to get approval. The application had passed through 52 different government agencies.