![]() The economic historian Paul Schmelzing’s meticulous reconstruction of interest rates back to the thirteenth century points instead to a long-run, “supra-secular” decline in nominal rates, driven mostly by the process of capital accumulation, punctuated periodically but randomly by inflationary episodes nearly always associated with wars. Unfortunately, modern research dispels the idea of such regularity in economic life. In the 1920s, the Soviet economist Nikolai Kondratieff sought to show that there were such patterns in capitalism, inferring from British, French, and German economic statistics the existence of fifty-year cycles of expansion followed by depression.114 For this contribution, which continues to be influential with many investors today, Stalin had Kondratieff arrested, imprisoned, and later shot. Drawing on a deep knowledge of global history, he catalogs the threats that mankind has faced, and the resourceful ways in which human societies have dealt. But the idea that those waves are like waves of light and sound is an illusion. Niall Ferguson puts the Covid pandemic into the broadest of historical perspectives, and reminds us that this was not the first time that humans have had to deal with catastrophic events. ![]() ![]() “There are waves in history, as we have seen, including some vast tsunamis. ![]()
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