It is difficult not to marvel at the imagination which was implicit in this gargantuan insanity. If there must be madness something may be said for having it on a heroic scale.
The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.
Anyone who had saved a penny, anyone who had the least credit at his disposal, speculated in railway stocks. The number of railway journals rose from three to twenty.
Arbitrage is an investment strategy in which an investor simultaneously buys and sells an asset in different markets to take advantage of a price difference and generate a profit. While price differences are typically small and short-lived, the returns can be impressive when multiplied by a large volume. Arbitrage is commonly leveraged by hedge funds and other sophisticated investors.
This paper investigates the growth of new forms of personal finance used in purchasing motor vehicles – a development which it characterises as ‘financialisation’.
Until recently, the Irish State did not have to be good at investment. That’s because, before the 1990s, Ireland quietly dwindled. It didn’t have to get good at building homes and transport systems for a growing population because it had a shrinking population.