The west has a great deal to answer for in the Middle East, from Britains belated empire-building after the First World War to the US and British policy that condemns modern Iraq to the material and social squalor of a half-century ago. – James Buchan
Up until the Depression, recession had a moral character: it was supposed to purge the body economic of the greed and excess that attends a business expansion. – James Buchan
Cause and effect, the riddle of all history, is a particular devil in financial history and never more so than today, where entire classes of security are collapsing not on public exchanges and stock-tickers but because there are no markets to establish prices this side of nothing. – James Buchan
The year 2008 was a reminder to those who had forgotten that there is such a thing as history and that the cycle of famine and feast in commerce, first identified in antiquity and well understood in the Middle Ages, was not suddenly abolished in modern times. – James Buchan