Amsterdam: A History of the World’s Most Liberal City, by Russell Shorto

Like many other small European countries, it borrowed money very cheaply from abroad and paid very high interest rates on foreign deposits. Icelanders could borrow Japanese yen for close to 0 percent, and they paid foreign investors very high rates. For instance, Kaupthing Bank’s (an Icelandic bank) Isle of Man subsidiary offered 7.15 percent on on

This tendency in the coastal areas to deal with problems privately, to tend towards decentralization and a rough kind of democracy, was to form the basis of the administrative tradition which, in the end, would determine Dutch political culture for centuries to come.

The dominant regime of political economy in the West since 1971, and particularly acute since 2009, has been built on a set of related economic fallacies: There are no adverse consequences to manipulating the price and supply of money; economic well-being can be measured by increases in flows of revenue rather than the growth rate of profit over ca