Venice’s failed war against Constantinople led to the first bond market (bigthink.com)
51 pointsby RickJWagner9 hours ago15 comments
veqq an hour ago
The author was on Top Tradders Unplugged 2 weeks ago, giving a nice hour long summary, which inspired me to read the book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsOUuihvpzs
interdrift 3 hours ago
the story of the constantinople riots is really interesting. A foolish treaty established this unequal relationship between constantinople and venice that would later indirectly lead to the destruction of the empire through the fourth crusade and the weakening of the trade rights of its own citizens. The emperor who made that treaty was equally desperate and stupid.
alephnerd an hour ago
The Byzantine "Empire" in 1204 was barely an empire at that point anyhow. It was essentially a rump state consisting of Greece and small portions of Anatolia.
Or, if the Byzantine Empire can be treated as an empire in 1200, the Kingdom of Hungary or the Kingdom of Poland should be treated as an empire as well.
vondur 28 minutes ago
The sack of Constantinople was 30 years into the future after this expedition. But yes, after the fall of Constantinople in 1204, it never was able to recover its former power. Manuel I Komnenos really blew it with the decision to anger the Venetian's.
fuzzfactor an hour ago
Compare this to the US Civil War and the depth of perpetual debt before and after.
mono442 3 hours ago
Technically bond markets with fiat currencies are unnecessary but for some reason they still exist.
nostrademons 3 hours ago
Why? The purpose of the bond market isn't to supply the government with currency, but rather to distribute risk and capital payments to those most willing to bear them.
mono442 2 hours ago
The main purpose is definitely to supply the government with currency. Many countries put imo unnecessary restrictions on themselves and do not borrow directly from the central bank which would be simpler and cheaper.
Ekaros 2 hours ago
Wouldn't that be just more complicated way to print money? With weird question about would it ever be possible lower debt without actually printing...
mono442 2 hours ago
Money comes from debt. Debt is essentially the way to print money.
smallmancontrov an hour ago
No. Money is a type of debt, but a very special type, one that has no duration and is available now rather than locked up for some period of time. When the treasury sells bonds, it replaces "unlocked" money with "locked" money in the private sector, decreasing the amount of unlocked money in the private sector to balance the increased amount of unlocked money in the public sector. The amount of unlocked money remains constant.
If the Federal Reserve prints reserves (unlocked money) to buy bonds (locked money) and keeps doing this as they mature so that WALCL goes up and to the right, that's money printing.
nostrademons an hour ago
If that were true we wouldn't have corporate bond markets, and municipal bond markets, and mortgage bond markets. All of these are capital markets where the capital goes to either a private party or a non-monetary-authority government.
Seignoriage (the practice of the government directly issuing currency to fund its government expenditures) has been around for about 2500 years and predates the invention of the bond market described in this article by roughly 1500 years.
smallmancontrov an hour ago
"Some reason" is Separation of Power applied to money printing. The Federal Reserve is an independent body guarding the money printer from the politicians.
Congress (and, increasingly, the executive) can't simply choose to print and spend. They can choose to spend in excess of revenue, but to do this they must sell treasuries, they must borrow and spend, but the bond market is allowed to say "no." We are seeing this in real time as interest rates rise. In contrast, if the politicians want to print and spend they have to beg/pressure/persuade the Federal Reserve to run the money printer and buy the treasuries.
Whether this is good or bad depends on your politics. I like separation of powers. I'm not keen on the idea of handing congress/executive the power of the printer, people in the US are very sanguine about how that can go. I'm also not keen on destroying the money printer, because the events of 100 years ago showed us what deflationary shocks look like (even worse than the inflationary shocks) and unlike my goldbug relatives and crypto-pilled friends I payed attention. The mechanism of having an independent body that guards the printer is the best compromise I have heard, so personally I'm glad it's the one we have.
Challenge: propose something better.
pm90 3 hours ago
[flagged]
dang 3 hours ago
This comment got flagged by our software which classified it as genai, which isn't allowed in HN comments (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079.)
But is an interesting border case - it's in the DMZ of mostly-genai-but-with-a-human wrapper. We don't know what to do with those yet, and neither do the classifiers.
In this specific case I suppose it's probably better not to paste the output of an LLM into an HN thread, since anyone who wants to can ask one themselves. But if you wanted to rephrase what you learned in your own words, that would presumably be ok.