Беседы с дочерью об экономике

what incentive do they have to limit the loans they dish out during the good times? Wouldn’t a better solution <…> —so that people’s savings and the economy’s payment system are preserved—
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Unfortunately, this obvious solution crashes on the shoals of harsh reality. More often than not, the politicians in charge of government are elected with the help of large contributions from those same bankers. Too often, the politicians need the bankers every bit as much as the bankers need the politicians.

once they had granted Miriam’s loan, they would then chop it up into little pieces and sell it to lots of others. In return for lending the bank $100 each, five thousand investors would each be given a share in Miriam’s $500,000 loan. Why would anyone invest in one of these shares? Because the bank paid them higher interest than they would have received had they simply deposited that $100 in the bank (but lower, overall, than the amount of interest Miriam had agreed to pay). Thus, the banker recouped the $500,000 immediately and still stood to make a profit when Miriam repaid her loan. And if Miriam were to go bankrupt and renege on her debt obligations, it was the five thousand investors who would lose out.

The Protestants, who broke away from the Catholic Church in the sixteenth century, played a crucial role in this reversal.
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Protestants insisted that anyone could speak personally with the divinity, unmediated by an authoritarian, stifling Church. Suddenly, the person, the individual, who is the director of his own affairs, became the pillar of that reformed Church. And who was the ideal example of this newly empowered, autonomous person?
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Protestantism’s iconic hero was none other than the merchant, the entrepreneur. Unsurprisingly, the new Protestant ethic embraced interest-bearing loans and profiteering as part of God’s plan.

Returning to Faustus, you should know that the version of the story that most people read these days—and the one most performed in theaters—isn’t Marlowe’s play The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus but Faust, a much later version written by the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. While Marlowe wrote his play at the very end of the sixteenth century, Goethe wrote Faust at the dawn of the nineteenth.
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Instead of sending his hero to hell, Goethe allows him to achieve redemption through good deeds and wholesome intentions.

If we can’t beat the filthy merchants, why not join them? As they looked out the windows of their castle towers and down upon the serfs toiling on their land, they wondered: What’s the use of these serfs planting onions and beetroots? What value do beetroots have on the international market? None!
And so they made a bold decision: get rid of all those perishable crops, like beetroots and onions, that offer no access to the emerging global markets; build fences around their estates, <…>; evict the swarms of pathetic serfs and replace them with flocks of sheep, which were more submissive and whose wool could be sold for a mint internationally. Thus, Britain experienced one of the most violent transformations in human history, the so-called enclosures.