James Buchan
James Buchan
The Honourable James Buchanis a Scottish novelist and historian...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth11 June 1954
real losing humiliation
Losing your capital is like losing your trousers. It is a real humiliation, and one not to be soon repeated.
passion history waiting
If good history is dispassionate history, it must naturally wait until the passions of the period subside.
saudi-arabia virtue claims
Saudi Arabia is a puritanical state that claims a monopoly of wisdom and virtue.
fall dust bulls
Bulls don't read. Bears read financial history. As markets fall to bits, the bears dust off the Dutch tulip mania of 1637, the Banque Royale of 1719-20, the railway speculation of the 1840s, the great crash of 1929.
simple cash parliament
Even before he came to power in 1997, Gordon Brown promised to change the accounts to parliament from simple litanies of cash in and cash out, to a more commercial system that took notice of the public property the departments were using. This system is known as resource accounting.
war iraq people
Since the attack on the United States on September 11 2001, and the US retaliation in Afghanistan and Iraq, there must be few people who have not felt a twinge of nostalgia for the cold war.
optimistic numbers government
Nature is not simply a technical or economical resource, and human beings are not mere numbers. To suggest that one can somehow align all the squabbling institutions of science, environmental management, government and diplomacy in an alliance of convenience to regulate the global climate seems to me optimistic.
economic great learned obliged older relive
The great disadvantage of getting older is to be obliged to relive the salient economic events of one's youth, with nothing learned and nothing forgotten.
bear boom bust circles eternal falling happened pessimist sees wretched
In falling markets, there is nothing that has not happened before. The bear or pessimist sees only the past, which imprisons the wretched financial soul in eternal circles of boom and bust and boom again.
years tasks three
For 50 years, nuclear power stations have produced three products which only a lunatic could want: bomb-explosive plutonium, lethal radioactive waste and electricity so dear it has to be heavily subsidised. They leave to future generations the task, and most of the cost, of making safe sites that have been polluted half-way to eternity.
birthday order challenges
Any new financial order for the world must tackle the three chief challenges of our age.
wish needs lines
The dividing line between wish and need was never clear.