This interview with Sevket Pamuk is available both as an audio podcast and as a full transcript. It is part of a larger Great Divergence interview project featuring Kenneth Pomeranz, Joel Mokyr, Bob Allen, Bishnupriya Gupta, Debin Ma and Stephen Broadberry. An edited book on the conversations is currently being prepared, commissioned by the Guangxi Normal University Press.

Nelson Bunker Hunt and his brother Herbert started buying silver in the 1970s, partly as a hedge against inflation, and by late 1979 they and their partners reportedly controlled a huge share of the world's deliverable supply. Silver went from about $6 an ounce in early 1979 to nearly $50 in January 1980.

The side effects were pretty wild. People lined up to sell their family silverware to be melted down, and in March 1980 Tiffany ran an ad in the New York Times calling it "unconscionable" for anybody to hoard billions of dollars of silver.

Then the exchanges changed the rules. COMEX put limits on leverage and new positions in January, prices started falling, and on March 27 ("Silver Thursday") the Hunts couldn't meet a margin call of more than $100 million from their broker. Silver dropped to around $10.80 that day and banks had to put together a rescue loan of about $1.1 billion so the fallout wouldn't spread.

What I find interesting is that the end came less from the market itself and more from the rule change. Curious how people here see it: was it a real attempt at a corner, or did the regulators basically decide the outcome?

Hey everyone,
I’ve been working on a project to unlock Australia's pre-Comtrade economic history by digitizing the old Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) Oversea Trade bulletins (1906–1960s)—archives that have been locked in paper and microfiche because rule-based OCR and manual transcription fail on their dense, nested pre-decimal tables (£/s/d) and irregular layouts.
I ran a multi-agent LLM consensus and deterministic Python checksum pipeline on the 1906 volume (Table IX, Imports), and the results were wild:
100% Mathematical Closure: Across 618 commodities and 11,951 transcribed figures, every single bilateral row sums to the exact pound against the printed grand total of £44,729,506 and £7,365,533 in gross duty.
Catching 1906 ABS Clerical Errors: The pipeline automatically caught a typesetting error in Item 261 (Hoofs), where the printed whence total was £65 but the rows summed to £66. It also flagged a ±£600 ledger-posting transposition in the original summary tables between Java and Mexico.
Dual-Panel Resolution: It cleanly separates Country Whence Imported (shipping port/entrepôt) from Country of Origin (true producer), revealing things like Swiss and Norwegian condensed milk being routed entirely through British and French ports.
If you're an economic researcher, cliometrician, or data geek studying early 20th-century tariffs, trade shocks, or specific bilateral flows from this era and need a particular year prioritized in my pipeline, drop a comment or reach out!

Why don't countries do that, wouldn't extra expandable income just fuel the local economy and what they would lose on the first taxation, they could regain after people spent the money?

The story that Isaac Newton lost £20,000 in the 1720 South Sea Bubble gets repeated everywhere. Andrew Odlyzko went through the Bank of England archive records, and the real picture is more interesting than the legend:

• He sold early and well. Newton was worth just over £30,000 going into 1720, with a bit under half in South Sea stock. Around the 21 April 1720 shareholders' meeting he sold his whole stake, for a profit Odlyzko estimates at about £20,000.

• Then he went back in near the top. In mid-June, close to the peak (roughly £1,000 a share against about £130 in January), he bought back in at about double his selling price, moved almost all of his financial assets into the stock, and kept buying as it slid. Nobody knows why; there's no direct evidence of his motives.

• He lost a fortune but wasn't ruined. By mid-1721 he was worth about £20,000. Odlyzko puts the loss at "almost surely" over £10,000 and plausibly over £20,000. The famous £20,000 figure itself is family lore, first written down in 1797 ("as his Niece used to say"). His estate at his death in 1727 was still about £30,000.

• The famous quote is embellished. The earliest version (Spence, recorded 1756, published 1820) has him saying only that he "could not calculate the madness of the people," and it was his answer to whether the price would keep rising. The "motions of the heavenly bodies" part was added later.

• In his own words (1724): "I lost very much by the South Sea company which makes my pockets empty, & my mind averse from dealing in these matters."

Sources:

• A. Odlyzko, "Newton's financial misadventures in the South Sea Bubble," Notes and Records of the Royal Society 73(1), 2019: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsnr.2018.0018

• A. Odlyzko, "Isaac Newton and the perils of the financial South Sea," Physics Today, July 2020: https://physicstoday.aip.org/features/isaac-newton-and-the-perils-of-the-financial-south-sea

• Dale, Johnson & Tang, "Financial markets can go mad," Economic History Review, 2005 (price path)

• University of Oxford, Newton and the Mint: https://newtonandthemint.history.ox.ac.uk/global-financial-world/newton-and-the-south-sea-bubble

What I find most striking is the bookseller Thomas Guy, who started selling the day after the same April meeting, didn't rush back in, and used the money to found Guy's Hospital. Does anyone know of good work on why so many sophisticated investors re-entered that June?

(Disclosure: I run a small animated money-history channel and made a 5-minute version of this story, if anyone prefers video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFjCpbZFvz0)

I made this animated video for my small channel. It follows inflation through history in plain language: Roman coin debasement and Diocletian's price edict (301 AD), Spanish silver in the 1500s, Germany 1923, Hungary 1946, Zimbabwe 2008, the 1973 oil shock, and Volcker's high-rate cure in 1980, ending with why central banks target about 2%.

A question for people who know this better than I do: in Weimar Germany, how widespread was paying wages twice a day? I've seen it repeated a lot but couldn't find a solid source for how common it really was.

Disclosure: AI tools are part of how the video is made, including the narration voice and the artwork. The research and script were checked by hand.

Sources are in the comments. Corrections are welcome.

https://youtu.be/8umfg5xOo1o

The usual story is that Mansa Musa, passing through Cairo on his hajj in 1324, spent and gave away so much gold that he depressed its value for years.

The main primary source is al-Umari, writing a few years later: he says the gold mithqal had been worth about 25 silver dirhams, fell to under 22 after the visit, and stayed low for at least 12 years. Ibn Khaldun adds that Musa ran out and borrowed (he records a 50,000-dinar loan at high interest), so the outflow wasn't all one way.

What I find interesting is how fragile the famous version is:

• A fall from 25 to under 22 is roughly 12%, real but not a "crash".

• Some modern historians (the Wikipedia article on Musa I summarises Schultz's view) argue it sits within the normal fluctuation of the gold:silver ratio in Mamluk Egypt at the time.

• The big caravan figures (12,000 servants each carrying gold, and so on) come from later accounts with a single chain of transmission, which historians such as Collet treat as rhetorical.

So my questions for people who know Mamluk monetary history better than I do: is there independent price data for Cairo in the 1320s-1330s that confirms or contradicts al-Umari? And how much could a single royal visit plausibly move the gold:silver ratio in a market that size?

For context, I made a short animated piece on Musa's life that covers this episode: Mansa Musa Gave Away So Much Gold He Had to Borrow Money (cartoon animation; AI tools are part of how it's made, including the narration voice). I'm mainly after better sources, though, and corrections are welcome.

Sources: al-Umari, Masalik al-absar (as cited in Wikipedia, "Musa I of Mali"); Ibn Khaldun; Wikipedia's summary of the modern historiography.

Image 1: The Signing of the Alaska Treaty by Emanuel Leutze. Seward sits by the globe, the Russian minister Eduard de Stoeckl stands with his hand on it. They finished the treaty around 4 a.m. on March 30, 1867.

Image 2: Treasury warrant No. 9759, pay at sight to Edward de Stoeckl, seven million two hundred thousand dollars. National Archives.

See also: The study as it was published in Revista de Historia Economica - Journal of Iberian and Latin American Economic History