A few decades later, Venice brilliantly exploited the Fourth Crusade’s debt (and the fact that they built all the Crusade’s ships) to proceed on a debt-collection/revenge tour along the Adriatic, sacking Zara, getting the entire Crusade excommunicated, and ultimately diverting the entire force to Constantinople where they sacked the city in 1204 and replaced the government with the Latin Empire.
I found City of Fortune by Roger Crowley to be a very entertaining read, the full story of the Crusade is absurd. Venice completely dedicated its entire economy to producing the Crusade’s ships for years to make this happen.
It's funny how tied together war is with money-making.
Fun fact: possibly the first international banking system was built by the Knights Templar almost 1000 years ago to fund the first Crusade [1]. People would make deposits with them, travel to the Holy Land, possibly redeem what were very early certificates of deposit, fight and come back. Many times they'd die along the way, or fighting while there or on the way back. So the KT got rich off of unredeemed deposits. It bears some similarities to how Swiss banks got rich from WW2 except there the lack of redemption came from a death camps not issuing death certificates to now-dead Jewish depositors.
Never underestimate financial incentives. The Knights Templar wouldn't have wanted to Crusade to end and they would've wanted to encourage as many people as possible to go.
The modern day version of this is wars for oil. Except the war isn't really about oil. It's about selling weapons. Oil dependance just induces demand for weapons. So if you ever wonder why countries don't aggressively pursue renewable energy, it's because it would directly hurt weapons manufacturers.
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.
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.
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.
Currency-issuing governments don't strictly need bonds to fund spending, but they issue them for monetary control, financial stability, and credibility.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
A few decades later, Venice brilliantly exploited the Fourth Crusade’s debt (and the fact that they built all the Crusade’s ships) to proceed on a debt-collection/revenge tour along the Adriatic, sacking Zara, getting the entire Crusade excommunicated, and ultimately diverting the entire force to Constantinople where they sacked the city in 1204 and replaced the government with the Latin Empire.
I found City of Fortune by Roger Crowley to be a very entertaining read, the full story of the Crusade is absurd. Venice completely dedicated its entire economy to producing the Crusade’s ships for years to make this happen.
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
It's funny how tied together war is with money-making.
Fun fact: possibly the first international banking system was built by the Knights Templar almost 1000 years ago to fund the first Crusade [1]. People would make deposits with them, travel to the Holy Land, possibly redeem what were very early certificates of deposit, fight and come back. Many times they'd die along the way, or fighting while there or on the way back. So the KT got rich off of unredeemed deposits. It bears some similarities to how Swiss banks got rich from WW2 except there the lack of redemption came from a death camps not issuing death certificates to now-dead Jewish depositors.
Never underestimate financial incentives. The Knights Templar wouldn't have wanted to Crusade to end and they would've wanted to encourage as many people as possible to go.
The modern day version of this is wars for oil. Except the war isn't really about oil. It's about selling weapons. Oil dependance just induces demand for weapons. So if you ever wonder why countries don't aggressively pursue renewable energy, it's because it would directly hurt weapons manufacturers.
No one goes to war over a solar panel [2].
[1]: https://www.historyhit.com/how-did-the-knights-templar-evolv...
[2]: https://www.theenergymix.com/no-one-goes-to-war-over-a-solar...
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.
The Venetians also essentially opened the door to the Ottomans, and the Ottomans then proceeded to dismantle the Venetian empire.
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.
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.
Compare this to the US Civil War and the depth of perpetual debt before and after.
Technically bond markets with fiat currencies are unnecessary but for some reason they still exist.
Currency-issuing governments don't strictly need bonds to fund spending, but they issue them for monetary control, financial stability, and credibility.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Money comes from debt. Debt is essentially the way to print money.
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.
"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.
[flagged]
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.