Archive - Periscope

Our Currency, Your Problem – The 1971 Nixon Shock

“The dollar is our currency, but it’s your problem.” Sounds familiar? This is not someone saying it today, but this remark, which caused tremors in the…

Jun 12 •

May 2025

From Kaffa With Love – How Coffee Conquered the World

South Sea Bubble is perhaps one of history’s best-known financial bubbles and also was among the first. It was a product of the “Financial Revolution…

May 22 •

From Silk to Silicon – A Connected World

Let me start with two different stories, about two books with different meanings, about globalization in two different eras, fifteen hundred years…

May 15 •

April 2025

Lessons of History – Smoot-Hawley Tariffs and the Great Depression

As George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”. But the irony is, we learnt from history that we don’t learn…

Apr 9 •

March 2025

Surprised Again? - This Time is Not Different

The twelve golden words from Sir John Templeton ring true every time - ‘The Four Most Expensive Words in English are, “This Time is Different”. One of…

Mar 13 •

February 2025

Louisiana Purchase and the Making of America

It probably is the largest land deal ever made, and in many ways, it changed the world. The Louisiana purchase was made 221 years ago, when the nascent…

Feb 26 •

January 2025

Second Atomic Age – The Global Nuclear Revival

2024 was the year when “AI went Nuclear”. A common thread running through the future plans of Microsoft. Google, Amazon and Meta is their commitment to…

Jan 23 •

Knights Templars and the Invention of Modern Banking

Popularly known as Knights Templars, they began their existence as “The Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Solomon”, were in reality not…

Jan 7 •

November 2024

A Perfect Storm - Panic of 1907 and Birth of the Federal Reserve

It was a perfect storm. Two earthquakes, a real one in San Francisco and the other in the realm of Finance in New York, though seemingly unrelated would…

Nov 21, 2024 •

Narratives, Affect and Popularity in Investing

It all started with a shipwreck. In the 1690’s, London saw a tech bubble that rose out of a successful treasure hunt, which was led by a New England sea…

Nov 7, 2024 •

September 2024

“The Great Mirror of Folly” – 300 Years of Stock Market Manias

In 1720, Europe experienced two financial crises: the South Sea Bubble in Great Britain and the Mississippi Bubble in France, and together they…

Sep 12, 2024 •

Silver Standard and the Silver Way – First Global Currency and Birth of Globalization

Diego Gualpa, Andres de Urdaneta and Zhang Juzheng: These are the people lost in the footnotes of history.

Sep 5, 2024 •

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