Bagehot Quotes

“Logic makes as poor an argument against a boom as it does against a love affair.”
― James Grant, Bagehot: The Life and Times of the Greatest Victorian

“husband; Milton, the Puritan political partisan (without reference to the poet’s magnificent defense of free speech, Aeropagitica, a curious omission for a writer and publisher); and, of course, the author of Paradise Lost.”
― James Grant, Bagehot: The Life and Times of the Greatest Victorian

“I am more afraid of remedies than diseases.”
― James Grant, Bagehot: The Life and Times of the Greatest Victorian

“Bagehot had warned about the perils of low interest rates since at least the early 1850s. "John Bull," as he advised the readers of the Inquirer, quoting but not naming himself, "can stand a great deal, but he cannot stand 2 percent." He pressed on: "People won't take 2 percent; they won't bear a loss of income. Instead of that dreadful event, they invest their careful savings in something impossible - a canal to Kamchatka, a railway to Watchet, a plan for animating the Dead Sea, a corporation for shipping skates to the Torrid Zone." In 1867, with the Bank of England's discount rate quoted at 2 percent on the button, savers invested their careful savings across the seas. Bagehot anticipated the consequences of the coming bond bubble almost before it began to inflate.”
― James Grant, Bagehot: The Life and Times of the Greatest Victorian

“It is a comment on the nature of economics as much as it is on the genius of Bagehot that his dicta on central banking continue to hold sway almost a century and a half after he propounded them. In the physical sciences, progress is cumulative; we stand on the shoulders of giants. In economics, the most ostensibly rigorous of the social sciences, progress - and error, too - are cyclical; we keep stepping on the same rakes.”
― James Grant, Bagehot: The Life and Times of the Greatest Victorian