From Sovereign Bonds to Monte Cristo: A Tale of Two Waterloos 📚

A Tale of Two Centuries

I finally took the time to read a fascinating research paper recently recommended to me by my former mentor: “Sovereign Bonds since Waterloo” – a thorough and brilliant study revealing how emerging market bonds have consistently delivered long-run excess returns over their UK and US counterparts across two centuries, despite myriad wars, coup d’états and serial defaults*. As I delved into its insights about the post-Napoleonic era, something clicked. Right around the same time that these first bond borrowings began, unfolds Alexandre Dumas’ “The Count of Monte Cristo” – a tale that would prove equally enduring. 📜

What Research and Fiction Teach Us

Having recently finished both the new French movie adaptation and Danish director Bille August’s fresh mini-series version of The Count of Monte Cristo, I’m struck by how this story, beginning in the tumultuous days of Napoleon’s escape from Elba, continues to resonate across generations. It’s made me reflect on something important: in our both professional and fact-driven world, do we tend to forget the profound wisdom found in classical fiction? 🎭

The Human Story Behind the Data

This masterpiece, which I first encountered as a teenager in its original French text (thanks to my French-Danish parents), explores the depths of human nature – love, betrayal, justice, and the complexity of redemption. Its endurance lies in brilliant ambiguity: while adaptations over the decades have interpreted the protagonist Edmund Dantes’ journey – and its conclusion – in vastly different ways, they all preserve the core tension: how actions born of justified grievance can lead us into moral uncertainty. Most characters’ actions are simultaneously understandable, questionable, and debatable – it’s this delicate balance between righteousness and revenge that makes the story so powerfully human. ⚖️

Beyond the Numbers

💡 So while I heartily recommend that research paper for its brilliant analysis of financial returns since Waterloo, I’d equally suggest diving into the fictional world that emerged from the same historical moment. The returns might be harder to quantify, but they’re just as valuable. What better than a story of a Count who learned what truly counts can’t be counted?** 🌟

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*Josefin Meyer & Carmen M Reinhart & Christoph Trebesch, 2022. “Sovereign Bonds Since Waterloo,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol 137(3)

** h/t to William Bruce Cameron’s (often mistakenly attributed to Einstein) “Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted”