Re: The Bond Dream Room
Posted: Wed Aug 30, 2023 8:07 am
From the Financial Times, last week, print version:
It was a crisp September day in 2015 when Timothy Young arrived at Houten, an unremarkable Dutch commuter town, determined to col- lect an almost 400-year-old debt. He carried a case containing a fragile piece of goatskin covered in dense writ- ing and numbers. It was a bond, issued in 1648 by a group of Dutch landowners who managed the dikes on a stretch of the river Lek. They had borrowed 1,000 guilders from a local merchant and the bond stated that in return for the loan, the merchant would receive a 5 per cent interest payment every year-for ever.
Although the terms of this so-called "perpetual" bond have changed over centuries of wars, depressions, revolu- tions and new currencies, it is still a valid liability of Stichtse Rijnlanden, a Dutch utility, and is now owned by Yale University's Beinecke Library. Young, a curator at Yale, was collecting €136 of interest from a delighted Dutch official, who had made a giant cheque to commemorate the payment.
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