Safe Assets

Gary Gorton has a fascinating new paper, "History and Economics of Safe Assets", which contains the quote of the week: "...almost all of human history can be written as the search for and the production of different forms of safe assets".  Not sure that's the first cut I'd take at "all of human history", but it's certainly an interesting perspective.  As the old maxim says: "When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail".