The Spanish wording in the title is borrowed from a book by Joseph de la Vega published in Amsterdam in 1688. The book consists of a series of dialogues between a philosopher, a merchant and a shareholder, and is usually recognised as being one of the first analytical attempts to describe the different kinds of financial operations taking place in Amsterdam at the end of the seventeenth century. This paper tries to provide new textual evidence for a better understanding of the importance of Vega's book, both in the form of a detailed description of options and futures markets and as an appraisal of decision-making processes in a context of risk and uncertainty. It also considers some of the ethical implications of the individual strategies associated with the gambling and speculation activities taking place at that time on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange.

This paper analyses the organisational make-up and financial techniques of Greek diaspora banking during its golden era in Constantinople, c. 1840–81. It is argued that this small group of bankers had a flexible style of business organisation, which included informal operations. Well embedded into the network of international high finance, these bankers facilitated the integration of Constantinople into Western European capital markets — during the early days of Western financial presence in the Ottoman Empire — by developing a cunningly ingenious, for the standards of the time and place, method for the internationalisation of the financial instruments of the internal Ottoman public debt.

Australia during the second half of the nineteenth century experimented with a free banking system. However, the severe banking crisis experienced in 1893 poses a difficulty for proponents of free banking as they argue that such systems should be free from instability. We suggest that the few regulations that Australian banks faced were either not credible or had minimal impact on bank prudential behaviour. Using data on individual banks and the overall banking system, we go on to suggest that the 1893 banking crisis was the natural outcome of an unregulated environment. We also examine the role played by the colonial governments during the crisis.

This paper investigates the private-interest and public-interest theories of regulatory change to analyse the politico-economic determinants of securities transaction taxation (STT), a fiscal tool that has been practised in most industrialised countries. Combining contrasting predictions from the two theories with political arguments used and a number of recorded economic facts from Swedish STT history during the entire twentieth century, I find that the interest-group factors related to the relative strength of taxed and subsidised groups best explain the timing of STT changes. By contrast, the distortive and fiscally insignificant STT, and the other historical evidence, reject most arguments used to justify the government tax policy in a public-interest view.