A six-paper empirical macrofinancial analysis of Britain from 1698 to 1827, sole-authored at first submission, each paper taking one question in asset pricing, intermediation and financial history.
Using every transfer of the 3% Consol, 1752 to 1827, with both counterparties named, I ask who gained from trading British government debt, whether dealers' fees covered what they lost to better-informed customers, and how private news traveled from the first trader into the market price.
Presented: Economic History Association Annual Meeting, St. Louis, poster, September 2026 · Cambridge Economic and Social History Workshop, October 2026 · LSE Economic History Seminar, November 2026, scheduled.
Were value, momentum and carry already priced in London's first capital markets?
How secondary-market liquidity emerged and moved with volatility through wars, crises and the 1797 suspension.
How far households recycled coupon income into new government debt, and why Britain's war debt became safe. Presented at the LSE Financial History Group workshop, June 2026.
When the Consol began to earn a safety premium, and how it became the world's first fiat safe asset.
Did Britain's capital markets help or crowd out industrialization?
A relational database reconstructing individual holdings and lifetime portfolio returns for the universe of named British financial market participants across 130 years: roughly fifty million transactions and five hundred thousand named investors, from about two million manuscript images across six London archives. Complete market microstructure, with investor lifetime transactions and portfolio returns as the unit of analysis.
Built through a bespoke open-source transcription pipeline running at roughly 95 percent character accuracy, and reconciled into a double-entry accounting frame: a closed universe, over-specified by construction, in which every position has a counterparty and every balance foots.
The identity layer beneath the dataset: every named market participant across 130 years of ledgers, resolved to one persistent unique identifier. The HNI Number Project builds a persistent identity engine, and a robust architecture for linking to future historical micro-datasets as they come online.
The dataset is housed and governed through a London-based non-profit research institute, as the institutional home for FLB and for future historical macrofinance research, policy work and practice.
The dissertation that became the research program: how the market for British government debt financed war, and what it did to the balance sheets of the households that bought it.
Published four days after the 2024 election. One of the earliest public uses of the phrase; subsequently taken up by the Council on Foreign Relations, TD Economics, East Asia Forum and the American Enterprise Institute.
"Re-marking… to current market value would mechanically deleverage the US balance sheet."
Quoted by name in Gillian Tett's column "Gold glitters as the unimaginable becomes imaginable," 7 February 2025, on Treasury Secretary Bessent's stated intent to monetize the asset side of the US balance sheet: what a revaluation of the gold stock would do mechanically, and why the possibility was suddenly being discussed at all.
The funding challenge behind the strategy: the secular decline in rates, sectoral balance-sheet leverage, and the asymmetry between Wall Street and Main Street in the outgoing model.
A hundred-day assessment connecting tariff shocks, geopolitics and the trade architecture back to the underlying financial-market thesis.