I found City of Fortune by Roger Crowley to be a very entertaining read, the full story of the Crusade is absurd. Venice completely dedicated its entire economy to producing the Crusade’s ships for years to make this happen.
Or, if the Byzantine Empire can be treated as an empire in 1200, the Kingdom of Hungary or the Kingdom of Poland should be treated as an empire as well.
Fun fact: possibly the first international banking system was built by the Knights Templar almost 1000 years ago to fund the first Crusade [1]. People would make deposits with them, travel to the Holy Land, possibly redeem what were very early certificates of deposit, fight and come back. Many times they'd die along the way, or fighting while there or on the way back. So the KT got rich off of unredeemed deposits. It bears some similarities to how Swiss banks got rich from WW2 except there the lack of redemption came from a death camps not issuing death certificates to now-dead Jewish depositors.
Never underestimate financial incentives. The Knights Templar wouldn't have wanted to Crusade to end and they would've wanted to encourage as many people as possible to go.
The modern day version of this is wars for oil. Except the war isn't really about oil. It's about selling weapons. Oil dependance just induces demand for weapons. So if you ever wonder why countries don't aggressively pursue renewable energy, it's because it would directly hurt weapons manufacturers.
No one goes to war over a solar panel [2].
[1]: https://www.historyhit.com/how-did-the-knights-templar-evolv...
[2]: https://www.theenergymix.com/no-one-goes-to-war-over-a-solar...
Oil industry moves significantly (like very significantly) more money than weapons producing. It makes it pretty hard to fit this novel theory to the reality.
Congress (and, increasingly, the executive) can't simply choose to print and spend. They can choose to spend in excess of revenue, but to do this they must sell treasuries, they must borrow and spend, but the bond market is allowed to say "no." We are seeing this in real time as interest rates rise. In contrast, if the politicians want to print and spend they have to beg/pressure/persuade the Federal Reserve to run the money printer and buy the treasuries.
Whether this is good or bad depends on your politics. I like separation of powers. I'm not keen on the idea of handing congress/executive the power of the printer, people in the US are very sanguine about how that can go. I'm also not keen on destroying the money printer, because the events of 100 years ago showed us what deflationary shocks look like (even worse than the inflationary shocks) and unlike my goldbug relatives and crypto-pilled friends I payed attention. The mechanism of having an independent body that guards the printer is the best compromise I have heard, so personally I'm glad it's the one we have.
Challenge: propose something better.
Seignoriage (the practice of the government directly issuing currency to fund its government expenditures) has been around for about 2500 years and predates the invention of the bond market described in this article by roughly 1500 years.
If the Federal Reserve prints reserves (unlocked money) to buy bonds (locked money) and keeps doing this as they mature so that WALCL goes up and to the right, that's money printing.
If at all, the statement might hold for "government bond markets with fiat currencies are unnecessary", not for corporate, supras, securitised (asset backed, mortgage backed), etc.
But is an interesting border case - it's in the DMZ of mostly-genai-but-with-a-human wrapper. We don't know what to do with those yet, and neither do the classifiers.
In this specific case I suppose it's probably better not to paste the output of an LLM into an HN thread, since anyone who wants to can ask one themselves. But if you wanted to rephrase what you learned in your own words, that would presumably be ok.