About

This blog is an attempt to understand the past with the tools of modern finance. So far, this has meant writing posts that I’ve organized into different series, each of which focuses on a single financial and historical topic. The main tool I’ve been using throughout this blog is financial modeling, which allows me to incorporate Excel, XML, VBA, and other applications and programming languages into my analysis.

Ultimately, my aim is to produce a robust financial model, along the lines of what modern bank regulators use to analyze large financial institutions, to interpret an important historical organization. As an example of this, I would love build a model/simulation with financial data from, say, the Medicis or one of the earliest companies like the Dutch East India Company. Then, visitors to this blog will be able to examine and interact with the data and hopefully, if I built it correctly, gain a new perspective on the historical subject.

Please refer to the contents page for a synopsis of each blog series, including its financial topic and historical subject matter, and for links to the financial models I’ve developed for those posts.