HistoricalLondon and overseas sovereign lending · 1822 to 1825

London bonds: an impressive brochure

The prospectus is quite detailed about a government that doesn't exist.

Poyais was invented. The land and its inhabitants weren't.

The prospectus is on a London desk and the borrower is overseas. One is easier to inspect.

The New York Fed describes speculation and poor information in the lending boom. It reports Latin American bond prices roughly halving by summer 1825. Those are resale prices. The principal owed didn't halve, and it isn't a formal index of every London bond.

Poyais took the paperwork further. The land and its inhabitants were real and the issuing state was made up. It was one fraud within the wider panic.

Latin American bond prices, in this historical account: Roughly halved; by summer 1825

Price or promise?

The promise is printed on the certificate: what is owed, on what terms, by when. It does not move because the market moved.

The price is what somebody will pay today to hold that promise. A price halving is not principal being cancelled, and it is not a forecast of what will eventually be repaid.

HistoricalNetherlands · a Lekdijk Bovendams water-board bond held at Yale · Issued 1648 · collection reported 2015

The water bond with an appointment

A Dutch water-board bond from 1648 was still earning interest when Yale collected a payment in 2015.

The payment record had run out of room. A paper extension made the trip; the bond stayed home in the library.

Interest collected for 12 years: €136.20; collected in 2015

In 2015, Yale collected €136.20 for twelve years of interest on a Dutch water-board bond issued in 1648.

The payment record had filled up. A paper extension could travel for the collection while the original stayed in the library. The bond was old enough to be a museum piece and still needed someone to run an errand.

The euro figure is an interest payment for twelve years, collected in 2015. It is not the bond's principal, not a modern market value, and it does not enter any debt scale on this site. No annual rate is claimed and no oldest-debt label is applied. The 367-year age in the source's headline describes the object in 2015 and is not a claim of uninterrupted payment through today. This is a Dutch case dated 1648 and 2015, distinct from the 1825 London episode that hosts it. The issuer was the Hoogheemraadschap Lekdijk Bovendams and the body that paid in 2015 is its successor; a different, older Lekdijk Bovendams bond of 1624 is held elsewhere and is not this one.

A bond is a written promise to pay that can itself be bought and sold, which is the idea this card introduces. The halving is an approximate historical generalization from the cited account, not a defined index for all London bonds and not a dated series; no numeric index observations exist for it here. It is not a principal write-off and not a recovery rate. Poyais is one swindle among many and is not the explanation of the whole crisis; the invented state is the fraud, not the land or the people said to live there.

Sources

Crisis Chronicles: The Panic of 1825 (London and Poyais account) — Donald P. Morgan and James Narron, Liberty Street Economics, Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The overseas-lending, Poyais and crisis paragraphs, including the statement that Latin American bond prices roughly halved by summer 1825. Institutional synthesis citing historians, not a reconstructed bond index. Reader comments are not evidence.
Yale's 367-year-old water bond still pays interest — Mike Cummings, Yale News. The paragraphs identifying the 1648 issue, the 2015 collection of €136.20 for 12 years of interest, and the travelling paper addendum added when the original ran out of space. The 367-year age in the headline describes the object in 2015; it is not a claim of uninterrupted payment through 2026.

These historical figures stay separate from the running debt comparison. Source review recorded: 2026-09-13.