Imagine the year 1624. The world does not have New York and her Stock Exchange that would shape global finance. The Industrial Revolution still lies over a century in the future. The Mughal empire is enjoying its heyday in India.
Around the new year, floods hit the town of Utrecht in the Netherlands. Dikes break. Fields are drowned. Livelihoods are washed away. Without a central system of aid and little reserve, authorities at the local level have no money to finance the immediate needs of recovery.
Confronted with the crisis, a small Dutch water board takes an unprecedented decision: it floats a bond. Not to fund war or conquest, but to finance recovery, to repair the dikes and stem the tide. Amazingly, that bond continues to earn interest today, over 400 years later.
A timelessly wise act of climatic foresight, now in the possession of a foundation under the New York Stock Exchange, in a world that would not hav
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