Sunday 15 December 2019

Could This Still Paying Interest Bond,

be the oldest paying bond in history?


this perpetual bond was issued in 1648 by a Dutch water board, to finance improvements to a local dike system, it still pays interest to this day, although not allowed out of the country, the bond is housed at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, however a paper attached to the bond can leave and interest be paid, Timothy Young, the library’s curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts, has travelled to Amsterdam in the past to visit Stichtse Rijnlanden, a Dutch water authority, and he collected 12 years of interest on the bond, collecting the back interest maintains the bond’s status as a functioning artifact from the Golden Age of Dutch finance. The water authority paid Young 136.20 euros in interest, the equivalent of $153, for a fuller read of this fascinating story have a look here.


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