Here is a very interesting quotation from Napoleon Bonaparte from my recent series of little known quotations by famous people. As Napoleon came to appreciate, war is a very expensive business. It was common then for both sides of a war to be financed by the same bank and it was the practice at the time for the victor to pay the debts left by the loser. The banks always won. Napoleon sold the territory west of the Mississippi River to Thomas Jefferson for three million dollars in gold to finance his war plans to avoid borrowing from the banks. Today The United States borrows money from Chinese bankers to finance their global wars.