It was a crisp September day in 2015 when Timothy Young arrived at Houten, an unremarkable Dutch commuter town, determined to collect an almost 400-year-old debt. He carried a case containing a fragile piece of goatskin covered in dense writing and numbers. It was a bond, issued in 1648 by a group of Dutch landowners, who managed the dikes on a stretch of the river Lek. They had borrowed 1000 guilders from a local merchant and the bond explained that, in return for the loan, the merchant would receive a 5 per cent interest payment every year – for ever.

Although the terms of this so-called “perpetual” bond have changed over centuries of wars, depressions, revolutions and new currencies, it is still a valid liability of Stichtse Rijnlanden, a Dutch utility, and is now owned by Yale University’s Beinecke Library. Young, a curator at Yale, was collecting €136 of interest from a delighted Dutch official, who had made a giant cheque to commemorate the payment.

Financial Times