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At an investment conference last week, Harvard historian Niall Ferguson created a huge mess for himself. He glibly speculated that maybe because economist John Maynard Keynes was a childless, "effete" homosexual, he embraced a doctrine that favored immediate economic gratification. Keynes' bon mot "in the long run, we are all dead" takes on new meaning when you realize he didn't have kids to worry about. Following the usual script, but at a much faster clip, an uproar ensued on Twitter and in various blogs. Ferguson quickly offered an apology that rivaled John Cleese's in A Fish Called Wanda in its...

"There’s a brouhaha a-brewin’ over comments by Niall Ferguson at an investor conference. Ferguson suggested that because John Maynard Keynes was gay, effete, and childless he might have lacked concern for posterity. After all, Keynes famously proclaimed ”in the long run we’re all dead.” In a nigh-upon hysterical and terribly written item, Tom Kostigen of Financial Advisor says Ferguson took “gay-bashing to new heights.” He adds, “Apparently, in Ferguson’s world, if you are gay or childless, you cannot care about future generations nor society.”  Now, I don’t know exactly what Ferguson said, and I don’t trust Kostigen’s version of events either. There are few full quotes and virtually...

What Is Samantha Power Thinking?The charismatic Obama adviser believes that stopping "genocide" is the United States' top foreign-policy priority. On March 18, President Obama explained his decision to mobilize the United States military for international intervention in Libya. “Left unchecked,� he said, “we have every reason to believe that Qaddafi would commit atrocities against his people. Many thousands could die. A humanitarian crisis would ensue. The entire region could be destabilized, endangering many of our allies and partners.� (As if it hasn’t been already?) That last sentence was a Realpolitik, national-interest justification for the U.S. intervention. But it rang hollow....

ARROYO GRANDE, Calif. (MarketWatch) -- "One of the disturbing facts of history is that so many civilizations collapse," warns anthropologist Jared Diamond in "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed." Many "civilizations share a sharp curve of decline. Indeed, a society's demise may begin only a decade or two after it reaches its peak population, wealth and power." Now, Harvard's Niall Ferguson, one of the world's leading financial historians, echoes Diamond's warning: "Imperial collapse may come much more suddenly than many historians imagine. A combination of fiscal deficits and military overstretch suggests that the United States may be the...

WASHINGTON -- It has been a very rough patch for Our President, and I do believe it is going to get rougher still. Do not be surprised, as the month goes on and August runs into September, that his campaign budget becomes tighter. President Barack Obama is spending more money than he is raising. It will get worse. A president who mismanages the federal budget the way Obama does cannot be expected to manage his campaign budget much better. Lavish spending, it turns out, is a way of life for the community organizer who became our 44th president. Lavish spending...

First, duck the argument. Second, nitpick. Third, vilify. That’s what Niall Ferguson says liberal bloggers did after reading his Newsweek story on Obama’s record. Here, he offers a point-by-point defense of his argument.

<p>The other day, Newsweek had a cover story about Mitt Romney's "Wimp Factor."</p>

After some of the recent Obama-loving/Romney-bashing Newsweek covers, the one hitting newsstands Monday is guaranteed to turn some heads. Under the picture of our dear leader are the words, "Hit the Road, Barack: Why We Need a New Leader." The article is written by Niall Ferguson, a British historian and economist that backed John McCain in 2008. After an introduction, Ferguson made his case: In his inaugural address, Obama promised “not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth.” He promised to “build the roads and bridges, the electric grids, and digital lines that feed...

Niall Ferguson Has Been Wrong On Economics Joe Weisenthal Aug. 19, 2012, 6:44 PM Niall Ferguson has a huge piece in The Daily Beast saying Obama needs to get fired titled: "Hit The Road, Barack."It's basically an ell-encompassing takedown of Obama's record on the economy (it still sucks), the deficit (it's getting bigger) and America's standing in the world (The Mideast has not gotten safer). It even hits Obama for stuff like this, which seems totally inevitable at some point, regardless of who is President.Newsweek Anyway, as you read Niall Ferguson, it's worth noting that he has been wrong on...

I was a good loser four years ago. “In the grand scheme of history,” I wrote the day after Barack Obama’s election as president, “four decades is not an especially long time. Yet in that brief period America has gone from the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. to the apotheosis of Barack Obama. You would not be human if you failed to acknowledge this as a cause for great rejoicing.” Despite having been—full disclosure—an adviser to John McCain, I acknowledged his opponent’s remarkable qualities: his soaring oratory, his cool, hard-to-ruffle temperament, and his near faultless campaign organization. Yet the...

Let's reward good behavior. Newsweek is apparently desperate to survive. We plan on buying this issue off the shelf. Might they get the message????

(snip) My pessimism is supported by a simple historical observation. The achievements of the last 25 years were actually not that big a deal compared with what we did in the preceding 25 years, 1961-1986 (e.g. landing men on the moon). And the 25 years before that, 1935-1960, were even more impressive (e.g. splitting the atom). In the words of Peter Thiel, perhaps the lone skeptic within a hundred miles of Palo Alto: In our youth we were promised flying cars. What did we get? 140 characters. Moreover, technoptimists have to explain why the rapid scientific technological progress in those...

Young people should welcome austerity measures because it means huge government debts are less likely to blight their futures, historian Niall Ferguson has said. The economic historian, who is affiliated to Oxford and Harvard Universities, says wise young voters should insist politicians pay off debts as soon as possible.... “It is surprisingly easy to win the support of young voters for policies that would ultimately make matters even worse for them, like maintaining defined benefit pensions for public employees,” ... He adds: "If young Americans knew what was good for them, they would all be in the Tea Party." Professor...

http://www.businessinsider.com/study-company-us-2012-4 NIALL FERGUSON: This Is The Study That Shows Why The US Economy Is Doomed Rob Wile | Apr. 5, 2012, 2:02 PM | 17,651 | 67 A Harvard Business School study that Niall Ferguson pointed us to today shows the U.S. has fallen severely behind in terms of international competitiveness. The study, from January, found that for Harvard alums personally involved in a company relocation decision, 57 percent said the decision "involved the possibility of moving existing activities out of the U.S." Meanwhile, only 9 percent considered moving existing activities from another country into the U.S. "A U.S.-based respondent...

Over the past few centuries, Western cultures have been very good at creating general prosperity for themselves. Historian Niall Ferguson asks: Why the West, and less so the rest? He suggests half a dozen big ideas from Western culture -- call them the 6 killer apps -- that promote wealth, stability and innovation. And in this new century, he says, these apps are all shareable. History is a curious thing, and Niall Ferguson investigates not only what happened but why. 20 minute video at the link

Welcome to Europe, 2021. Ten years have elapsed since the great crisis of 2010-11, which claimed the scalps of no fewer than 10 governments, including Spain and France. Some things have stayed the same, but a lot has changed. The euro is still circulating, though banknotes are now seldom seen. (Indeed, the ease of electronic payments now makes some people wonder why creating a single European currency ever seemed worth the effort.) But Brussels has been abandoned as Europe's political headquarters. Vienna has been a great success. "There is something about the Habsburg legacy," explains the dynamic new Austrian Chancellor...

Call it Niall Ferguson's Pauline Kael moment . . . During the roundtable segment this morning on ABC's This Week, Ferguson, an academic with appointments at Harvard, Stanford and Oxford, said that "all the Texans I know" can't stand Rick Perry. Ferguson was reacting to host Christiane Amanpour's question about Perry's highly-animated New Hampshire address. Ferguson professed to like the "swaggering Texan" side of Perry he apparently saw in the speech. George Will had a caustic comeback. View the video here.

<p>Civilizations don’t rise, fall, and then gently decline, as inevitably and predictably as the four seasons or the seven ages of man. History isn’t one smooth, parabolic curve after another. Its shape is more like an exponentially steepening slope that quite suddenly drops off like a cliff.</p> <p>'snip'</p> <p>'snip'</p>

Americans love a revolution. Their own great nation having been founded by a revolutionary declaration and forged by a revolutionary war, they instinctively side with revolutionaries in other lands, no matter how different their circumstances, no matter how disastrous the outcomes. This chronic reluctance to learn from history could carry a very heavy price tag if the revolutionary wave currently sweeping across North Africa and the Middle East breaks with the same shattering impact as most revolutionary waves. Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson hailed the French Revolution. “The French have served an apprenticeship to Liberty in this country,” wrote the...

"President Obama is one of the least experienced men in terms of foreign policy to ever occupy the White House and yet he has advisers around him who are frankly, second, if not third-rate and you just can't do that. It's far too risky, it's far too dangerous of a world and some of us said this when he ran for election that it was a huge risk to put somebody of that kind of inexperience into the position like Commander-in-Chief of the United States. And what we saw unfold in Egypt reveals the truth of that segment," Professor Niall...

Niall Ferguson, Harvard professor and Newsweek columnist, rained on the Morning Joe parade this morning by arguing President Obama blew it in Egypt and has now left the country in a fragile state potentially susceptible to domination by the Muslim Brotherhood. Prior to hearing Ferguson, Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough thought Obama did pretty well with the situation, however Ferguson passionately attempted to convince them otherwise. Brzezinski claimed “looking at all the different reports coming in, and the pictures, and the peacefulness on the streets of Cairo, so far so good it actually seems like it went pretty damn well.”...

Even if IÂ’m wrong, and my old rival Paul Krugman is rightÂ… and that is possible. I donÂ’t rule that out. Even if heÂ’s right and the interest rate is low, the bond market is in a coma, and the vigilante go off and take up some other activities. Recurrent deficits year after year, never much less than 5 percent of GDP even on the administrationÂ’s optimistic forecasts, plus debt accumulation as a result mean inevitably that interest payments will consume a rising proportion of tax revenue. The process I have described you is independent of any bond market panic....

Ferguson: Why No Jobs? Tax Hikes Ahead Monday, July 26, 2010 11:46 AM By: Dan Weil Harvard economic historian Niall Ferguson has an explanation for why unemployment remains stubbornly high at 9.5 percent. It’s the threat of tax increases as the Bush tax cuts end this year. “Why is it that small- and medium-sized businesses in the United States today are not hiring? Why is it that they're not expanding?” he said on CNN. “It's because they see the tax hikes coming that are implied by this fiscal policy.” The United States is running a budget deficit estimated by the...

Niall Ferguson: A US Fiscal Disaster Is Imminent, And Bernanke's Monetary Policy Is Appalling Joe Weisenthal Jul. 12, 2010, 8:19 AM Ignore the uber-low yields on U.S. government debt. It's only a matter of time before markets lose confidence in the U.S. government argues Harvard professor Niall Ferguson. Right now Washington is benefiting from global worries, such as those being seen in Europe, but that won't last for long. If you want to look for a pivotal moment: Watch for when debt interest payments begin to eclipse defense payments. In fact, this will happen inevitably, even if there's no imminent...

San Francisco - Over the last two years, three-quarters of San Francisco's uninsured adults have enrolled in a public program that guarantees access to medical services, an effort that is being touted as a national model during the rancorous debate over healthcare reform. More than 46,000 adults have enrolled in Healthy San Francisco since it was launched; this first-in-the- nation, city-run universal healthcare effort has received high marks in recent independent studies. The program is funded in part by an employer mandate, a controversial component of the plans under discussion in Washington. One analysis has concluded that this mandate on...

It's careful, it's complicated, it's got a catchy name, and it's first. At face value, that's what I see in the Mortgage Bankers Association's proposal to formulate a new, government-guaranteed, mortgage backed securities market to take the place of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.Let's start at the very beginning, with the MBA press release: The centerpiece of MBA’s recommendation is the creation of a new line of mortgage-backed securities (MBS). Each security would have two components – a loan level guarantee provided by privately-owned, government-chartered and regulated mortgage credit-guarantor entity (MCGE) and a security-level, federal government-guaranteed wrap.America, meet the MCGE,...

There is no example in history of any country growing out of this sort of debt position, except for Britain in the early 1800s, which had empire and industrial revolution on its side. Default now seems the only escape, and the U.S. may choose that path with unfunded liabilities like Social Security.

Now, who said the following? "My prediction is that politicians will eventually be tempted to resolve the [fiscal] crisis the way irresponsible governments usually do: by printing money, both to pay current bills and to inflate away debt. And as that temptation becomes obvious, interest rates will soar." Seems pretty reasonable to me. The surprising thing is that this was none other than Paul Krugman, the high priest of Keynesianism, writing back in March 2003. A year and a half later he was comparing the U.S. deficit with Argentina's (at a time when it was 4.5 percent of GDP). Has...

... [L]ong-term rates have risen by 167 basis points in the space of five months. In relative terms, that represents an 81 per cent jump. Most commentators were unnerved by this development, coinciding as it did with warnings about the fiscal health of the US. For me, however, it was good news. For it settled a rather public argument between me and the Princeton economist Paul Krugman. It is a brave or foolhardy man who picks a fight with Mr Krugman, the most recent recipient of the Nobel Prize for Economics. Yet a cat may look at a king, and...

British Econ-god Niall Ferguson goes after US econ-god Paul Krugman, who made the mistake of being condescending to him on a panel last week. The fate of the world hangs in the balance. From the FT: On Wednesday last week, yields on 10-year US Treasuries – generally seen as the benchmark for long-term interest rates – rose above 3.73 per cent. Once upon a time that would have been considered rather low. But the financial crisis has changed all that: at the end of last year, the yield on the 10-year fell to 2.06 per cent. In other words, long-term...

Does Wall Street's meltdown presage the end of the American century? Many commentators have warned that the past week's financial mayhem signaled a major political setback for the United States as well as an economic one. "Why should the rest of the world ever again take seriously the American free-market model after this debacle?" a leading British journalist asked me last Thursday. This crisis, he argued, was to economics what the Iraq war was to U.S. foreign policy: a fatal blow to the credibility of American claims to global primacy. Certainly, if the talk of a "unipolar moment" after the...

(snip) I remember visiting the pre-Giuliani Manhattan. It was like one long episode of "Kojak." The professions then open to young New Yorkers were dealer, hood, hooker, junkie, pimp -- or bent cop. Yet by the time I moved to the city, not long after 9/11, the analysts outnumbered the psychos. "Kojak" had been replaced by "Seinfeld." A large share of the credit for that transformation belongs to Giuliani. His presidential bid is based on the notion that what worked for the world's capital city can work for the world. America, Giuliani says, must remain "on offense" to win the...

Seven years ago, the economist Brigitte Granville and I published an article ...titled "Weimar on the Volga," in which we argued that the experience of 1990s Russia bore many resemblances to the experience of 1920s Germany. ... "By discrediting free markets, the rule of law, parliamentary institutions and international economic openness," ... "the Weimar inflation proved the perfect seedbed for national socialism. In Russia, too, the immediate social costs of high inflation may have grave political consequences in the medium term. As in Weimar Germany, the losers may yet become the natural constituency for a political backlash against both foreign...

Imagine an American president addressing the United Nations and concluding his remarks by praying that God would hasten Christ’s return and unleash the apocalypse. What do you suppose public opinion would be? Well, something even scarier actually happened at the UN last week, and the world said... nothing. That’s because the president in question was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran. At the end of his September 21 address to the General Assembly, he prayed that Allah would send “the perfect human being promised to all by you.” That “perfect human being” Ahmadinejad prayed for was the Mahdi, a Shiite messianic figure....

According to ABC News, 2008 presidential candidate Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) may have recently called his moderate-right credentials into question. "McCain has tapped a controversial academic to be a member of his virtual 'kitchen cabinet,'" ABCNews.com noted. That academic -- Niall Ferguson of Harvard University -- is, according to David Weigel of Reason magazine, a "foaming-at-the-mouth 'national greatness conservative.'" This academic has presented, according to Priyamvada Gopal of Cambridge University in Britain, an "aggressive rewriting of history, driven by the messianic fantasies of the American right." Who is this dastardly intellectual twisting the liberal media's beloved "Maverick" McCain into a...

The idea that there is something fundamentally unconservative about protecting the environment is, of course, a canard. At the very core of British conservatism since the time of Benjamin Disraeli has been a romantic reverence for the land and a desire to mitigate the damage done by industrialization. It was Marx and Engels who sneered at "the idiocy of rural life." It was Lenin and Stalin whose mania for smoke-belching steelworks turned huge tracts of Russia into toxic wastelands. Conservatives do not expect problems to be solved by some kind of world government; on the contrary, they prefer local solutions...

Critics of U.S. global dominance should pause and consider the alternative. If the United States retreats from its hegemonic role, who would supplant it? Not Europe, not China, not the Muslim world—and certainly not the United Nations. Unfortunately, the alternative to a single superpower is not a multilateral utopia but the anarchic nightmare of a new Dark Age. We tend to assume that power, like nature, abhors a vacuum. In the history of world politics, it seems, someone is always the hegemon or bidding to become it. Today, it is the United States; a century ago, it was the United...

MAYBE IT'S because I know I have to catch a transatlantic flight on Sept. 11. Maybe I'm just too fond of "What if?" historical questions. Whatever the reason, I can't get over how quickly the world has moved on since the exposure of the Heathrow bomb plot. Ever since the revelation that a terrorist ring intended "mass murder on an unimaginable scale," I've been finding it all too easy to imagine what it would have been like if the plotters had succeeded. We cannot assume, for obvious legal reasons, that the suspects who were charged in London are anything other...

This might not be a world war, but it still needs a sense of urgency By Niall Ferguson (Filed: 23/07/2006) This is not the first time that world leaders have had their summers ruined by "a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing". In the summer of 1938, the quarrel between Germans and Czechs over the Sudetenland - which inspired Neville Chamberlain's notorious phrase - brought Europe to the brink of war. Chamberlain's shuttle diplomacy, which saw him fly three times to see Hitler in Germany, was inspired by memories of an earlier quarrel over...

Are we heading for a Summer of Rage? A generation ago, young Americans flocked to San Francisco with flowers in their hair for a hippie Summer of Love. But today the potent combination of young people and sunny weather is producing something very different. The Sixties slogan was "Make Love Not War". The 2006 slogan seems to be the very opposite. From Mumbai to Mogadishu, from Helmand to Haifa, the past week has seen an eruption of violence. Around 200 people were killed on Tuesday when a succession of bombs exploded along what was once Bombay's Western railway line. Suspicion...

The march of Islam (Filed: 21/05/2006) Nuclear power is not the only weapon Iran has at its disposal – its population is growing seven times faster than Britain’s. In this exclusive extract from his new book, Niall Ferguson reveals how Islam is winning the numbers game For many people the end of the 20th Century was 'the triumph of the West'. Writing in 1989, Francis Fukuyama argued that the crumbling of Soviet Communism marked 'the end of history'. Capitalism, liberalism and democracy had emerged as the victors of the century's protracted ideological conflicts. Numbers game: Friday prayers at Kadhimiya shrine...

[snip] Congressmen should beware of underestimating this president as others have done in the past. They should remember that a second-term president is not necessarily a lame duck. He is also a man with nothing to lose. So my guess is that Bush is going to bite back. And the obvious way for him to do this is over Iran. Last Tuesday Vice-President Dick Cheney gave a speech in which he bluntly declared: "We will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon." Remind you of anything? It was Cheney who set the pace four years ago, as the administration...

I miss the Cold War. I know I ought not to, but I just can't help it. So I was naturally delighted by last week's spy story. Admittedly, as one of the papers here cruelly remarked, it was more Johnny English than James Bond. In a television documentary that had Kremlin fingerprints all over it, four British embassy staff were accused of being spooks. Blurred video footage purported to show them fiddling with a rock in a Moscow suburb. Now, the young men and women the Foreign Office traditionally recruits are the type of people who do enjoy fiddling with...

Are we living through the origins of the next world war? Certainly, it is easy to imagine how a future historian might deal with the next phase of events in the Middle East: With every passing year after the turn of the century, the instability of the Gulf region grew. By the beginning of 2006, nearly all the combustible ingredients for a conflict - far bigger in its scale and scope than the wars of 1991 or 2003 - were in place. The first underlying cause of the war was the increase in the region's relative importance as a source...

With every passing year after the turn of the century, the instability of the Gulf region grew. By the beginning of 2006, nearly all the combustible ingredients for a conflict - far bigger in its scale and scope than the wars of 1991 or 2003 - were in place. The first underlying cause of the war was the increase in the region's relative importance as a source of petroleum. On the one hand, the rest of the world's oil reserves were being rapidly exhausted. On the other, the breakneck growth of the Asian economies had caused a huge surge in...

Are we living through the origins of the next world war? Certainly, it is easy to imagine how a future historian might deal with the next phase of events in the Middle East: With every passing year after the turn of the century, the instability of the Gulf region grew. By the beginning of 2006, nearly all the combustible ingredients for a conflict - far bigger in its scale and scope than the wars of 1991 or 2003 - were in place. The first underlying cause of the war was the increase in the region's relative importance as a source...

'There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false." No, that wasn't Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, half-answering questions in Europe last week about the CIA's alleged prison camps in Poland and Romania and the "extraordinary rendition" of terrorist suspects to countries where they are likely to be tortured. It was actually Harold Pinter, explaining the difference between drama and politics in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature....

You shouldn't have to burn cars to get a better life - ask my Bolivian cleaning lady By Niall Ferguson (Filed: 06/11/2005) Which would you rather have in your capital city: a terrorist attack in the centre or a week-long riot on the outskirts? After the experience of last July, most Londoners would probably opt for the latter. The damage inflicted by the Tube bombings far exceeds the cost of the recent mayhem in Paris's eastern suburbs. A few policemen have been injured and one woman badly burnt when her bus was attacked but, apart from the two youths whose...

There is a wonderful Rudyard Kipling short story entitled On the City Walls, which can be read as a kind of metaphor for British rule in India - and perhaps for our apparent misrule in Iraq today. The city in question - Lahore, thinly disguised - is seething with communal antagonism between numerous ethnic and religious groups, among them "Shias of the grimmest and most uncompromising persuasion". The role the British play is to intervene, as and when required, to prevent the occasional riot from turning into a full-scale bloodbath. Of course, you may say, that is only how we...

Disasters happen. Two hundred and fifty years ago, on November 1, 1755, the Portuguese capital, Lisbon, was flattened by an earthquake that killed thousands of its inhabitants. Like the hurricane that inundated New Orleans last week, the calamity inspired not only awe at the power of nature and sympathy for the helpless victims, but also all kinds of moral commentary. None was more profound than that of the French philosopher Voltaire. To Voltaire, the destruction of Lisbon was proof that we do not live "in the best of all possible worlds" - a philosophical position associated with Gottfried Leibniz, but...