The most recent and familiar example of precipitous decline is the collapse of the Soviet Union. With the benefit of hindsight, historians have traced all kinds of rot within the Soviet system back to the Brezhnev era and beyond. Perhaps, as the historian and political scientist Stephen Kotkin has argued, it was only the high [...]

go to permalink....

Economist and historian Niall Ferguson predicts a French-German bailout of Greece and financial collapse for other European countries. U.S. might seem like a safe haven now, but with rising nominal yields at a time of low inflation and having a very large debt, there is more trouble coming our way.
Niall Ferguson: The Next Greece? It’s [...]

go to permalink....

Are we living through the end of the domination of the world by the civilisation that arose in western Europe in the wake of the Renaissance and Reformation – the civilisation that, propelled by the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, spread across the Atlantic and as far as the Antipodes, finally reaching its apogee in [...]

go to permalink....

For the better part of the past decade, the world economy has been dominated by a unique geoeconomic constellation that the authors call “Chimerica”: a world economic order that combined Chinese export-led development with U.S. overconsumption on the basis of a financial marriage between the world’s sole superpower and its most likely future rival. For [...]

go to permalink....

Best selling author and historian Niall Ferguson tells Consuelo what the seismic global economic and market shifts of recent years mean for our future, particularly the longer term implications of America’s exploding debt.
Approximately 50% of our debt is held by foreign countries. Our strategic rival, China, holds a big chunk of our debt. That cannot [...]

go to permalink....

We won the cold war and weathered 9/11. But now economic weakness is endangering our global power.
But if the United States succumbs to a fiscal crisis, as an increasing number of economic experts fear it may, then the entire balance of global economic power could shift. Military experts talk as if the president’s decision about [...]

go to permalink....

‘Having narrowly avoided a Great Depression by using massive fiscal and monetary stimulus, we are now in uncharted waters,’ Harvard University historian says
Why Niall Ferguson is still bearish – The Globe and Mail

go to permalink....

“Crises last longer than most people think,” said Ferguson, author of The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World.
“Most crises, major financial crises worthy of the name depression or indeed recession, last significantly longer than a day and they can be measured more in the thousands of days. I think it would be [...]

go to permalink....

The American appetite for credit is likely to be the undoing of the world’s greatest power, a prominent conservative Harvard University historian told several hundred midshipmen last night at the Naval Academy.
Speaking at the 30th annual Bancroft Lecture, economic historian Niall Ferguson warned that China is about to overtake the United States as the world’s [...]

go to permalink....

The U.S. is an empire in decline, according to Niall Ferguson, Harvard professor and author of The Ascent of Money.
Putting a finer point on it, Ferguson says America today is comparable to Britain circa 1900: a dominant empire underestimating the rise of a new power. In Britain’s case back then it was Germany; in America’s [...]

go to permalink....