Niall Ferguson



Profile:
Full name: Niall Ferguson

Area of interest: Politics and Economics - expert on the origins of conflict in the 20th century

Journals/Organisation: Financial Times | Los Angeles Times

Email: [mailto:nfergus@fas.harvard.edu nfergus@fas.harvard.edu]

Personal website:

Website: http://www.niallferguson.com

Blog:

Representation: contacts page

Networks: https://twitter.com/#!/nfergus | http://www.linkedin.com/pub/10/7b2/92a



Biography:
About: http://www.niallferguson.com/site/FERG/Templates/General2.aspx?pageid=5&cc=GB

Education: The Glasgow Academy | Magdalen College, Oxford (Demy): 1st-class honours degree

Career: NiallFerguson.com biography

Current position/role: weekly columnist for Newsweek


 * also writes/written for:

Other roles/Main role: Professor of History at Harvard University; senior research fellow at Jesus College, Oxford University: senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University
 * Laurence Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University - teaches in the History Department and the Harvard Business School as the William Ziegler Professor of Business Administration. Also holds fellowships at Jesus College, University of Oxford, and at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. (Previously John Herzog Chair of Financial History at New York University (NYU), Professor of Modern History at University of Oxford)

Other activities: Hired as a consultant by GLG Partners, Hedge Fund, September 2007 (source: City AM 28/09/07); contributing editor for Bloomberg TV

Disclosures:

Viewpoints/Insight:
 * 'The left love being provoked by me ... they think I'm a reactionary imperialist scumbag', interview with Decca Aitkenhead, The Guardian, 11th April 2011
 * What would the left wing do without me?, interview with Sean O'Grady, The Independent, 3rd July 2010
 * Conversations with History: The War of the World, Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley, 2006
 * Niall Ferguson's Current Research

Broadcast media:

Video: Regularly contributes to television and radio
 * Channel 4: China: Triumph and Turmoil, examines China's ascendancy, and asks what the future holds for the world's most populous country and its relationship with the rest of the world, March 2012
 * Channel 4: Civilization: Is the West History?, March 2011
 * Channel 4: The War of the World: A new history of the 20th century (2006)
 * wrote/presented six-part history of the British Empire for Channel 4 (2003)
 * documentary based on Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire, Channel 4 (2004)

and see: NiallFerguson.com Film/TV clips

Controversy/Criticism:
 * Relationship between democracy and economics: Lecturer ignites controversy in talk, Adrian O'Connor
 * Niall Ferguson apologises for remarks about 'gay and childless' Keynes - In speech at conference, Harvard professor implied economist lacked foresight because he was childless and gay - The Observer, 4th May 2013

Awards/Honours: Paper and Iron: Hamburg Business and German Politics in the Era of Inflation 1897-1927 (Cambridge University Press, 1995), short-listed for the History Today Book of the Year award; The World’s Banker: The History of the House of Rothschild (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) won the Wadsworth Prize for Business History and was short-listed for the Jewish Quarterly/Wingate Literary Award as well as the American National Jewish Book Award

Scoops:

Other: Time magazine named him as one of the world’s hundred most influential people, 2004



Books & Debate:

 * Paper and iron: Hamburg business and German politics in the era of inflation, 1897-1927. ISBN 0-521-47016-1. 1995
 * The world's banker: the history of the house of Rothschild. ISBN 0-297-81539-3. 1998
 * The pity of war. ISBN 0-465-05711-X. 1999
 * Virtual history: alternatives and counterfactuals. ISBN 0-465-02322-3. 1999
 * The cash nexus: money and power in the modern world, 1700-2000. ISBN 0-7139-9465-7. 2000
 * Empire: how Britain made the modern world. ISBN 0-7139-9615-3. 2003
 * Colossus. ISBN 0-7139-9770-2. 2004
 * The war of the world: history's age of hatred. ISBN 0-7139-9708-7. 2006
 * The ascent of money: a financial history of the world. OCLC 191929255, 2009
 * High financier: the lives and times of Siegmund Warburg OCLC 559865393, 2010

Latest work: Civilization: the west and the rest OCLC704199921, February 2011, review here by Dominic Lawson in The Sunday Times

and see: NiallFerguson.com: bookstore

Speaking/Appearances: Centre for Policy Studies Ruttenberg Memorial Lecture: Conservatism and the Crisis: A Transatlantic Trilemma (download lecture here) - 24th March, 2009

Debate: 

Journals:

 * No regular column



Articles: 2017

 * America is angry, and the safety catch is off - The Virginia shootings point to an upsurge in political violence - 18th June
 * Now watch Trump bend to the laws of physics - We now know the half-life of populism. It’s 12 months. Scientific disclaimer: I know that what just happened in British politics is not identical to what happens when atoms undergo radioactive decay - 11th June
 * Trump’s orb lights the path out of terrorism - The president’s photo op in Riyadh signals a strategic coup - 28th May
 * Trump is slipping and sliding but may be safe - The left is too quick to see tyranny or ruin in the sacking of the FBI chief - 14th May
 * The left’s chapter of history has ended - The problem is not Clinton or Corbyn: social democracy itself is dead - 8th May
 * The world’s new sheriff doesn’t shoot blanks - Trump’s action in Syria signals the US impotence under Obama is over - 9th April
 * This is no friendly divorce, but a long, bitter schism - Europe is free to bind closer and hurt a UK desperate for deals elsewhere - 2nd April
 * Dawa: the Islamist mind poison that turns lost souls into ‘lone wolves’ - 26th March
 * How do we stop net giants mugging us? China will tell us — for a bitcoin - Only in China could there already be a museum of internet finance. - 19th March
 * Trump already has his war — it was started in Cyberia and will never end - Cyberia is the twilight zone inhabited by Russian intelligence. Cyber war spreads disinformation - 12th March
 * At ease, America. Trump’s generals are no junta, they’re your best hope - 26th February
 * The lying, hating hi‑tech webs of Zuck and Trump are the new superpowers - The world today is like a giant network on the verge of a cataclysmic outage - 19th February
 * If you fight the law, Mr Trump, the law wins. Take on Iran and sharia instead - 12th February
 * Look out, world — the Jekyll and Hyde president has a nose for weakness - 5th February
 * Watching the Donald show is fun, but look out for the real action off‑screen - America is living through a kind of Trumpian Genesis: seven days of high-speed political creation - 29th January
 * Misjudge China, and Donald Dealmaker will never make America great again - 22nd January
 * Here’s a true Trump nightmare for the liberals: that his policies work - Imagine if George Washington’s farewell address had been followed a day later — rather than 172 years later — by Richard Nixon’s first press conference as president-elect - 15th January



Articles: 2016

 * Sorry, I was wrong to fight Brexit to keep my friends in No 10 and No 11 - I was wrong to argue against Brexit, as I admitted in public last week. By this I do not mean to say “I wish I had backed the winning side”. Rather, I mean “I wish I had stuck to my principles - 11th December
 * Trump’s Mad Dog is the sane warrior we need to make the world safer - The new defence secretary is not only a fearsome soldier, he is deep strategic thinker - 4th December
 * The football abuse case is not the new Savile — this hysteria must end - Here we go again. A BBC news bulletin warns of “fears” that reports of sexual assaults on young footballers by an acclaimed coach “echo the case of Jimmy Savile . . . unearthing abuse on a scale never previously imagined” - 27th November
 * Trump pitches, Clinton swings. But the size of the crowd is key to this game - ‘October surprises’ such as the new FBI emails inquiry rarely swing an election - 6th November
 * Whoever wins, America needs a new Kissinger to build bridges with China - There is a reason to doubt Clinton would automatically play hardball with Beijing - 30th October
 * The two-party system is failing us all. America must declare independents - Most democracies have become multiparty — Even Britain, birthplace of Whigs and Tories - 23rd October
 * It’s not complicated: Hillary wins if she keeps things nice and simple - The Gettysburg address was just 272 words. The past was punchy. The present is prolix - 2nd October
 * Monster goldfish and globaloney: the force pushing Trump closer to power - They should have cancelled United Nations week in New York as soon as the news broke that Angelina was divorcing Brad. Did any family more perfectly embody the hopes of that nebulous but uplifting entity, the international community, than theirs? - 25th September
 * Hillary Snafu and Donald Fubar: it’s all about which mess America wants - Trump offers voters acceleration along a new track, albeit at the risk of derailment - 18th September
 * As the Fishtown hordes rally to Trump, Hillary’s elite risks coming apart - The white lower class will turn out for Trump in droves, like their UK counterparts for Brexit - 31st July
 * Trump calls on the forgotten to gift him the United States of Armageddon - The political elite have failed to understand the power of the paranoid style - 24th July
 * Hillary or Donald? The American dilemma as excruciating as Brexit - the lessons of Brexit for America are as follows. First, in most modern elections, results are close, so do not expect Clinton to trounce Trump - 17th July
 * If Tony had let Saddam be, would we be applauding now? I doubt it - To Blair, leaving Saddam in power seemed worse than toppling him. Most of Fleet Street agreed - 9th July
 * Generation Led Zep has just kicked Britain down the Stairway to Hell - The old politics of class is being overlaid by a more complex politics of age and identity - 26th June
 * Two atrocities; each deserves to be met with sorrow, but only one with fear - No man is an island, as John Donne said. Every murder changes the world a bit - 19th June
 * Come on, Hillary — give America a little piece of your heart - You may find this hard to believe, but Hillary Rodham Clinton was once a conservative - 12th June
 * The young aim wide in the clash of generations - Just consider the generation gap on the question of Brexit - 5th June
 * Fog in Channel: Brexiteers isolated from Britain’s duty to save Europe - Last Tuesday about 70 historians gathered at No 11 Downing Street to affirm their support for EU membership - 29th May
 * China is in the grip of a new cultural revolution, led by Chairman Money - Some weeks it is hard to know what to worry about most. Terrorist attacks? Mass migration triggered by war? Trump or Brexit? And yet all this could easily pale into insignificance if the world’s most populous country were to repeat its own history - 22nd May
 * It’s Big Brother v the bin Ladens in a cack-handed corruption crackdown - In Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky fired a broadside against the 19th-century do-gooders who dreamt of a perfectly rational society. “You seem certain that man himself will give up erring of his own free will,” he fulminated - 15th May
 * Trump won’t wreck America — the rest of the world is another matter - The American Berlusconi? First, this isn’t Italy. Second, Trump can’t afford to forget his election pledges and focus on partying - 8th May
 * Islamists and Trots are hijacking the opposition: of course it’s anti-semitic - I am a philo-semite. The disproportionate Jewish contribution to western civilisation— not least to science and the arts — is one of the most astonishing achievements of modern history - 1st May
 * Empires fall. Power matters. That’s why we should listen to America - “You like tomayto, and I like tomahto,” crooned Fred Astaire to Ginger Rogers in the 1937 caper Shall We Dance. I had always unthinkingly assumed this was a song about the differences in pronunciation between American and British English. But of course it’s not - 24th April
 * Brexit’s happy morons don’t give a damn about the costs of leaving - 17th April
 * Crafty Cruz sees there are enough suckers to put him in the White House - I cannot imagine Ted Cruz as president of the United States. Despite his emphatic defeat of Donald Trump in the Wisconsin primary - 10th April
 * Click, whir, babble. Chatbot Trump spews out foreign policy piffle - I have to admit that DeepMind’s AlphaGo computer had me worried when it trounced the world champion at the board game Go... - 3rd April
 * It takes a network to defeat a network, so our best weapon against Isis is the EU - The word of last week was "network". I have lost track of the number of times I have read... - 27th March
 * Caveman Trump wields a plastic club in the revolt against feminine politics - In our time, women have been gaining political power as never before. There are (by my count)... - 20th March
 * Obama pours blame on his friends while the Middle East dam cracks - There is a powerful symbolism in the impending collapse of Iraq’s Mosul dam - The Sunday Times, 13th March
 * Big Brother Trump, forgive me. I once doubted you would be a good president - From the vantage point of 2024, as President Trump prepares to run for His third term in the White House, the events of 2016 have an air of inevitability about them - The Sunday Times, 6th March
 * Trump doesn’t wear jackboots — but we need to stamp on his populism - Panic is setting in. "I now understand... exactly how Hitler could have come to power," says my Harvard colleague. Welcome to Weimar America - The Sunday Times, 28th February
 * Brexit now and we will only have to Breturn to save a disintegrating Europe - The Sunday Times, 21st February
 * The oil producers are in for a bumpy ride but we’ll escape the ‘doom loop’ - In the film The Revenant’s best known scene, Leonardo DiCaprio is hideously mauled by a bear... - The Sunday Times, 14th February
 * Trump may grab little old Iowa but he won’t be seizing the big prize - Imagine if we did it the American way — the way they will do it in Iowa tomorrow - The Sunday Times, 31st January
 * Cheer up: the world will bounce back after the blues in the loos of Davos - It’s a bit like reliving your college years, but with each year compressed into a day - The Sunday Times, 24th January



Articles: 2015

 * Like the Roman empire, Europe has let its defences crumble - I am not going to repeat what you have already read or heard - The Sunday Times, 15th November
 * We must relearn arts of war and strategy - West blew its peace dividend in 20-year party of consumption and speculation - Financial Times, 26th September
 * Labour should blame Keynes for defeat - The real architect of the Conservative victory was surely the chancellor - Financial Times, 11th May
 * The meaning of the Minsk agreement - The devilish detail of this document is highly advantageous to the Russians - Financial Times, 14th February



Articles: 2014

 * Scotland and Europe need grand coalitions - The right response is for the centrists to join forces, hard though it is to bury their ancestral rivalries - 22nd September
 * Nationalists, you took one hell of a beating - This was no ambiguous outcome. It was a political triumph for the prime minister, both north and south of the border - 20th September
 * Downturn’s discontents spurn populism - European populism is more like the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party than Boston’s - 19th April



Articles: 2013

 * The left's irrational fear of American intervention - In Syria, as elsewhere, US military might is the best available means of preventing crimes against humanity - 7th September
 * Merkel’s ‘deutsche Michel’ ploy is flawed - The euro project had fiscal implications from the start - 12th july
 * Right about Britain and nearly everything - She was respected more abroad than at home - 9th April
 * On the teaching of history, Michael Gove is right - Why do critics feel obliged to defend a status quo that so many teachers, parents and pupils agree is indefensible? - 15th February
 * Admiral Dave takes wind from foes’ sails - Forty years ago British cartoonists depicted a Conservative leader — Edward Heath — steering the British ship of state towards a European harbour. Last week another Tory leader was sailing in the opposite direction - 27th January 2013
 * Currency wars are best fought quietly - The identity of the true warriors might come as a surprise - 26th January



Articles: 2012

 * The United States: a struggling nation that is polls apart - America is divided as never before on class, gender, race and economic lines – but voters agree on the big issue - 3rd November
 * Civil society has slipped into a state of decay - True citizens do more than vote and pay taxes. They, not the State, prevent an uncivil society - 10th July
 * The City needs a dose of financial Darwinism - No regulation will be as powerful as the fear of prison to stop our banks behaving badly - 27th June (The Times)
 * Reith Lecture: 'We’re mortgaging the future of the younger generation' - Uncontrolled public debt threatens to rupture society as the older generation thrives at the expense of the young - 19th June (The Telelgraph)
 * Berlin is ignoring the lessons of the 1930s - Bank recapitalisation is essential if the euro is to be saved, with Nouriel Roubini (Financial Times)



Articles: 2010

 * Keynesians have learnt nothing'' - Why are so many economists stuck in 1930s - 20th July
 * do 'God's work', bankers need morals'' - Financiers must be taught to think beyond their bonuses – rather than be regulated more - 6th July (writing in The Daily Telegraph)
 * unappealing choices after an inconclusive election'' - No choice but to implement tough spending cuts - 10th May
 * Greek crisis is coming to America'' - This is more than just a Mediterranean problem; it is a fiscal crisis of the western world - 11th February



Articles: 2009

 * decade the world tilted east'' - The realisation that the yawning US current account deficit was increasingly being financed by Asian central banks, with the Chinese moving into pole position, was, for me at least, the eureka moment of the decade - 28th December
 * to take moral hazard out of banking'' - with Laurence Kotlikoff - 3rd December
 * a Lehman deal would not have saved us'' - If only Lehman Brothers had been saved, all would have been for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Actually no. A decision to bail out the bank would almost certainly have had worse consequences than letting Dick Fuld and his company go under - 15th September
 * runaway deficit may soon test Obama’s luck'' - Six months in, ‘Felix the Prez’ still has the look of a lucky, two-term president. But that could change if voters become even more disenchanted with the legislative branch and start blaming the president for the looming fiscal train-wreck - 11th August
 * trillion dollar question: China or America?'' - Who is going to come out of the economic crisis stronger and with the whip hand - China or America - 2nd June
 * economists can misunderstand the crisis'' - To understand the global financial crisis one must put it in a historical context and not take as gospel the theories of economists such as Keynes - The Daily Telegraph, 30th May
 * This financial crisis does have a Conservative solution - The combined effects of globalisation and the financial crisis have left parties of the Right with a challenging three-way choice - The Daily Telegraph, 24th March
 * the age of leverage: new banks must arise'' - There is a better way to go – in the opposite direction. The aim must be not to increase debt but to reduce it - 3rd February
 * The great liquidity crisis – 94 years ago - Set in the inter-war period, this timely story should remind central bankers on what can go wrong when they achieve only the semblance of co-operation - 3rd January



Articles: 2008

 * An imaginary retrospective of 2009 - Few foresaw the credit crunch of 2008, when people finally gave up trying to predict what lay ahead. For the new year, Niall Ferguson offers his fictional review - 27th December 2008
 * The American Future - This historical rhapsody, which shares Kerouac’s almost inebriated eloquence, is a reflection on the essence of America with a bedrock of deep knowledge behind the bebop prose - 3rd October 2008
 * What price peace? - The Munich agreement, signed 70 years ago, delayed the war in Europe by handing Hitler a part of Czechoslovakia. In hindsight, a year’s peace and economic respite only boosted Germany - 26th September 2008
 * A long shadow - Alan Greenspan, that grandmaster of good timing, last week described the current financial crisis as “probably a once-in-a-century event” - 21st September 2008
 * Their struggle - The Nazi empire turned out to be the least successful piece of colonisation ever seen. Three Hitler biographies offer explanations for the Third Reich’s doom - 13th September 2008
 * How a local squall might become a global tempest - A new and colder front is crossing the macroeconomic weather map: the prospect of a global slowdown. Niall Ferguson considers the outlook - 7th August 2008
 * China’s war on nature - Rapid growth is generating conflicts that may prove hard to keep off the internet – yet the medium is proving as suited to nationalism as to dissent - 14th July 2008
 * Rebellion without a cause - The higher-education earthquake that reverberated across campuses 40 years ago articulated fundamental shifts in society and thinking. Niall Ferguson asks what 1968 has come to mean - 17th May 2008
 * West Village to West Bank - A new readable collection by an authority on sometimes unreadable intellectuals shows how the Left Bank looks from downtown Manhattan - 26th April 2008
 * When worlds collide - Are empires as dominant today as they have ever been? It’s an ambitious claim, but it’s easy to quibble with this work’s conclusions - 28th March 2008
 * Time travellers - Twenty scholars take an imaginary journey back in time and recreate the ambience of key periods in history - 22nd March 2008
 * Slow but sure - Has the democratic wave broken? Is the tide of political freedom now ebbing after the spectacular flow that began in 1989? - 25th January 2008
 * An Ottoman warning for indebted America - Future historians will look back on the current decade as a turning point comparable with that of the Seventies. No, not the 1970s - 1st January 2008



Los Angeles Times:
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Remit/Info: Politics and Economics

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Email: nferguson@latimescolumnists.com

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Articles:

 * archive



News & updates:

 * Niall Ferguson: China's got the whole world in its hands As China approaches global economic supremacy, Harvard professor Niall Ferguson - whose three-part television series on the growing superpower begins tomorrow - reveals his fears for an ominously powerful nation, The Sunday Telegraph, 11th March 2012
 * Fur flies as top academics trade blows over Felix the Cat (and race), The Independent, 24th August 2009

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Links:

 * Wikipedia biography