Niall Ferguson
Member of the Board, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs
Experience
Niall Ferguson is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University. He is also a Senior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford University, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University and a member of the Belfer Center’s Board. Born in Glasgow in 1964, he was a Demy at Magdalen College and graduated with First Class Honours in 1985. After two years as a Hanseatic Scholar in Hamburg and Berlin, he took up a Research Fellowship at Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1989, subsequently moving to a Lectureship at Peterhouse. He returned to Oxford in 1992 to become Fellow and Tutor in Modern History at Jesus College, a post he held until 2000, when he was appointed Professor of Political and Financial History at Oxford. Two years later he left for the United States to take up the Herzog Chair in Financial History at the Stern Business School, New York University, before moving to Harvard in 2004. His first book, Paper and Iron: Hamburg Business and German Politics in the Era of Inflation 1897-1927 (Cambridge University Press, 1995), was short-listed for the History Today Book of the Year award, while the collection of essays he edited, Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (Macmillan, 1997), was a UK bestseller and subsequently published in the United States, Germany, Spain and elsewhere. In 1998 he published to international critical acclaim The Pity of War: Explaining World War One (Basic Books) and The World’s Banker: The History of the House of Rothschild (Penguin). The latter won the Wadsworth Prize for Business History and was also short-listed for the Jewish Quarterly/Wingate Literary Award and the American National Jewish Book Award. In 2001 he published The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World, 1700-2000 (Basic), following a year as Houblon-Norman Fellow at the Bank of England. He is a regular contributor to television and radio on both sides of the Atlantic. In 2003 he wrote and presented a six-part history of the British Empire for Channel 4, the UK terrestrial broadcaster. The accompanying book, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (Basic), was a bestseller in both Britain and the United States. The sequel, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire, was published in 2004 by Penguin. His latest book is The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred, published by Penguin in 2006. A prolific commentator on contemporary politics and economics, Niall Ferguson writes and reviews regularly for the British and American press. He is a weekly columnist for the Sunday Telegraph and the LA Times. In 2004 Time magazine named him as one of the world’s hundred most influential people.
He and his wife Susan have three children. They divide their time between the United States and the United Kingdom.
AP Photo
November 16, 2009
"The Great Wallop"
Op-Ed, New York Times
By Niall Ferguson, Member of the Board, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and Moritz Schularick
"A few years ago we came up with the term "Chimerica" to describe the combination of the Chinese and American economies, which together had become the key driver of the global economy," says Niall Ferguson member of the Belfer Center's board of directors. "Correcting the economic imbalance between the United States and China - the dissolution of Chimerica - is now indispensable if equilibrium is to be restored to the world economy."
November 16, 2009
"The Year the World Really Changed"
Magazine or Newspaper Article, Newsweek
By Niall Ferguson, Member of the Board, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs
"...1989 was less of a watershed year than 1979. The reverberations of the fall of the Berlin Wall turned out to be much smaller than we had expected at the time. In essence, what happened was that we belatedly saw through the gigantic fraud of Soviet superpower. But the real trends of our time—the rise of China, the radicalization of Islam, and the rise and fall of market fundamentalism—had already been launched a decade earlier."
September 11, 2009
"Wall Street’s New Gilded Age"
Op-Ed, Newsweek
By Niall Ferguson, Member of the Board, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs
"But now, barely a year after one of the worst crises in all financial history, we seem to have returned to the Gilded Age of the late 19th century-the last time bankers came close to ruling America," argues Niall Ferguson, member of the Belfer Center's board of directors. "A few Wall Street giants, led by none other than JPMorgan, are back to making serious money and paying million-dollar bonuses," Ferguson says, while "every month, hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans face foreclosure or unemployment because of a crisis caused by ... a few Wall Street giants."
AP Photo
August 11, 2009
"A Runaway Deficit May Soon Test Obama’s Luck"
Op-Ed, Financial Times
By Niall Ferguson, Member of the Board, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs
President Barack Obama reminds me of Felix the Cat. One of the best-loved cartoon characters of the 1920s, Felix was not only black. He was also very, very lucky. And that pretty much sums up the 44th president of the US as he takes a well-earned summer break after just over six months in the world’s biggest and toughest job.
AP Photo
June 29, 2009
"Do not count on the Tories winning just yet"
Op-Ed, Financial Times
By Niall Ferguson, Member of the Board, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs
"Most commentators assume that whenever the election happens it will be won by the Conservatives. The Labour party had its worst performance in the recent elections since 1910. As in the 1990s, the electorate is sick of the incumbent party. Just as the Labour party had young, telegenic Tony Blair in 1997, so the Tories today have young, telegenic David Cameron.
Yet this is to overstate the strength of the Conservative position."
AP Photo
May 30, 2009
"A History Lesson for Economists in Thrall to Keynes"
Op-Ed, Financial Times
By Niall Ferguson, Member of the Board, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs
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 sometimes a historian can challenge an economist.
January 7, 2008
"An Ottoman Warning for America"
Op-Ed, Financial Times (London)
By Niall Ferguson, Member of the Board, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs
Future historians will look back on the current decade as a turning point comparable with that of the Seventies. No, not the 1970s. This is not going to be another piece pointing out the coincidence of an unpopular Republican president, soaring oil prices, a sagging dollar and an unwinnable faraway war. I am talking about the 1870s.
This is the story of how an over-extended empire sought to cope with an external debt crisis by selling off revenue streams to foreign investors. The empire that suffered these setbacks in the 1870s was the Ottoman empire. Today it is the US.
