Niall Ferguson's complete guide to the sovereign debt crises

[DRumsfeld2000]

Enjoy the presentation:-

http://www.businessinsider.com/niall...gn-debt-2010-5

[hayekvindicated]

Re: Niall Ferguson's complete guide to the sovereign debt crises

Enjoy the presentation:-

http://www.businessinsider.com/niall...gn-debt-2010-5

Thanks for posting that.

[jk]

Re: Niall Ferguson's complete guide to the sovereign debt crises

just read the transcript- i recommend it, including the q&a

http://www.iie.com/publications/pape...guson-2010.pdf

[D-Mack]

Re: Niall Ferguson's complete guide to the sovereign debt crises

[Shakespear]

Re: Niall Ferguson's complete guide to the sovereign debt crises

"What causes the crises?"

Here the Prof. Ferguson speaks as an economist and does not wish to delve into the geopolitical behavior that gets the countries in trouble. WAR.

When he says that the current financial conditions we see are not as a result of War, he is clearly doing it for the benefit of not sounding alarmist.

However, We are at War and that is why we are where we are. The War Politics of Bush got us here in mere 8 years. :mad:

Good Lecture

[D-Mack]

Re: Niall Ferguson's complete guide to the sovereign debt crises

Ron Paul is raising the war question, btw the comission is sponsored by the same Peterson institution to which Niall spoke, I assume.
http://www.pgpf.org/newsroom/press/N...esponsibility/

President Obama has packed the Debt Commission (also known as the cat food commission) with members who have an overwhelming history of support for both benefit cuts and privatization of Social Security.
http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/201...privatization/

Lawmakers Call For Cuts In Military Spending


As the budget crisis worsens, some lawmakers are looking where others dare not - at defense spending. In a letter to the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle despaired at "the apparent absence of discussion about the efficacy, the extent, and cost of overseas U.S. military commitments."
The statement authored by Reps. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), Ron Paul (R-Texas), Walter B. Jones (R-N.C.) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) asked commissioners to scale back America's global military commitments. The effort comes just weeks after Frank appointed his own bipartisan commission to look at ways to reduce America's bloated military budget.
"At a time when our nation is facing serious economic problems, when it is borrowing trillions of dollars from foreign nations of varying degrees of friendliness, and it must deal with the rising costs of tens of millions of retiring baby boomers, we believe meaningful deficit reduction requires that no element of existing federal spending can be excluded from consideration," wrote the congressmen in their letter to the Commission. "So while we have differing political views and party affiliations, we are united in the belief that your Commission must rethink the nature and scope of every category of federal spending."
..


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/0..._n_592686.html

[jk]

Re: Niall Ferguson's complete guide to the sovereign debt crises

Ron Paul is raising the war question, btw the comission is sponsored by the same Peterson institution to which Niall spoke, I assume.
http://www.pgpf.org/newsroom/press/N...esponsibility/

[relative] pacifism on the left, libertarianism on the right, along with a tend-our-own-garden-while-under-adversity-isolationism all point to scaling back global commitments. this may hasten the day fergusun points to: when the amount the u.s. spends on interest on its debt exceeds what it spends on the military. that point represents the transition of empire into its dotage. problem: we still depend on imported oil, and our military plays a big role in ensuring that continued flow. i suspect this will determine where and how we choose to cut military spending.

[Shakespear]

Re: Niall Ferguson's complete guide to the sovereign debt crises

I am looking forward to read the good professor's book about Henry Kissinger. It will be interesting to see how he squares the revelations available today of the then US Foreign Policy in Latin America.

[D-Mack]

Re: Niall Ferguson's complete guide to the sovereign debt crises

You can look at the Chile chapter of Ascent of Money, although I believe he doesn't mention Kissinger.
And I haven't read his Rothchild biography
http://video.pbs.org/video/1173188365/#

[Shakespear]

Re: Niall Ferguson's complete guide to the sovereign debt crises

I saw this series recently on BBC and this is where I got the sense that Prof. Ferguson was treating the Western Elites with kid gloves. His is a surgical analysis without a commentary of what's behind the curtain.

The coup in Chilie according to his documentary presentation was clear cut, Maxists were run off by the request of the parliament who opted for a coup. Inefficient elements were eliminated to put in place the best ideas, The Chicago School of Economics. Sounds very simple. How can it be faulted if one looks at the wonderful results that this coup reached.

However I smiled when I listend to Dr. Piniera say that what was dragging down Chile was the Wealfare State of Allende. Ok, but what about the Welfare State for Wall Street of the Bush Administartation? Nehhh, that is not welfare ;)

I came across the GW Univ. project that opened my eyes a bit and made it clearer why there is so much "noise" about US meddling in Latin American politics. The story is not pretty, hence my doubt about Prof. Feguson's analysis of history. Bit too simplistic.

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/...8/nsaebb8i.htm

Rothschild biography was mentioned in the Peterson Institute's Niarchos Lecture. I looked at the Amazon reviews of his 2 vol. book and found it interesting. However, I want to see his Kissinger bio. FIRST before I attempt to read his Rothschild book as it will give me a clue of what to expect from the good Professor

[D-Mack]

Re: Niall Ferguson's complete guide to the sovereign debt crises

Looks like he is going to be influencing school books...

Rightwing historian Niall Ferguson given school curriculum role

...

Ferguson said he had been prompted to turn his attention to history in schools as a result of the way his children were being taught. The problem was not, he said, the quality of teachers, but rather that: "In this country, the vast majority of school pupils learn only about Henry VIII, Adolf Hitler and Martin Luther King. That is what teenagers leave school knowing about, and that is not really enough." His own children, he said, had not been taught who the original Martin Luther was.
The paradox, he said, was that in general culture, "history has never been more popular" – as evinced by the success of history on TV – "but in schools has never been more unpopular. It is a declining subject with a reputation for being boring."
Analysing the options for history at GCSE and A-level, he noted the "near oblivion of ancient and medieval history". He said: "There is no grand narrative that knits together what pupils learn over a year, leave alone over a school career."


...

[Shakespear]

Re: Niall Ferguson's complete guide to the sovereign debt crises

Well I am an engineer but I have come to the realization that not knowing History well leaves you Uneducated ;)

Niall is hanging on a thin branch there saying "His own children, he said, had not been taught who the original Martin Luther was." Why shouldn't they I would ask. Why not read how the Law destroyed thousand of innocent people during the French Revolution and how little even the French know of what had happened. They continue to give honor to men of the Revolution who could best be described as sociopaths or psychopaths.

Kłamstwo Bastylii | Andrzej Cisek » good book but unfortunately only in Polish



Guillotine & The Cross - Warren H. Carroll

[Ben]

Re: Niall Ferguson's complete guide to the sovereign debt crises

Thanks!

...inflation won't work - therefore raising real interest rates and renewed recession with defaults likely?
thoughts anyone?

[Jay]

Re: Niall Ferguson's complete guide to the sovereign debt crises

Thanks!

...inflation won't work - therefore raising real interest rates and renewed recession with defaults likely?
thoughts anyone?

This was the one sentence that caught my eye too. I don't understand how he can be so sure that real interest rates will outpace inflation when you can monetize. In addition, he suggests that the savvy institutional investors are sitting on Treasuries and Gilts. These will do terribly in an environment of rising rates.

[Shakespear]

Re: Niall Ferguson's complete guide to the sovereign debt crises

Jay

when you can monetize.

Unfortunately, I have to strike out three of these six options right away because
certainly from the vantage point of the United States, they’re very unlikely to
materialize. It’s very hard for me to believe, given our present predicament, that we’re
going to see a sudden upsurge in economic growth in the United States. I think one
consequence of the financial crisis has been to lower the growth path of the United
States. At this point we’ve seen some slight recovery in the US 10-year yield, but that,
of course, reflects a flight to safety as investors have exited Europe. At the moment the
view persists that US treasuries are a safe haven, the safe haven for investors. But as I
11
pointed out in the Financial Times some months ago, US treasuries are a safe haven the
way Pearl Harbor was a safe haven in 1941; safe but not for much longer.

The nasty fiscal arithmetic sooner or later catches up with all sovereign borrowers no matter how strong they feel themselves to be—which just leaves fiscal pain, inflation, or default.

Cut, print, or default. Ladies and gentlemen, history affords only one example of a
country that managed to get itself out from excessive debt-to-GDP burden without
either inflating or defaulting. The only case that I can find is Britain after 1815. For
a long century, Britain paid down its debt through growth and through running
primary budget surpluses. There was no default. There was no inflation. But this,
unfortunately, is the only case that history offers us.

....

So that just leaves us with two options: printing, and that’s much easier for a
country with monetary sovereignty like the United States or the United Kingdom
(it’s impossible for Greece, unless Monsieur Trichet agrees to print for them); or
alternatively default, which I believe not only Greece but other eurozone economies
will ultimately do because no bailout can essentially achieve the drastic contraction
in fiscal policy that the Greeks have committed themselves to undertake. And I don’t
believe that that contraction is politically viable

Bonds anyone ? I think he is saying, "NOOOooooo".

So one lesson of history is bond holders beware. If you look at the real annual returns on British and American bonds in the 20th century, the period after World War II
is characterized by four decades of negative returns. These are the annual returns on
both British and American government bonds adjusted for inflation. It wasn’t until the
1980s that bond investors got anything like positive returns.

PS: Cost of going to one of his lectures

$275 for members
$295 for non-members
$2750 per corporate member table of ten
$2950 per general table of ten

Poor students will not be there ;)