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Niall Ferguson

24 Jan, 7 tweets, 3 min read

"Sometimes events are beyond a new president’s control. Sometimes they are unforced errors of his own making. But presidents don’t simply make history. Often, history comes at them fast."
bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

The fiscal and monetary policies favored by Biden's economics team — deficits and quantitative easing as far as the eye can see — will widen the country’s already wide inequalities by cranking up further the prices of real estate and financial assets. bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

But the left wing of the Democratic Party cares more about identity politics than working-class living standards, so they will be fed a steady diet of green new dealing, critical race theory and transgender rights. Welcome to the ESG administration. bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

Then there's the deterioration of the public-health crisis in the coming weeks as new strains of SARS-CoV-2 spread across the U.S. bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

What happens when you announce your plan to relax immigration restrictions and give illegal immigrants a pathway to citizenship? The answer is that the flow of would-be migrants increases. bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

What happens when you come to power after a wave of protest that was marred by violence, vandalism and looting and slogans such as “Defund the Police”? The answer is that you inherit a wave of violent crime. bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

Finally, at some point there will be a crisis over Taiwan, North Korea or the South China Sea. Then we'll discover if the strange pageant we saw last week was morning in Joe Biden’s America, or the twilight of the late-Soviet United States. bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

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More from @nfergus

Niall Ferguson

@nfergus

18 Jan

Very important piece by Kurt Campbell and Rush Joshi, who will be driving Asia strategy on Biden's NSC: foreignaffairs.com/articles/unite….

“A strategy for the Indo-Pacific today" should be based on 3 lessons from post-Napoleonic Europe: "the need for a balance of power; the need for an order that the region’s states recognize as legitimate; and the need for a ... coalition to address China’s challenge to both."

“The way Beijing has pursued [its] goals—South China Sea island building, East China Sea incursions, conflict with India, threats to invade Taiwan, and internal repression in Hong Kong and Xinjiang—undermines important precepts of the established regional system."

Read 5 tweets

Niall Ferguson

@nfergus

9 Jan

More than two years ago, I warned of "the tendency of the network platforms to respond to public criticism by restricting free speech by modifying their terms of service and the guidelines they issue to their ... content monitors." hoover.org/research/what-…

@Facebook

Those unthinkingly applauding the latest actions by @Facebook, @Twitter and @Google should at least read the following paragraph:

@mmasnick

I have read intelligent defenses of the cancellation of Trump by @mmasnick techdirt.com/articles/20210… and @benthompson: stratechery.com/2021/trump-and…

Read 4 tweets

Niall Ferguson

@nfergus

6 Jan

Today's scenes in the Capitol are a disgrace. The organizers and perpetrators of this banana republic coup attempt must be prosecuted and punished. Any politician who does not unequivocally condemn what happened should have no future in democratic politics.

Hard questions must be asked about the role of the Capitol police. Was this just ineptitude? A grave danger in a situation such as this arises if the police have been politicized to the point of sympathizing with the mob.

There is a strong temptation at this point to say that I was wrong and that this really is Weimar America, after all: bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

Read 7 tweets

Niall Ferguson

@nfergus

30 Dec 20

@lawrence_wright

Must-read instant history of the pandemic by @lawrence_wright: newyorker.com/magazine/2021/…

The quote that sticks with me is from Matt Pottinger on "the fading art of leadership.” It’s not a failure of one party or another; it’s more of a generational decline of good judgment.

“The élites think it’s all about expertise,” he said. It’s important to have experts, but they aren’t always right: they can be “hampered by their own orthodoxies, their own egos, their own narrow approach to the world.”

Read 6 tweets

Niall Ferguson

@nfergus

30 Nov 20

We are living through a monetary revolution so multifaceted that few of us comprehend its full extent. And Bitcoin is winning it: bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

@Doug_D_Stuart

This article also contains, to my knowledge, the first reference in financial journalism to @Doug_D_Stuart's brilliant, Booker-winning novel "Shuggie Bain," which everyone should read. bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

The crux of the argument is that Bitcoin is not only scarce but (as Wences Casares argues) sovereign. “No one can change a transaction in the Bitcoin blockchain and no one can keep the Bitcoin blockchain from accepting new transactions.” bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

Read 4 tweets

Niall Ferguson

@nfergus

11 Nov 20

Each Remembrance Day / Veterans Day takes us another step away from the events of November 11, 1918; each generation finds it a little bit harder to imagine what it was like to be caught up, as my grandfather John Ferguson was, in what came to be the First World War.

This year's pandemic has reminded us that the "Spanish" influenza of 1918-19 was a key part of the war's ghastly culmination. It may have originated in a US army base (Fort Riley, Kansas, the site of Camp Funston) but it soon spread throughout the world, killing 40-50 m. people.

Writing The Pity of War more than 20 years ago, I was intrigued by the possibility that the war had not only caused the war, by facilitating its spread via camps and troop ships, but had also helped to end it, by contributing to the German collapse.

Read 6 tweets

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