Niall Ferguson's Blog

Six Questions for Xi Jinping: An update

Nearly two weeks ago, I published my usual column in the London Sunday Times with the headline, Lets Zoom Xi Jinping. He has questions to answer about coronavirus (April 5, 2020).   In it, I posed six questions that I suggested should be put to the Chinese President and Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping. In response to widespread interest in this...

Calling it Right: Excerpts from Niall Ferguson’s Pre-Crisis Journalism

REASONS TO WORRY (NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE) “According to calculations published by Barron's in February, over the next two years the monthly payments on about $600 billion of mortgages taken out by borrowers in the so-called subprime market (those with checkered or nonexistent credit histories) will increase by as much as 50 percent. This is because many A.R.M.'s have two-...

Quantitative Teasing

Back on November 15, 2010, I was one of the signatories of the following letter, addressed to the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, which was published in the Wall Street Journal: We believe the Federal Reserve's large-scale asset purchase plan (so-called "quantitative easing") should be reconsidered and discontinued. We do not believe such a plan is necessary or...

Inflated Claims

Josh Barro is the son of a famous economist. Maybe that’s why the website Business Insider allows him to write about economics. Maybe it’s also why he feels the need to stick up for another famous economist by attacking that individual’s principal detractor. The famous economist himself solemnly promised us that he would not reply – “never” – to my...

The Wizard Exposed

Paul Krugman has never shied away from criticizing me. He has relished it, and has not hesitated to spice his criticism with insults. And yet, when called to account for his own mistakes, not to mention his own boastful misrepresentation of his own record, he has collapsed. Manifestly unable to refute any of my charges against his work, he has added one final, infantile insult –...

Plover Alert

Meanwhile, the plovers flap about desperately: Funny how, far from defending Krugman, they just prove my point about the need for civility in public discourse, not to mention honesty and humility. Memo to Josh Barro: 1. If you are defending someone against a charge of incivility, the word "asinine" is not one to use. Nor does it really help your cause to cite tweets like this: Oh...

How I Personally Caused The Great Depression To Happen Again

Yes, according to Dean Baker, it was me. Except for one small problem, familiar to readers of Brad DeLong. There is not a shred of evidence that I – as opposed to "people like" me – said any of the things attributed to me in this strange rant. Take a look (emphasis added): Ferguson and like-minded people ... have ruined millions of lives and cost the world more than $10...

The Blo(g)viation Index

As I’ve been accused (wrongly) of stoking inflation fears, there is such a thing as inflation in intellectual life. This occurs when the supply of words exceeds the demand for them, causing the value of the individual word to collapse. For an example of superfluous verbiage, see Matt O’Brien’s desperate attempt to succeed where Brad DeLong so abjectly failed, i.e. to...

Krugtron the Invincible, Part 3

In my previous two articles, I have shown that Paul Krugman - revered by his acolytes as the Invincible Krugtron - failed to anticipate the financial crisis and wrongly predicted that the single European currency would fall victim to it. I have exploded his claim to intellectual invincibility. Very clearly, he has made at least twice as many major mistakes in his career as the mere two he...

Krugtron the Invincible, Part 2

As I pointed out yesterday, Paul Krugman's right to consign others to the "Always-Wrong Club" , and routinely to insult anyone who dares to disagree with him, is fatally vitiated by his own embarrassingly bad record of commentary on the European phase of the financial crisis. His repeated and erroneous predictions of the European Monetary Union's imminent collapse constitute a...