Niall Ferguson on US economic policy and empire decline

Ninth Annual Niarchos Lecture
Fiscal Crises and Imperial Collapses: Historical Perspective on Current Predicaments
Niall Ferguson, Harvard University
Peterson Institute for International Economics
Washington, DC
May 13, 2010

C. Fred Bergsten: I’m delighted to welcome you this evening to our 9th Annual Niarchos Lecture. This is a lecture series that’s been sponsored throughout by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, to whom we are very grateful for doing so.
Tonight it’s a particular pleasure that Niall Ferguson, the distinguished and rather famous historian from Harvard, will be speaking to us.

Niall Ferguson is the author of such visionary books as The Cash Nexus, Empire, War of the World, and the most recent book and television series, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World. He has currently completed a biography on Siegmund Warburg and has recently begun researching the life of Henry Kissinger, which should be very, very interesting. He has been listed by Time Magazine as one of the most influential people in the world and as a renowned historian in Britain. A prolific commentator on contemporary politics and economics, Niall Ferguson is a contributing editor also for the Financial Times.
His lecture tonight will focus on the relationship between economic policy and global strategy positions of the United States, a topic on which he is certainly well informed.

Transcript here.

To view the slides accompanying Niall Ferguson’s lecture, visit
http://www.piie.com/publications/papers/ferguson201005.pdf