Niall Ferguson's Time Machine

2 days ago | niallferguson.substack.com | Niall Ferguson

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4 days ago | niallferguson.substack.com | Niall Ferguson

When a head of state picks a fight with a university, you generally expect the university to lose. Even the richest university — say, Harvard — does not have pockets as deep as the government. And as for armed force, to paraphrase Stalin, “How many divisions does the president of Harvard have?”And yet the pen is sometimes mightier than the sword, the gown more powerful than the crown.

2 weeks ago | niallferguson.substack.com | Niall Ferguson

It always shocks me when people say they are shocked by Donald Trump. The president told us exactly what he was going to do. All you had to do was look. By my count, there were 37 short but tightly scripted videos, recorded between December 2022 and December 2023, in which the then-candidate previewed just about every move he has made since his inauguration 100 days ago.

3 weeks ago | niallferguson.substack.com | Niall Ferguson

This is the story of why I decided to call my advisory business after one of John Buchan’s books, Greenmantle. Let me begin by sketching a little bit the background to the founding of Greenmantle LLC back in 2011. If you go back to that period, two things were happening that I watched with increasing concern. One was that universities were increasingly in the grip of a kind of political mania. You could call it “wokeism,” for short.

3 weeks ago | niallferguson.substack.com | Niall Ferguson

It is five years since the world economy suffered a devastating shock caused by a virus from China. You may think the analogy strange, but we are marking the fifth anniversary of the Covid-19 pandemic with a very similar shock to the world economy, which is manifesting itself in very similar ways. Numbers of passengers flying to the US from abroad have plunged. Ships full of goods bound for America have been halted. All over the US, companies will soon start to raise prices and shed employees.