Dollar-Niall-Ferguson-Says (1); Ferguson says (3); Harvard Professor Niall Ferguson says Washington D.C. (1); Krugman versus Ferguson (1); Niall Ferguson (3); Niall Ferguson say (2); Tom Ferguson (2); Tom Ferguson's investment theory (1).
Sat 2010-07-24 16:14 EDT
Not since Ken Rogoff's famous attack on Joe Stiglitz has the dismal science of economics provoked such pompous, self-important, personalised squabbling. Professors Paul Krugman and Niall Ferguson, of course, have form; they've been at it on and off for nearly a year now over the efficacy of deficit spending in fighting the downturn, and today they return to the fray...
Credit Writedowns Sat 2010-05-22 20:55 EDT
...The cries of the deficit hawks grow louder: Repent all ye fiscal profligates, before the ``day of reckoning'' comes. Let's dial down the Biblical hysteria a wee bit while there's still time for rational debate. The market's recent response to the intensifying pressures in the euro zone suggests that investors are beginning to differentiate between countries that are sovereign issuers of currency, such as the US or Japan, and non-sovereign issuers, such as Greece or any other nations in the euro zone...That the US has the reserve currency is an irrelevant consideration here. The key distinction remains user vs. creator. The euro zone nations are part of the former; Canada, Australia, the UK, Japan and the US are representatives of the latter...Using ``PIIGS'' countries as analogues to the US or the UK, as Rogoff, Ferguson and countless other commentators do, is wrong. Their faulty analysis comes as a result of the deficit critics' failure to distinguish between the monetary arrangements of sovereign and non-sovereign nations. Any sovereign government (none within the EMU enjoy that status any longer) can deal with a collapse in revenue and an increase in outlays from a financial perspective without invoking the sort of deadlocks that are now crippling the EMU zone...Trying to engineer a reduction in the deficit via austerity programs (or freezes or whatever else one might like to call them) at a time when private spending is still insufficient to maintain adequate real GDP growth is a recipe for disaster. It will increase the deficit...
New Deal 2.0 Sat 2010-02-27 22:55 EST
...As the private sector started to dump housing and housing bonds quickly in 2007 and 2008, government officials made sure that the GSEs would be capable of absorbing these bad loans...This constitutes one part of many ``shadow bailouts'' according to Roosevelt Institute senior fellows Rob Johnson and Tom Ferguson; this argument, and the graph above, is from their Too Big to Bail: The `Paulson Put,' Presidential Politics, and the Global Financial Meltdown Part II paper. (In Part I, they argue that the Federal Home Loan Bank System was also used in a similar manner.) Astute readers will notice that the action of government officials using public funding sources to provide makeshift backstops for losses of the banking sector to clear the balance sheets of toxic assets to ``unlock the frozen credit market'', without having to go to Congress for funding, was also a central feature of Geithner's PPIP plan, with FDIC stepping up to the plate once the GSEs went bust...
Fri 2009-10-23 08:36 EDT
Harvard Professor Niall Ferguson says Washington D.C. is too complacent about China's ability to wean itself off the dollar...China's "current strategy is to diversify out of dollars and into commodities," Ferguson says. Furthermore, China's recent pact with Brazil to conduct trade in their local currencies is a "sign of the times." [dollar losing reserve currency status]
China; Dollar-Niall-Ferguson-Says; Dump; finance; Tech Ticker; wake; WASHINGTON; Yahoo.
Fri 2008-12-12 00:00 EST
AlterNet: Noam Chomsky: Is There Truth in Obama's Advertising? ``what's happened to the country...is that there was extensive and very constructive activism in the 1960s...And the activism did civilize the country''; Tom Ferguson's investment theory of politics; Brand Obama; ``The goal of advertising is to create uninformed consumers who will make irrational choices...And when they turn to selling a candidate they do the same thing...So you undermine democracy pretty much the same way you undermine markets.''
