Time to Apply Financial History Lessons

On my drive in this morning, I heard a quote attributed to Harvard financial historian Niall Ferguson.  In essence, he was commenting that current U.S. government efforts to stimulate our economy with enormous amounts of new spending and borrowing was simply passing debt-driven consumption from one set of trouble-makers (us) to a bigger troublemaker (the federal government).

I have to confess I had not heard of Niall Ferguson before this and was frankly surprised to hear such things being attributed to a professor at Harvard, a bastion of left wing academia.  (Full disclosure:  I am a Cornell grad and hockey fan and therefore a long-time hater of all things Crimson.)  So I did some research on this very interesting fellow. Read more