[Note: My colleague Dimitra DeFotis, who attended yesterday's Ira Sohn conference with me, prepared the following write-up of remarks by Niall Ferguson, Laurence A. Tisch professor of History at Harvard University, prolific author, and sometime contributor to the Financial Times. Thanks, Dimitra.]
While he admitted to having absolutely no experience as an investment manager, historian Niall Ferguson told investors at the Ira Sohn conference Wednesday to offset exposure to emerging markets, and their potential to slow, with assets in places like Canada and Sweden that have addressed financial crisis in the past and are, therefore, considerably better off today.
The prolific author and professor of history and business at Harvard U. also tipped his hat to natural resources.
He also weighed in on the state of America, which has �unsustainable fiscal policies with no way to address them.� He struggles �to see how the U.S. can achieve fiscal contraction through radical reform,” and that taxes will be consumed by the interest on debt in the years ahead. “We are out-pigging the PIIGS,� he said.
While expressing sympathy for the Germans’ disgust with the �Mediterraneans,� (suck in cheeks and crinkle brow here), he proclaimed the real issue is the triple-digit percentage of debt to GDP in the U.S. and the U.K. �Yes, we can print our way out of this, but that doesn�t make me feel better,� Ferguson said.
If you want to make the dear professor feel better, his latest book is already half-price on Amazon. Titled �The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World,� it looks to history for examples of finance as the foundation of human progress.
- Dimitra DeFotis, staff writer, Barron�s
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