Niall Ferguson on Investing Given the Possible U.S. Debt Crisis

Michael Panzner submits: In an article for the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs, "Complexity and Collapse: Empires on the Edge of Chaos," due out later this week, author and historian Niall Ferguson posits that the life cycles of great powers m

Harvard historian Niall Ferguson landed himself in hot water this past Friday at a conference when he equated the economic philosophy of John Maynard Keynes with the fact that Keynes was gay and childless.

ANALYSIS “The real point of me,” the British-born Harvard historian of money Niall Ferguson once told an interviewer, “isn’t that I’m good-looking. It’s that I’m clever. I’ve got a brain!”

Niall Ferguson:

By Philip Pilkington, a writer and research assistant at Kingston University in London. You can follow him on Twitter @pilkingtonphil

While Harvard historian Niall Ferguson's off-the-cuff remarks during the Q&A were in his words "as stupid as they were insensitive", the core message of his presentation was clear: the party of the last 20 years is now over and the longer we fail to address the real issues the bigger the hangover will be in the future. The central question Ferguson asks is whether our institutions, corporations and governments, are degenerating.

Harvard professor Niall Ferguson caused a furore today after reports emerged that he had linked John Maynard Keynes's economic philosophy to a lack of concern for future generations — a result, Ferguson apparently said, of Keynes's own lack of children and homosexuality.