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Extract from Niall Ferguson’s The Ascent of Money: Populists reaped the rewards of the financial crisis — now they are set to trigger a new crash

Thought Leader: Niall Ferguson
July 16, 2019
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By Niall Ferguson (Original source The Times)

“Ten years ago, few people would have predicted that in the summer of 2019 Donald Trump would be campaigning for a second term as president of America. The idea that Boris Johnson would succeed Theresa May as Britain’s prime minister would have seemed deranged.

Yet it was not so hard to foresee that there would be a political backlash in the aftermath of the global financial crisis — a backlash as momentous and enduring as the economic repercussions, which continue to make themselves felt, not least on battered banks such as Deutsche Bank, which made the first of 18,000 planned job cuts last week.

“There will be blood,” I told an interviewer in February 2009, “in the sense that a crisis of this magnitude is bound to increase political as well as economic [conflict]. It is bound to destabilise some countries. It will cause civil wars to break out that have been dormant. It will topple governments that were moderate and bring in governments that are extreme. These things are pretty predictable.” I also hypothesised that some governments — notably the Russian — might resort to foreign aggression, though I reasoned wrongly that President Vladimir Putin would be deterred from invading Ukraine by the economic costs of doing so.”

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