It’s not surprising so many people end up with credit-card debts. Saving for your retirement and buying a house are difficult things, and we don’t educate people about them at all. Niall Ferguson Read Quote
Civilisation is partly about restraining the male of the species from engaging in the violence of the hunter-gatherer period. But it doesn’t take an awful lot to unleash it. Niall Ferguson Read Quote
When I first came to Oxford, I struggled to feel comfortable in an Anglican, public school-dominated institution. Niall Ferguson Read Quote
As a financial historian, I was quite isolated in Oxford – British historians are supposed to write about kings – so the quality of intellectual life in my field is much higher at Harvard. The students work harder there. Niall Ferguson Read Quote
What’s so seductive about the efficient markets hypothesis is that it applies nine years out of ten. A lot of the time it works. But when it stops working, you blow up. Niall Ferguson Read Quote
The great thing about behavioural psychology and economics is that they help us to see that there are actually pretty good reasons why human beings swing from greed to fear, and why we’re not really calculating machines or utility-maximisers. Niall Ferguson Read Quote
Risk models are a substitute for historical knowledge, because they tend to work with just three years’ worth of data. But three years is not a long time in financial history. Niall Ferguson Read Quote
My fundamental tenets are concerned with freedom of the individual; the market isn’t perfect, but it’s the best available way of allocating resources. Niall Ferguson Read Quote
