Today’s Globe and Mail has an interview by its economics reporter, Heather Scoffield, with Harvard Professor Niall Ferguson regarding the current financial crisis.
In what is frankly a pretty depressing assessment of the crisis, Ferguson suggests:
It is bound to destabilize 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. The question is whether the general destabilization, the return of, if you like, political risk, ultimately leads to something really big in the realm of geopolitics.
Fortunately, he sees China continuing to support US debt – because it can’t afford to have US consumers stop buying Chinese-made products. He also doesn’t see increased military strife or war – but, otherwise, he’s forecasting that lots of adjustments will be required to deal with the fundamental de-leveraging that’s just begun.
Scott is a founder of Glenbrook with more than 30 years of experience in information technology. He is a co-author of the book “Payments Systems in the U.S.” and a co-inventor of US Patent 6,332,126 and US Patent 7,840,459. At Glenbrook, Scott focused his work on payments innovation, mobile payments, and social media / Web 2.0 in banking and financial services.
Previously, Scott was group executive vice president at First Data Merchant Services and at Visa International, where he led the development of Visa’s global payment systems strategies. Scott began his career as a systems engineer with IBM, where he held a series of technical management and product planning positions over seventeen years. Scott formally retired from Glenbrook in October 2016, but remains important to the firm as both a friend and advisor.