title: Sphere

text: At any given radius , the incremental volume () equals the product of the surface area at radius () and the thickness of a shell ():


title: Sphere

text: Alternatively, the area element on the sphere is given in spherical coordinates by . In Cartesian coordinates, the area element is


title: Sphere

text: The sphere has the smallest surface area of all surfaces that enclose a given volume, and it encloses the largest volume among all closed surfaces with a given surface area. The sphere therefore appears in nature: for example, bubbles and small water drops are roughly spherical because the surface tension locally minimizes surface area.


title: Sphere

text: The surface area relative to the mass of a ball is called the specific surface area and can be expressed from the above stated equations as


title: Sphere

text: A sphere can be constructed as the surface formed by rotating a circle about any of its diameters; this is essentially the traditional definition of a sphere as given in Euclid's Elements. Since a circle is a special type of ellipse, a sphere is a special type of ellipsoid of revolution. Replacing the circle with an ellipse rotated about its major axis, the shape becomes a prolate spheroid; rotated about the minor axis, an oblate spheroid.


title: Sphere

text: A sphere is uniquely determined by four points that are not coplanar. More generally, a sphere is uniquely determined by four conditions such as passing through a point, being tangent to a plane, etc. This property is analogous to the property that three non-collinear points determine a unique circle in a plane.


title: Sphere

text: Consequently, a sphere is uniquely determined by (that is, passes through) a circle and a point not in the plane of that circle.


title: Sphere

text: By examining the common solutions of the equations of two spheres, it can be seen that two spheres intersect in a circle and the plane containing that circle is called the radical plane of the intersecting spheres. Although the radical plane is a real plane, the circle may be imaginary (the spheres have no real point in common) or consist of a single point (the spheres are tangent at that point).


title: Sphere

text: The angle between two spheres at a real point of intersection is the dihedral angle determined by the tangent planes to the spheres at that point. Two spheres intersect at the same angle at all points of their circle of intersection. They intersect at right angles (are orthogonal) if and only if the square of the distance between their centers is equal to the sum of the squares of their radii.


title: Sphere

text: is also the equation of a sphere for arbitrary values of the parameters and . The set of all spheres satisfying this equation is called a pencil of spheres determined by the original two spheres. In this definition a sphere is allowed to be a plane (infinite radius, center at infinity) and if both the original spheres are planes then all the spheres of the pencil are planes, otherwise there is only one plane (the radical plane) in the pencil.


title: Sphere

text: In their book "Geometry and the Imagination", David Hilbert and Stephan Cohn-Vossen describe eleven properties of the sphere and discuss whether these properties uniquely determine the sphere. Several properties hold for the plane, which can be thought of as a sphere with infinite radius. These properties are:


title: Sphere

text: The basic elements of Euclidean plane geometry are points and lines. On the sphere, points are defined in the usual sense. The analogue of the "line" is the geodesic, which is a great circle; the defining characteristic of a great circle is that the plane containing all its points also passes through the center of the sphere. Measuring by arc length shows that the shortest path between two points lying on the sphere is the shorter segment of the great circle that includes the points.


title: Sphere

text: Many theorems from classical geometry hold true for spherical geometry as well, but not all do because the sphere fails to satisfy some of classical geometry's postulates, including the parallel postulate. In spherical trigonometry, angles are defined between great circles. Spherical trigonometry differs from ordinary trigonometry in many respects. For example, the sum of the interior angles of a spherical triangle always exceeds 180 degrees. Also, any two similar spherical triangles are congruent.


title: Sphere

text: Any pair of points on a sphere that lie on a straight line through the sphere's center (i.e. the diameter) are called "antipodal points"—on the sphere, the distance between them is exactly half the length of the circumference. Any other (i.e. not antipodal) pair of distinct points on a sphere


title: Sphere

text: Spherical geometry is a form of elliptic geometry, which together with hyperbolic geometry makes up non-Euclidean geometry.


title: Sphere

text: The sphere is a smooth surface with constant Gaussian curvature at each point equal to . As per Gauss's Theorema Egregium, this curvature is independent of the sphere's embedding in 3-dimensional space. Also following from Gauss, a sphere cannot be mapped to a plane while maintaining both areas and angles. Therefore, any map projection introduces some form of distortion.


title: Sphere

text: A sphere of radius has area element formula_36. This can be found from the volume element in spherical coordinates with held constant.


title: Sphere

text: This equation reflects that the position vector and tangent plane at a point are always orthogonal to each other. Furthermore, the outward-facing normal vector is equal to the position vector scaled by .


title: Sphere

text: In Riemannian geometry, the filling area conjecture states that the hemisphere is the optimal (least area) isometric filling of the Riemannian circle.


title: Sphere

text: In topology, an -sphere is defined as a space homeomorphic to the boundary of an -ball; thus, it is homeomorphic to the Euclidean -sphere, but perhaps lacking its metric.


title: Sphere

text: The -sphere is denoted . It is an example of a compact topological manifold without boundary. A sphere need not be smooth; if it is smooth, it need not be diffeomorphic to the Euclidean sphere (an exotic sphere).


title: Sphere

text: The sphere is the inverse image of a one-point set under the continuous function , so it is closed; is also bounded, so it is compact by the Heine–Borel theorem.


title: Sphere

text: Remarkably, it is possible to turn an ordinary sphere inside out in a three-dimensional space with possible self-intersections but without creating any creases, in a process called sphere eversion.


title: Sphere

text: The antipodal quotient of the sphere is the surface called the real projective plane, which can also be thought of as the Northern Hemisphere with antipodal points of the equator identified.


title: Sphere

text: Circles on the sphere are, like circles in the plane, made up of all points a certain distance from a fixed point on the sphere. The intersection of a sphere and a plane is a circle, a point, or empty. Great circles are the intersection of the sphere with a plane passing through the center of a sphere: others are called small circles.


title: Sphere

text: More complicated surfaces may intersect a sphere in circles, too: the intersection of a sphere with a surface of revolution whose axis contains the center of the sphere (are "coaxial") consists of circles and/or points if not empty. For example, the diagram to the right shows the intersection of a sphere and a cylinder, which consists of two circles. If the cylinder radius were that of the sphere, the intersection would be a single circle. If the cylinder radius were larger than that of the sphere, the intersection would be empty.


title: Sphere

text: In navigation, a rhumb line or loxodrome is an arc crossing all meridians of longitude at the same angle. Loxodromes are the same as straight lines in the Mercator projection. A rhumb line is not a spherical spiral. Except for some simple cases, the formula of a rhumb line is complicated.


title: Sphere

text: A Clelia curve is a curve on a sphere for which the longitude formula_15 and the colatitude formula_39 satisfy the equation


title: Sphere

text: Special cases are: Viviani's curve (formula_41) and spherical spirals (formula_42) such as Seiffert's spiral. Clelia curves approximate the path of satellites in polar orbit.


title: Sphere

text: The analog of a conic section on the sphere is a spherical conic, a quartic curve which can be defined in several equivalent ways, including:


title: Sphere

text: The intersection of the sphere with equation formula_43 and the cylinder with equation formula_44 is not just one or two circles. It is the solution of the non-linear system of equations


title: Sphere

text: An ellipsoid is a sphere that has been stretched or compressed in one or more directions. More exactly, it is the image of a sphere under an affine transformation. An ellipsoid bears the same relationship to the sphere that an ellipse does to a circle.


title: Sphere

text: Spheres can be generalized to spaces of any number of dimensions. For any natural number , an "-sphere," often denoted , is the set of points in ()-dimensional Euclidean space that are at a fixed distance from a central point of that space, where is, as before, a positive real number. In particular:


title: Sphere

text: The -sphere of unit radius centered at the origin is denoted and is often referred to as "the" -sphere. The ordinary sphere is a 2-sphere, because it is a 2-dimensional surface which is embedded in 3-dimensional space.


title: Sphere

text: If the center is a distinguished point that is considered to be the origin of , as in a normed space, it is not mentioned in the definition and notation. The same applies for the radius if it is taken to equal one, as in the case of a unit sphere.


title: Sphere

text: Unlike a ball, even a large sphere may be an empty set. For example, in with Euclidean metric, a sphere of radius is nonempty only if can be written as sum of squares of integers.


title: Sphere

text: An octahedron is a sphere in taxicab geometry, and a cube is a sphere in geometry using the Chebyshev distance.


title: Sphere

text: The geometry of the sphere was studied by the Greeks. "Euclid's Elements" defines the sphere in book XI, discusses various properties of the sphere in book XII, and shows how to inscribe the five regular polyhedra within a sphere in book XIII. Euclid does not include the area and volume of a sphere, only a theorem that the volume of a sphere varies as the third power of its diameter, probably due to Eudoxus of Cnidus. The volume and area formulas were first determined in Archimedes's "On the Sphere and Cylinder" by the method of exhaustion. Zenodorus was the first to state that, for a given surface area, the sphere is the solid of maximum volume.


title: Sphere

text: Archimedes wrote about the problem of dividing a sphere into segments whose volumes are in a given ratio, but did not solve it. A solution by means of the parabola and hyperbola was given by Dionysodorus. A similar problem — to construct a segment equal in volume to a given segment, and in surface to another segment — was solved later by al-Quhi.


title: Macadamia

text: Macadamia is a genus of four species of trees in the flowering plant family Proteaceae. They are indigenous to Australia, native to northeastern New South Wales and central and southeastern Queensland specifically. Two species of the genus are commercially important for their fruit, the macadamia nut (or simply macadamia). Global production in 2015 was . Other names include Queensland nut, bush nut, maroochi nut, bauple nut and Hawaii nut. In Australian Aboriginal languages, the fruit is known by names such as "bauple", "gyndl" or "jindilli" (north of Great Dividing Range) and "boombera" (south of the Great Range). It was an important source of bushfood for the Aboriginal peoples who are the original inhabitants of the area.


title: Macadamia

text: The nut was first commercially produced on a wide scale in Hawaii, where Australian seeds were introduced in the 1880s, and for some time they were the world's largest producer. South Africa has been the world's largest producer of the macadamia since the 2010s.


title: Macadamia

text: The German-Australian botanist Ferdinand von Mueller gave the genus the name "Macadamia" in 1857 in honour of the Scottish-Australian chemist, medical teacher and politician John Macadam, who was the honorary Secretary of the Philosophical Institute of Victoria beginning in 1857.


title: Macadamia

text: The leaves are arranged in whorls of three to six, lanceolate to obovate or elliptic in shape, long and broad, with an entire or spiny-serrated margin. The flowers are produced in a long, slender, simple raceme long, the individual flowers long, white to pink or purple, with four tepals. The fruit is a hard, woody, globose follicle with a pointed apex, containing one or two seeds. The nutshell ("coat") is particularly tough and requires around 2000 N to crack. The shell material is five times harder than hazelnut shells and has mechanical properties similar to aluminum. It has a Vickers hardness of 35.


title: Macadamia

text: Nuts from "M. jansenii" and M. ternifolia contain cyanogenic glycosides. The other two species are cultivated for the commercial production of macadamia nuts for human consumption.


title: Macadamia

text: Previously, more species with disjunct distributions were named as members of this genus "Macadamia". Genetics and morphological studies published in 2008 show they have separated from the genus "Macadamia", correlating less closely than thought from earlier morphological studies. The species previously named in the genus "Macadamia" may still be referred to overall by the descriptive, non-scientific name of macadamia.


title: Macadamia

text: The macadamia tree is usually propagated by grafting and does not begin to produce commercial quantities of seeds until it is 7–10 years old, but once established, may continue bearing for over 100 years. Macadamias prefer fertile, well-drained soils, a rainfall of , and temperatures not falling below (although once established, they can withstand light frosts), with an optimum temperature of . The roots are shallow and trees can be blown down in storms; like most Proteaceae, they are also susceptible to "Phytophthora" root disease. As of 2019, the macadamia nut is the most expensive nut in the world, which is attributed to the slow harvesting process.


title: Macadamia

text: A "Macadamia integrifolia" / "M. tetraphylla" hybrid commercial variety is widely planted in Australia and New Zealand; it was discovered by Dr. J. H. Beaumont. It is high in oil, but is not sweet. New leaves are reddish, and flowers are bright pink, borne on long racemes. It is one of the quickest varieties to come into bearing once planted in the garden, usually carrying a useful crop by the fourth year and improving from then on. It crops prodigiously when well pollinated. The impressive, grape-like clusters are sometimes so heavy they break the branchlets to which they are attached. In commercial orchards, it has reached per tree by 8 years old. On the downside, the macadamias do not drop from the tree when ripe and the leaves are a bit prickly when one reaches into the interior of the tree during harvest. Its shell is easier to open than that of most commercial varieties.


title: Macadamia

text: A pure "M. tetraphylla" variety from Australia, this strain is cultivated for its productive crop yield, flavor and suitability for pollinating 'Beaumont'.


title: Macadamia

text: A South African "M. integrifolia" / "M. tetraphylla" hybrid cultivar, it has a sweet seed, which means it has to be cooked carefully so that the sugars do not caramelise. The sweet seed is usually not fully processed, as it generally does not taste as good, but many people enjoy eating it uncooked. It has an open micropyle (hole in the shell), which may let in fungal spores. The crack-out percentage (ratio of nut meat to whole nut by weight) is high. Ten-year-old trees average per tree. It is a popular variety because of its pollination of 'Beaumont' and the yields are almost comparable.


title: Macadamia

text: A "M. integrifolia" / "M. tetraphylla" hybrid, this is a rather spreading tree. On the plus side, it is high yielding commercially; from a 9-year-old tree has been recorded and the nuts drop to the ground. However, they are thick-shelled, with not much flavor.


title: Macadamia

text: In 2018, South Africa was estimated as the leading producer of macadamia nuts, with 54,000 tonnes out of global production of 211,000 tonnes. Macadamia is commercially produced in many countries of Southeast Asia, South America, Australia, and North America having Mediterranean, temperate or tropical climates.


title: Macadamia

text: The first commercial orchard of macadamia trees was planted in the early 1880s by Rous Mill, southeast of Lismore, New South Wales, consisting of "M. tetraphylla". Besides the development of a small boutique industry in Australia during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, macadamia was extensively planted as a commercial crop in Hawaii from the 1920s onward. Macadamia seeds were first imported into Hawaii in 1882 by William H. Purvis, who planted seeds that year at Kapulena. The Hawaiian-produced macadamia established the well-known seed internationally and in 2017, Hawaii produced over 22,000 tonnes.


title: Macadamia

text: In 2019, researchers collected samples from hundreds of trees in Queensland and compared their genetic profiles to samples from Hawaiian orchards. They determined that essentially all the Hawaiian trees must have descended from a small population of Australian trees from Gympie, possibly just a single tree. This lack of genetic diversity in the commercial crop puts it at risk of succumbing to pathogens (as has happened in the past to banana cultivars). Growers may seek to diversify the cultivated population by hybridizing with wild specimens.


title: Macadamia

text: Raw macadamia nuts are 1% water, 14% carbohydrates, 76% fat, and 8% protein (table). A 100 gram reference amount of macadamia nuts provides 740 kilocalories, and are a rich source (20% or more of the Daily Value (DV)) of numerous essential nutrients, including thiamine (104% DV), vitamin B (21% DV), other B vitamins, manganese (195% DV), iron (28% DV), magnesium (37% DV) and phosphorus (27% DV) (table).


title: Macadamia

text: Compared with other common edible nuts, such as almonds and cashews, macadamias are high in total fat and relatively low in protein. They have a high amount of monounsaturated fats (59% of total content) and contain, as 17% of total fat, the monounsaturated fat, omega-7 palmitoleic acid.


title: Macadamia

text: Macadamias are toxic to dogs. Ingestion may result in macadamia toxicity marked by weakness and hind limb paralysis with the inability to stand, occurring within 12 hours of ingestion. It is not known what makes macadamia nuts toxic, but its effects have only been reported in dogs. Depending on the quantity ingested and the size of the dog, symptoms may also include muscle tremors, joint pain and severe abdominal pain. In high doses of toxin, opiate medication may be required for symptom relief until the toxic effects diminish, with full recovery usually within 24 to 48 hours.


title: Macadamia

text: The trees are also grown as ornamental plants in subtropical regions for their glossy foliage and attractive flowers. The flowers produce a well-regarded honey. The wood is used decoratively for small items.


title: Macadamia

text: "Macadamia" species are used as food plants by the larvae of some Lepidoptera species, including "Batrachedra arenosella".


title: Macadamia

text: Macadamia seeds are often fed to hyacinth macaws in captivity. These large parrots are one of the few animals, aside from humans, capable of cracking the shell and removing the seed.


title: Gino D'Acampo

text: Gennaro Sheffield D'Acampo (born Gennaro D'Acampo; 17 July 1976) is an Italian celebrity chef and media personality based in the United Kingdom, best known for his food-focused television shows and cookbooks.


title: Gino D'Acampo

text: D'Acampo rose to fame as a regular chef on the ITV show "This Morning". He has since presented cookery programmes including "Let's Do Lunch", "There's No Taste Like Home", and "Gino's Italian Escape". In June 2020, it was announced that D'Acampo would be the presenter of the new revival series of "Family Fortunes" on ITV 18 years after the last series.


title: Gino D'Acampo

text: In 1995, aged 19, D'Acampo moved to London to work in "The Orchard Restaurant", Hampstead, London and the "Cambio Restaurant" in Guildford, Surrey.


title: Gino D'Acampo

text: D'Acampo co-owns Bontà Italia Ltd, a supplier of Italian ingredients, and has a career in the development of ready meals, beginning with the Tesco Finest range. This experience led to his first engagement as a guest on "Great Food Live" on UKTV Food and the start of his television career.


title: Gino D'Acampo

text: In 2009, D'Acampo was crowned King of the Jungle in the ninth series of "I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here!". After the show, D'Acampo and fellow contestant Stuart Manning were charged by the Australian police with animal cruelty for killing and cooking a rat on the show. However, the charges were later dropped after ITV accepted responsibility for the incident.


title: Gino D'Acampo

text: D'Acampo has regularly appeared on the ITV series "This Morning". He launched his first iPhone app "Gino D'Acampo – Eating Italian" in 2010.


title: Gino D'Acampo

text: From 2011 until 2014, D'Acampo and Melanie Sykes presented the daytime cookery programme "Let's Do Lunch With Gino and Mel". The show aired for four series and three Christmas series from 2012 to 2014. D'Acampo hosts a Sunday afternoon cookery and discussion show on LBC 97.3. In 2011, D'Acampo presented the daytime cookery series "There's No Taste Like Home" for thirty episodes.


title: Gino D'Acampo

text: In 2013, D'Acampo launched a chain of restaurants with his name followed by "My Pasta Bar" or "My Restaurant". His first Pasta Bar opened on Fleet Street in July 2013. There are also restaurants in Leadenhall Market, Bishopsgate, Euston railway station, The Manchester Corn Exchange, Harrogate, Camden Town (Gino D'Acampo My Restaurant)


title: Gino D'Acampo

text: Since 2013, D'Acampo has presented seven series of "Gino's Italian Escape" on ITV. A cookery book is released to accompany each series.


title: Gino D'Acampo

text: In autumn 2014, D'Acampo filled in as a team captain for Holly Willoughby on the ITV2 panel show "Celebrity Juice", while she went on maternity leave. D'Acampo also appeared in the following series in Spring 2015, this time as a regular panellist. D'Acampo returned to "Celebrity Juice" in September 2015 where he replaced Fearne Cotton as team captain whilst she was on maternity leave.


title: Gino D'Acampo

text: In 2015 and 2017, D'Acampo toured the UK with a live stage show called "Gino's Italian Escape" to accompany his television series. He visited cities including Bath, Newcastle and Margate.


title: Gino D'Acampo

text: In May 2018, it was confirmed that Channel 5 had picked up "Win Your Wish List" for its Saturday night schedule, with D'Acampo as host. The show is now called "Gino's Win Your Wish List". The revival is produced by Stellify Media.


title: Gino D'Acampo

text: In December 2018, D'Acampo was woken up by Michael McIntyre for the "Midnight Gameshow" in the fourth series of "Michael McIntyre's Big Show".


title: Gino D'Acampo

text: D'Acampo lives with his wife Jessica Stellina Morrison, whom he married in 2002. He has three children.


title: Gino D'Acampo

text: In 1998, D'Acampo was convicted of burgling singer Paul Young's London home, and served two years in prison. D'Acampo has apologised to Young, who accepted and suggested that D'Acampo could invite him to dinner in his restaurant.


title: Monica (singer)

text: Monica Denise Arnold (formerly Brown; born October 24, 1980) is an American singer, rapper and actress. Born and raised in College Park, Georgia, she began performing as a child and became part of a traveling gospel choir at the age of ten. Monica rose to prominence after she signed with Rowdy Records in 1993 and released her debut album "Miss Thang" two years later. She followed it with a series of successful albums, including the global bestseller "The Boy Is Mine" (1998) as well as the number-one albums "After the Storm" (2003), "The Makings of Me" (2006) and "Still Standing" (2010). Throughout her career, several of Monica's singles became number-one hits on the pop and R&B charts, including "Before You Walk Out of My Life", "Don't Take It Personal (Just One of Dem Days)", "Like This and Like That", "The Boy Is Mine" (with Brandy), "The First Night", "Angel of Mine", "So Gone", and "Everything to Me".


title: Monica (singer)

text: Monica's popularity was further enhanced by her roles in television series such as "Living Single" (1996), "Felicity" (2001), and "American Dreams" (2003), and films including "Boys and Girls" (2000), "Love Song" (2000), and "Pastor Brown" (2009). A contributor to the NBC talent show "The Voice", in 2008, she appeared in the Peachtree TV reality show special "Monica: The Single" which tracked the recording of the song "Still Standing" along with her personal life and resulted in her own highly rated BET series "", containing a similar concept. Separated from rapper Rodney "Rocko" Hill, father of her first two children, Monica married professional basketball player Shannon Brown in November 2010. Their first child together, a daughter, was born in 2013.


title: Monica (singer)

text: Monica has sold 5.3 million albums in the United States and she is recognized as one of the most successful urban R&B female vocalists to begin a career in the mid to late 1990s. According to "Billboard", she is the youngest recording act to ever have two consecutive chart-topping hits on the "Billboard" Top R&B Singles chart, as well as the first artist to top the US "Billboard" Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart over the span of three consecutive decades (1990s, 2000s, and 2010s). In 2010, "Billboard" listed Monica at number 24 on its list of the Top 50 R&B and Hip Hop Artists of the past 25 years. A four-time nominee, she won a Grammy Award for Best R&B Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals for her contribution to "The Boy Is Mine" alongside Brandy, at the 41st awards ceremony and has been the recipient of one "Billboard" Music Award, one BET Award, and two BMI Pop Awards.


title: Monica (singer)

text: Monica Denise Arnold was born in College Park, Georgia, the only daughter of Marilyn Best, a Delta Air Lines customer service representative and former church singer of African American descent, and M.C. "Billy" Arnold Jr, who is African American with Indian and Irish ancestry and was a mechanic for an Atlanta freight company. She has a younger brother, Montez (born in 1983), and a half brother, Jermond Grant, on her father's side. Monica also is a cousin of record producer Polow da Don, and is related to rapper Ludacris through her mother's second marriage to Reverend Edward Best, a Methodist minister.


title: Monica (singer)

text: At the age of 2, Monica followed in her mother's footsteps with regular performances at the Jones Hill Chapel United Methodist Church in Marilyn's hometown Newnan, Georgia. While growing up in the modest circumstances of a single-parent home after her parents' 1984 separation and 1987 divorce, Monica continued training herself in singing and became a frequent talent-show contestant, winning over 20 local singing competitions throughout her early teenage years. When she was 10 years old, she became the youngest member of "Charles Thompson and the Majestics", a traveling 12-person gospel choir. She attended North Clayton High School with rapper 2 Chainz. She graduated from high school in 1997 at age 16, having skipped ahead scholastically by studying year-round with a private tutor.


title: Monica (singer)

text: In 1991, at the age of eleven, Monica was discovered by music producer Dallas Austin at the Center Stage auditorium in Atlanta, performing Whitney Houston 1986's "Greatest Love of All". Amazed by her voice, Dallas offered her a record deal with his Arista Records-distributed label Rowdy Records and consulted rapper Queen Latifah to work as Monica's first manager. Shortly afterwards Dallas and then staff producers Tim & Bob entered the studio with Monica to start writing and producing her debut "Miss Thang," which was eventually released in July 1995 and reached number thirty-six on the U.S. "Billboard" 200 and number seven on the Top R&B Albums chart. To date the album has sold 1.5 million copies in the United States. In January 2000 it was certified triple platinum by the RIAA for three million shipped units . The album produced three top ten singles, including debut single "Don't Take It Personal (Just One of Dem Days)" and "Before You Walk Out of My Life", which made Monica the youngest artist ever to have two consecutive chart-topping hits on the U.S. "Billboard" Hot R&B Singles chart. "Miss Thang" subsequently won Monica a Billboard Music Award and garnered her an American Music Award nomination in the Favorite Soul/R&B New Artist category.


title: Monica (singer)

text: After a label change to Clive Davis' Arista Records, Monica's mainstream success was boosted, when "For You I Will", from the "Space Jam" soundtrack (1996) became her next top ten pop hit. The song was written by Diane Warren. The following year she was asked to team up with singer Brandy and producer Rodney "Darkchild" Jerkins to record "The Boy Is Mine", the first single from both of their second albums. Released in May 1998, surrounding highly publicized rumors about a real-life catfight between both singers, the duet became both the biggest hit of the summer and the biggest hit of 1998 in general in America, spending thirteen weeks on top of the "Billboard" Hot 100 chart. It earned the pair a Grammy Award for Best R&B Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal" and garnered multi-platinum sales (to date, it remains as one of the top twenty most successful American singles in history based on "Billboard" chart success).


title: Monica (singer)

text: Jermaine Dupri, David Foster and Austin consulted on the album "The Boy Is Mine", which was released later that year and it eventually became Monica's biggest-selling album; selling over 2,016,000 copies.


title: Monica (singer)

text: In June 2000 , the album was certified triple platinum by the RIAA for three million shipped units. It yielded another two U.S. number-one hits with "The First Night" and "Angel of Mine", a cover of Eternal's 1997 single, as well as a remake of Richard Marx' "Right Here Waiting". "Rolling Stone" proclaimed it "closer to soul's source... harking back past hip-hop songbirds like Mary J. Blige and adult-contemporary sirens like Toni Braxton", while AllMusic called the album an "irresistible sounding [and] immaculately crafted musical backdrop [...] as good as mainstream urban R&B gets in 1998." Monica has also made guest appearances on several television shows such as "Living Single" (1996), "Beverly Hills, 90210" (1997, 1999) and the Cartoon Network special "Brak Presents The Brak Show Starring Brak" (2000).


title: Monica (singer)

text: In 2000, Monica made her film debut in the third drama from MTV Films, "Love Song", as Camille Livingston, a young woman torn between the life her parents have planned for her and the world she experiences after meeting a musician from the wrong side of the tracks. The film debut the song "What My Heart Says" with the promotion of her third album "All Eyez on Me" (2002). The film was released on April 30, 2002, and in "Felicity" (2001) and "American Dreams" (2003) playing Mary Wells, singing "My Guy".


title: Monica (singer)

text: In 2000, Monica contributed chorus vocals for "I've Got to Have It", a collaboration with Jermaine Dupri and rapper Nas. Released as the "Big Momma's House" theme song, the song saw minor success in the United States only. The following year, she released the Ric Wake production track "Just Another Girl", recorded for the "Down to Earth" soundtrack, as a single.


title: Monica (singer)

text: A year later, Monica channeled much of her heavily media-discussed experiences into the production of her third studio album, "All Eyez on Me", her first release on mentor Clive Davis newly founded J Records label. "I just wanted to give the people back something that had personal passion, instead of just, 'Oh, let's dance to this record'," she said about the issues worked into the tracks. The first single "All Eyez on Me", a Rodney Jerkins-produced R&B-dance track, saw minor to moderate success on the international charts but failed to enter the higher half of the U.S. "Billboard" Hot 100 chart. A follow-up song, "Too Hood", also got a lukewarm response and as a result, the album's tentative release was pushed back several times. "I don't think people wanted to hear a big fun record from me, after knowing all the things that I had personally experienced," Monica second-guessed her new material which saw both early and heavy bootlegging via internet at that time.


title: Monica (singer)

text: After the Japan-wide release of "All Eyez on Me", Monica was asked to substantially reconstruct the record with a host of new producers, and as a result she re-entered recording studios to start work with songwriters Kanye West, Jazze Pha, Andre "mrDEYO" Deyo, Bam & Ryan and Dupri – replacing executive producer Missy Elliott. Released in June 2003, "After the Storm" debuted at number one on the "Billboard" 200 chart with first-week sales of 185,500 copies. This was Monica's first and only time reaching number-one on the chart. It eventually received a gold certification, and has sold 1,023,000 copies to date. Media reception of the CD was generally enthusiastic, with AllMusic saying the album "has all the assuredness and smart developments that should keep Monica's younger longtime followers behind her — all the while holding the ability to appeal to a wider spectrum of R&B and hip-hop fans." The album's lead single, Elliott-penned "So Gone", was one of Monica's biggest commercial successes in years, becoming her first top ten single since 1999's "Angel of Mine". In addition, it reached the top position of the "Billboard" R&B/Hip-Hop Tracks and Hot Dance Club Play charts. Subsequently, "After the Storm" spawned another three singles, with final single "U Should've Known Better" reaching number nineteen on the "Billboard" Hot 100 chart.


title: Monica (singer)

text: Towards the end of 2006, Monica released her next studio album "The Makings of Me". Titled after Curtis Mayfield's recording "The Makings of You", it saw her particularly reuniting with producers Elliott, Dupri, and Bryan Michael Cox; they had previously contributed to "After the Storm". The album received a positive reception from most professional music critics, with AllMusic calling it a "concise and mostly sweet set of songs", and "Entertainment Weekly" declaring it "a solid addition" to Monica's discography. While it debuted at number one on "Billboard"s Top R&B/Hip-Hop albums chart, and at number eight on the official "Billboard" 200, it widely failed to revive the success of its predecessors. Singles such as snap-influenced "Everytime tha Beat Drop" featuring Atlanta hip hop group Dem Franchize Boyz and Elliott-produced "A Dozen Roses (You Remind Me)" failed to reach the top forty of the regular pop charts. The same year, she made a cameo appearance in the American comedy-drama film "ATL", playing the Waffle House waitress.


title: Monica (singer)

text: In August 2008, Monica appeared in the Peachtree TV reality show special "Monica: The Single", which tracked the recording of the song "Still Standing" for her same-titled sixth studio album. The following year, she lent her voice to the ballad "Trust", a duet with Keyshia Cole, that peaked in the top five on "Billboard" Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart, and joined the cast of Rockmond Dunbar's drama film "Pastor Brown". In 2010, with the success of the 2008 one-hour special, Monica joined the production of the BET network for her own series "", producing a spin-off her Peachtree show, containing the same concept. It focused on finding a hit single for the album's release while balancing her personal life as a full-time mother and dealing with her troubled past. The premiere and encore episode garnered 3.2 million total viewers, while the show itself was made the second-highest series debut in BET history behind the debut of "Tiny & Toya", and was given a B rating by "Entertainment Weekly".


title: Monica (singer)

text: Featuring production by Stargate, Ne-Yo, and Polow da Don, "Still Standing" was released in March 2010 and garnered a generally positive response by critics, who perceived its sound as "a return to the mid-'1990s heyday" of contemporary R&B, The album debuted atop on "Billboard"s Top R&B/Hip-Hop albums chart, and number two on the "Billboard" 200 with opening week sales of 184,000 copies, becoming her highest-charting album in years. Lead single "Everything to Me" scored Monica her biggest chart success since 2003's "So Gone", reaching the top position of the "Billboard" R&B/Hip-Hop Tracks charts for seven weeks. The album was certified gold by the RIAA with domestic shipments of 500,000 copies within a single month. With it success, the album and "Everything to Me" were nominated for a Grammy Award for Best R&B Album and Best Female R&B Vocal Performance, presented at the 53rd Grammy Awards in 2011. In March 2010, it was announced that Monica and Hill had split in October 2009, surrounding rumors that he cheated. Monica and NBA player Shannon Brown met in June 2010 when while they shot her music video for her second single "Love All Over Me". On November 22, 2010, Monica married Brown in a secret ceremony at their Los Angeles home, follow by a second wedding in front of close family on July 9, 2011. Also in 2010, Monica joined Trey Songz on his Passion, Pain & Pleasure Tour, her first North American concert tour in ten years.


title: Monica (singer)

text: In 2011, Monica joined the debut season of the reality talent show "The Voice" as an adviser to musician coach Cee Lo Green. In April 2012, her seventh studio album, "New Life", was released. It marked her first release with RCA, following the disbandment of J Records in October 2011. Reception for the album was generally mixed; AllMusic complimented the album's "saucy, spirited, and soulful vibe" while Adam Markovitz of "Entertainment Weekly" criticized its "cheesy choruses and outdated tunes". Commercially, "New Life" debuted at number four on the "Billboard" 200 and number two on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums. The album spawned two preview singles, "Anything (To Find You)" and "Until It's Gone", both of which peaked in the top 30 on the "Billboard" R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart. Lead single "It All Belongs to Me", another duet with singer Brandy, charted similarly, reaching number 23 on the same chart. The same year, Monica along with Fred Hammond was featured on gospel music recording artist James Fortune and FIYA's single "Hold On" which became a top five hit on the Christian Songs chart and garnered a Grammy Award nomination for Best Gospel Song at the 54th awards ceremony.


title: Monica (singer)

text: In October 2013, Monica appeared on the soundtrack of Malcolm D. Lee's Christmas comedy-drama "The Best Man Holiday" with her Jermaine Dupri-produced rendition of "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas". In December 2015, her eighth studio album "Code Red" was released. Upon its release, the album received generally mixed reviews from most music critics, and debuted at number 27 on the US "Billboard" 200 chart. Leading single "Just Right for Me", a collaboration with Lil Wayne, reached number twelve on the "Billboard" Adult R&B Songs chart but failed to impact elsewhere, resulting in lackluster sales in general and the release of no further singles. In support of the album, Monica embarked on her first solo concert tour in years, The "Code Red" Experience to promote "Code Red". In November 2016, Monica announced her departure from her longtime label RCA Records after two decades.


title: Monica (singer)

text: In December 2018, Monica released the ballad "Be Human" to introduce The Be Human Foundation, a non profit organization founded by herself. The same month, she previewed music from her ninth studio album "Trenches" when she appeared on the seventh season of the VH1 reality series "". In January 2019, she released "Commitment", the first single on her own label, Mondeenise Music. A sleeper hit, "Commitment" reached number one on the US "Billboard" Adult R&B Songs in the week ending July 21, 2019, becoming her first chart topper in nine years. This was followed by the release of "Me + You" in April 2019 and title track "Trenches" featuring Lil Baby. The release of "Trenches" coincided with Monica and Brandy's appearances on the webcast battle series "Verzuz" which took place on August 31, 2020, at Tyler Perry Studios in Atlanta. At least 1.2 million people tuned in for the battle.


title: Monica (singer)

text: Monica possesses an alto vocal range, which "Billboard"'s Erika Ramirez described as "impeccable". Elysa Gardner of the "Los Angeles Times" likened her "husky, dramatic alto" to that of singer Toni Braxton. Writing that the singer arguably possesses "the best alto of her generation", PopMatters contributor Tyler Lewis said Monica has "always been able to elevate even the most generic material ... with conviction and the sheer beauty of her voice", despite believing she uses "a little too much vibrato at times".


title: Monica (singer)

text: Monica has said many times that Whitney Houston is her biggest inspiration and influence since childhood. Another big influence is Mary J. Blige. Other artists she looks up to are Betty Wright, Gladys Knight and Anita Baker.


title: Monica (singer)

text: Monica's career slowed down in 1999 due to having problems in her relationship with ex-boyfriend Jarvis Weems. In July 2000, the couple were together at the gravesite of Weems's brother, who had died in an automobile accident at age 25 in 1998. Weems then, without warning, put a gun to his head and committed suicide. "Afterward, I felt, 'What else could I have done?' You replay that situation over and over and you switch it around: Maybe if I had said this, or if I would have done that,'" Monica said in an interview with "The Cincinnati Enquirer" the following year. "It's just something that it's never possible for me to go back and change." Monica briefly dated rapper, C-Murder, until he was incarcerated for a murder in 2003.


title: Monica (singer)

text: Monica met rapper Rodney "Rocko" Hill, a former SWA officer and real estate manager, shortly after Weems's suicide, a time which she described as her "weakest". While the pair soon began dating in the fall of the same year, they ended their relationship in 2004. A few months later, Monica and Hill reunited and she became pregnant with their first child. On May 21, 2005, she gave birth to their son, Rodney, who performs under "Rodneyy" as a SoundCloud rapper. Monica and Hill


title: Monica (singer)

text: then became engaged on Christmas Eve 2007, shortly before the birth of their second child. On January 8, 2008, their son named Romelo Montez Hill, after Monica's younger brother, was born. The couple split in early 2010.


title: Monica (singer)

text: In June 2010, Monica met NBA player Shannon Brown while she was looking for someone to play the love interest in her video for the song "Love All Over Me". In October 2010, she announced her engagement to Brown via her Twitter account, posting a photo of a rose-cut diamond ring. On November 22, 2010, the couple married in a secret ceremony at their Los Angeles home. Their wedding, however, did not become a matter of public record until January 21, 2011, when Brown told the "Hip-Hop Non-Stop TV-Show". A second wedding ceremony was held for family and friends to attend in July 2011. On September 3, 2013, Monica gave birth to her third child, Laiyah Shannon. After eight years of marriage, Monica filed for divorce from Brown in March 2019. In October 2019, their divorce was finalized.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: Niall Campbell Ferguson (; born 18 April 1964) is a Scottish-American historian based in the United States who is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. Previously, he was a professor at Harvard University, the London School of Economics, New York University, a visiting professor at the New College of the Humanities, and a senior research fellow at Jesus College, Oxford, England.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: Ferguson writes and lectures on international history, economic history, financial history and the history of the British Empire and American imperialism. He holds positive views concerning the British Empire. He once ironically called himself "a fully paid-up member of the neo-imperialist gang" following the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In 2004, he was one of "Time" magazine's 100 most influential people in the world. Ferguson has written and presented numerous television documentary series, including "The Ascent of Money", which won an International Emmy award for Best Documentary in 2009.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: Ferguson has been a contributing editor for Bloomberg Television and a columnist for "Newsweek". He began writing a twice-a-month column for "Bloomberg Opinion" in June 2020.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: Ferguson was born in Glasgow, Scotland, on 18 April 1964 to James Campbell Ferguson, a doctor, and Molly Archibald Hamilton, a physics teacher. Ferguson grew up in the Ibrox area of Glasgow in a home close to the Ibrox Park football stadium. He attended The Glasgow Academy. He was brought up as, and remains, an atheist, though he has encouraged his children to study religion and attends church occasionally.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: Ferguson cites his father as instilling in him a strong sense of self-discipline and of the moral value of work, while his mother encouraged his creative side. His maternal grandfather, a journalist, encouraged him to write. He has described his parents as "both very much products of the Scottish Enlightenment." Ferguson ascribes his decision to read history at university instead of English literature to two main factors: Leo Tolstoy's reflections on history at the end of "War and Peace" (which he read at the age of fifteen), and his admiration of historian A. J. P. Taylor.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: Ferguson received a demyship (highest scholarship) from Magdalen College, Oxford. Whilst a student there, he wrote a 90-minute student film "The Labours of Hercules Sprote", played double bass in a jazz band "Night in Tunisia", edited the student magazine "Tributary", and befriended Andrew Sullivan, who shared his interest in right-wing politics and punk music. He had become a Thatcherite by 1982. He graduated with a first-class honours degree in history in 1985.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: Ferguson studied as a Hanseatic Scholar in Hamburg and Berlin in 1987 and 1988. He received his Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Oxford in 1989: his dissertation was titled "Business and Politics in the German Inflation: Hamburg 1914–1924".


title: Niall Ferguson

text: In 1989, Ferguson worked as a research fellow at Christ's College, Cambridge. From 1990 to 1992 he was an official fellow and lecturer at Peterhouse, Cambridge. He then became a fellow and tutor in modern history at Jesus College, Oxford, where in 2000 he was named a professor of political and financial history. In 2002 Ferguson became the John Herzog Professor in Financial History at New York University Stern School of Business, and in 2004 he became the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and William Ziegler Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. From 2010 to 2011, Ferguson held the Philippe Roman Chair in history and international affairs at the London School of Economics. In 2016 Ferguson left Harvard to become a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, where he had been an adjunct fellow since 2005.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: Ferguson has received honorary degrees from the University of Buckingham, Macquarie University (Australia) and Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez (Chile). In May 2010, Michael Gove, education secretary, asked Ferguson to advise on the development of a new history syllabus, to be entitled "history as a connected narrative", for schools in England and Wales. In June 2011, he joined other academics to set up the New College of the Humanities, a private college in London.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: In 2018, Ferguson apologized after fellow historians criticized him for only inviting white men as speakers to a Stanford conference on applied history.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: Also in 2018, emails documenting Ferguson's attempts to discredit a progressive activist student at Stanford University who had been critical of Ferguson's choices of speakers invited to the Cardinal Conversations free speech initiative were released to the public and university administrators. He teamed with a Republican student group to find information that might discredit the student. Ferguson resigned from leadership of the program once university administrators became aware of his actions.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: Ferguson responded in his column saying, "Re-reading my emails now, I am struck by their juvenile, jocular tone. "A famous victory," I wrote the morning after the Murray event. 'Now we turn to the more subtle game of grinding them down on the committee. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.' Then I added: 'Some opposition research on Mr O might also be worthwhile'—a reference to the leader of the protests. None of this happened. The meetings of the student committee were repeatedly postponed. No one ever did any digging on "Mr O". The spring vacation arrived. The only thing that came of the emails was that their circulation led to my stepping down."


title: Niall Ferguson

text: In 2000, Ferguson was a founding director of Boxmind, an Oxford-based educational technology company.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: In 2007, Ferguson was appointed as an investment management consultant by GLG Partners, to advise on geopolitical risk as well as current structural issues in economic behaviour relating to investment decisions. GLG is a UK-based hedge fund management firm headed by Noam Gottesman. Ferguson was also an adviser to Morgan Stanley, the investment bank.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: In 2011, he set up Greenmantle LLC, an advisory business specializing in macroeconomics and geopolitics.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: Ferguson was an advisor to John McCain's U.S. presidential campaign in 2008, supported Mitt Romney in his 2012 campaign and was a vocal critic of Barack Obama.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: Ferguson is a trustee of the New-York Historical Society and the London-based Centre for Policy Studies.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: Ferguson has written regularly for British newspapers and magazines since the mid 1980s. At that time, he was lead writer for "The Daily Telegraph," and a regular book reviewer for "The Daily Mail".


title: Niall Ferguson

text: In the summer of 1989, while travelling in Berlin, he wrote an article for a British newspaper with the provisional headline "The Berlin Wall is Crumbling", but it was not published.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: In the early 2000s he wrote a weekly column for "The Sunday Telegraph" and "Los Angeles Times", leaving in 2007 to become a contributing editor to the "Financial Times". Between 2008 and 2012 he wrote regularly for "Newsweek". Since 2015 he has written a weekly column for "The Sunday Times" and "The Boston Globe", which also appears in numerous papers around the world.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: Ferguson's television series "The Ascent of Money" won the 2009 International Emmy award for Best Documentary. In 2011 his film company Chimerica Media released its first feature-length documentary, "Kissinger", which won the New York Film Festival's prize for Best Documentary.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: In May 2012, the BBC announced Niall Ferguson was to present its annual Reith Lectures. These four lectures, titled "The Rule of Law and its Enemies", examine the role man-made institutions have played in the economic and political spheres.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: In the first lecture, held at the London School of Economics, titled "The Human Hive", Ferguson argues for greater openness from governments, saying they should publish accounts which clearly state all assets and liabilities. Governments, he said, should also follow the lead of business and adopt the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles and, above all, generational accounts should be prepared on a regular basis to make absolutely clear the inter-generational implications of current fiscal policy. In the lecture, Ferguson says young voters should be more supportive of government austerity measures if they do not wish to pay further down the line for the profligacy of the baby boomer generation.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: In the second lecture, "The Darwinian Economy", Ferguson reflects on the causes of the global financial crisis, and allegedly erroneous conclusions that many people have drawn from it about the role of regulation, and asks whether regulation is in fact "the disease of which it purports to be the cure".


title: Niall Ferguson

text: "The Landscape of Law" was the third lecture, delivered at Gresham College. It examines the rule of law in comparative terms, asking how far the common law's claims to superiority over other systems are credible, and whether we are living through a time of "creeping legal degeneration" in the English-speaking world.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: The fourth and final lecture, "Civil and Uncivil Societies", focuses on institutions (outside the political, economic and legal realms) designed to preserve and transmit particular knowledge and values. Ferguson asks whether the modern state is quietly killing civil society in the Western world, and what non-Western societies can do to build a vibrant civil society.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: The first lecture was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and the BBC World Service on Tuesday, 19 June 2012. The series is available as a BBC podcast.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: In his 2001 book, "The Cash Nexus", which he wrote following a year as Houblon-Norman Fellow at the Bank of England, Ferguson argues that the popular saying, "money makes the world go 'round", is wrong; instead he presented a case for human actions in history motivated by far more than just economic concerns.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: In his 2003 book, "Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World," Ferguson conducts a provocative reinterpretation of the British Empire, casting it as one of the world's great modernising forces. The Empire produced durable changes and globalisation with steampower, telegraphs, and engineers.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: Bernard Porter, famous for expressing his views during the Porter–MacKenzie debate on the British Empire, attacked "Empire" in "The London Review of Books" as a "panegyric to British colonialism". Ferguson, in response to this, drew Porter's attention to the conclusion of the book, where he writes: "No one would claim that the record of the British Empire was unblemished. On the contrary, I have tried to show how often it failed to live up to its own ideal of individual liberty, particularly in the early era of enslavement, transportation and the 'ethnic cleansing' of indigenous peoples." Ferguson argues however that the British Empire was preferable to German and Japanese rule at the time:


title: Niall Ferguson

text: The 19th-century empire undeniably pioneered free trade, free capital movements and, with the abolition of slavery, free labour. It invested immense sums in developing a global network of modern communications. It spread and enforced the rule of law over vast areas. Though it fought many small wars, the empire maintained a global peace unmatched before or since. In the 20th century too the empire more than justified its own existence. For the alternatives to British rule represented by the German and Japanese empires were clearly – and they admitted it themselves – far worse. And without its empire, it is inconceivable that Britain could have withstood them.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: In his 2005 book, "Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire," Ferguson proposes that the United States aspires to globalize free markets, the rule of law, and representative government, but shies away from the long-term commitments of manpower and money that are indispensable, in taking a more active role in resolving conflict arising from the failure of states. The U.S. is an empire in denial, not acknowledging the scale of global responsibilities. The American writer Michael Lind, responding to Ferguson's advocation of an enlarged American military through conscription, accused Ferguson of engaging in apocalyptic alarmism about the possibility of a world without the United States as the dominant power and of a casual disregard for the value of human life.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: In "War of the World", published in 2006, Ferguson argued that a combination of economic volatility, decaying empires, psychopathic dictators, racially/ethnically motivated and institutionalised violence resulted in the wars and genocides of what he calls "History's Age of Hatred". "The New York Times Book Review" named "War of the World" one of the 100 Notable Books of the Year in 2006, while the "International Herald Tribune" called it "one of the most intriguing attempts by an historian to explain man's inhumanity to man".


title: Niall Ferguson

text: Ferguson addresses the paradox that, though the 20th century was "so bloody", it was also "a time of unparalleled [economic] progress". As with his earlier work "Empire", "War of the World" was accompanied by a Channel 4 television series presented by Ferguson.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: Published in 2008, "The Ascent of Money" examines the history of money, credit, and banking. In it Ferguson predicts a financial crisis as a result of the world economy and in particular the United States using too much credit. He cites the China–United States dynamic which he refers to as Chimerica where an Asian "savings glut" helped create the subprime mortgage crisis with an influx of easy money.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: Published in 2011, "Civilization: The West and the Rest" examines what Ferguson calls the most "interesting question" of our day: "Why, beginning around 1500, did a few small polities on the western end of the Eurasian landmass come to dominate the rest of the world?"


title: Niall Ferguson

text: The "Economist" in a review wrote: In 1500 Europe's future imperial powers controlled 10% of the world's territories and generated just over 40% of its wealth. By 1913, at the height of empire, the West controlled almost 60% of the territories, which together generated almost 80% of the wealth. This stunning fact is lost, he regrets, on a generation that has supplanted history's sweep with a feeble-minded relativism that holds "all civilisations as somehow equal".


title: Niall Ferguson

text: Ferguson attributes this divergence to the West's development of six "killer apps", which he finds were largely missing elsewhere in the world in 1500 – "competition, the scientific method, the rule of law, modern medicine, consumerism and the work ethic".


title: Niall Ferguson

text: Ferguson compared and contrasted how the West's "killer apps" allowed the West to triumph over "the Rest" citing examples. Ferguson argued the rowdy and savage competition between European merchants created far more wealth than did the static and ordered society of Qing China. Tolerance extended to thinkers like Sir Isaac Newton in Stuart England had no counterpart in the Ottoman Empire, where Takiyuddin's state built observatory was eventually demolished due to political conflict. This ensured that Western civilization was capable of making scientific advances that Ottoman civilization never could. Respect for private property was far stronger in British America than it ever was in Spanish America, which led to the United States and Canada becoming prosperous societies while Latin America was and remains mired in poverty.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: Ferguson also argued that the modern West had lost its edge and the future belongs to the nations of Asia, especially China, which has adopted the West's "killer apps". Ferguson argues that in the coming years we will see a steady decline of the West, while China and the rest of the Asian nations will be the rising powers.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: "Kissinger The Idealist", Volume I, published in September 2015, is the first part of a planned two-part biography of Henry Kissinger based on his private papers. The book starts with a quote from a letter which Kissinger wrote in 1972. The book examines Kissinger's life from being a refugee and fleeing Nazi Germany in 1938, to serving in the US army as a "free man" in World War II, to studying at Harvard. The book explores the history of Kissinger joining the Kennedy administration and later becoming critical of its foreign policy, to supporting Nelson Rockefeller on three failed presidential bids, to joining the Nixon administration. The book includes Kissinger's early evaluation of the Vietnam war and his efforts to negotiate with the North Vietnamese in Paris.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: Historians and political scientists gave the book mixed reviews. "The Economist" wrote in a review about "The Idealist": "Mr Ferguson, a British historian also at Harvard, has in the past sometimes produced work that is rushed and uneven. Not here. Like Mr Kissinger or loathe him, this is a work of engrossing scholarship." In a negative review of "The Idealist", the American journalist Michael O'Donnell questioned Ferguson's interpretation of Kissinger's actions leading up to Nixon's election as President.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: Andrew Roberts praised the book in "The New York Times", concluding: "Niall Ferguson already has many important, scholarly and controversial books to his credit. But if the second volume of "Kissinger" is anywhere near as comprehensive, well written and riveting as the first, this will be his masterpiece."


title: Niall Ferguson

text: In 2018's "The Square and the Tower", Ferguson proposed a modified version of group selection that history can be explained by the evolution of human networks. He wrote, "Man, with his unrivaled neural network, was born "to" network." The title refers to a transition from hierarchical, "tower" networks to flatter, "square" network connections between individuals. John Gray in a review of the book was not convinced. He wrote, "He offers a mix of metaphor and what purports to be a new science."


title: Niall Ferguson

text: "Niall Ferguson has again written a brilliant book," wrote Deirdre McCloskey in "The Wall Street Journal", "this time in defence of traditional top-down principles of governing the wild market and the wilder international order. "The Square and the Tower" raises the question of just how much the unruly world should be governedand by whom. Not everyone will agree, but everyone will be charmed and educated. ... "The Square and the Tower" is always readable, intelligent, original. You can swallow a chapter a night before sleep and your dreams will overflow with scenes of Stendhal's "The Red and the Black," Napoleon, Kissinger. In 400 pages you will have restocked your mind. Do it."


title: Niall Ferguson

text: In this book Ferguson offers a global history of disaster. Damon Linker of the "New York Times" argues that the book is "often insightful, productively provocative and downright brilliant" and suggests that Ferguson displays "an impressive command of the latest research in a large number of specialized fields, among them medical history, epidemiology, probability theory, cliodynamics and network theory". However Linker also criticises the book's "perplexing lacunae".


title: Niall Ferguson

text: Ferguson has been referred to as a conservative historian by some commentators and fellow historians. Ferguson himself stated in a 2018 interview on the "Rubin Report" that his views align to classical liberalism and has referred to himself as a "classic Scottish enlightenment liberal" on other occasions. Some of his research and conclusions have resulted in controversy, particularly from commentators on the left of the political spectrum.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: Ferguson endorsed Kemi Badenoch's campaign during the July 2022 Conservative Party leadership election.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: In 1998, Ferguson published "The Pity of War: Explaining World War One", which with the help of research assistants he was able to write in just five months. This is an analytic account of what Ferguson considered to be the ten great myths of the Great War. The book generated much controversy, particularly Ferguson's suggestion that it might have proved more beneficial for Europe if Britain had stayed out of the First World War in 1914, thereby allowing Germany to win.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: Ferguson has argued that the British decision to intervene was what stopped a German victory in 1914–15. Furthermore, Ferguson expressed disagreement with the "Sonderweg" interpretation of German history championed by some German historians such as Fritz Fischer, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Hans Mommsen and Wolfgang Mommsen, who argued that the German Empire deliberately started an aggressive war in 1914. Likewise, Ferguson has often attacked the work of the German historian Michael Stürmer, who argued that it was Germany's geographical situation in Central Europe that determined the course of German history.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: On the contrary, Ferguson maintained that Germany waged a preventive war in 1914, a war largely forced on the Germans by reckless and irresponsible British diplomacy. In particular, Ferguson accused the British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey of maintaining an ambiguous attitude to the question of whether Britain would enter the war or not, and thus confusing Berlin over just what was the British attitude towards the question of intervention in the war.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: Ferguson accused London of unnecessarily allowing a regional war in Europe to escalate into a world war. Moreover, Ferguson denied that the origins of National Socialism could be traced back to Imperial Germany; instead Ferguson asserted the origins of Nazism could only be traced back to the First World War and its aftermath.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: Ferguson attacked a number of ideas that he called "myths" in the book. They are listed here (with his counter-arguments in parentheses):


title: Niall Ferguson

text: Another controversial aspect of "The Pity of War" is Ferguson's use of counterfactual history also known as "speculative" or "hypothetical" history. In the book, Ferguson presents a hypothetical version of Europe being, under Imperial German domination, a peaceful, prosperous, democratic continent, without ideologies like communism or Italian fascism. In Ferguson's view, had Germany won World War I, then the lives of millions would have been saved, something like the European Union would have been founded in 1914, and Britain would have remained an empire as well as the world's dominant financial power.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: The French historians Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker were dubious about much of Ferguson's methodology and conclusions in "The Pity of War", but praised him for the chapter dealing with the executions of POWs, arguing that Ferguson had exposed a dark side of the war that until then had been ignored. The American writer Michael Lind wrote about "The Pity of War":Like the historian John Charmley, who expressed the same wish in the case of World War II, Ferguson belongs to the fringe element of British conservatism that regrets the absence of a German-British deal in the first half of the 20th century that would have marginalized the United States and might have allowed the British Empire to survive to this day. According to Ferguson, Britain should have stayed out of World War I and allowed Imperial Germany to smash France and Russia and create a continental empire from the Atlantic to the Middle East. The joke is on Ferguson's American conservative admirers, inasmuch as he laments the defeat of the Kaiser's Germany because it accelerated the replacement of the British Empire by the United States of America and the eclipse of the City of London by Wall Street. The German-born American historian Gerhard Weinberg in a review of "The Pity of War" strongly criticized Ferguson for advancing the thesis that it was idiotic for Britain to have fought a Germany that allegedly posed no danger. Weinberg accused Ferguson of completely ignoring the chief foreign policy aim of Wilhelm II from 1897 onwards, namely "Weltpolitik" ("World Politics") and argued it was absurd for Ferguson to claim that allowing Germany to defeat France and Russia would have posed no danger to Britain. Weinberg wrote that Ferguson was wrong to claim that Germany's interests were limited only to Europe, and maintained that if the "Reich" had defeated France in 1914, then Germany would have taken over the French colonies in Asia and Africa which would have definitely affected the balance of power all over the world, not just in Europe.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: Finally, Weinberg attacked Ferguson for claiming that the Tirpitz Plan was not a danger to Britain and that Britain had no reason to fear Germany's naval ambitions, sarcastically asking if that was really the case, then why did the British redeploy so much of their fleet from around the world to the North Sea and spend so much money building warships in the Anglo-German naval arms race? Weinberg accused Ferguson of distorting both German and British history and ignoring any evidence that did not fit with his thesis that Britain should never have fought Germany, stating that "The Pity of War" was interesting as a historical provocation, but was not persuasive as history.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: Ferguson wrote two volumes about the prominent Rothschild family: "The House of Rothschild: Volume 1: Money's Prophets: 1798–1848" and "The House of Rothschild: Volume 2: The World's Banker: 1849–1999". These books were the result of original archival research. The books won the Wadsworth Prize for Business History and were also short-listed for the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Literary Award and the American National Jewish Book Award.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: The books were widely acclaimed by historians, although they did receive some criticism. John Lewis Gaddis, a Cold War–era historian, praised Ferguson's "unrivaled range, productivity and visibility", while criticising the book as unpersuasive and containing contradictory claims. Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm had praised Ferguson as an excellent historian, but criticised him as a "nostalgist for empire". In a mixed review of a later book by Ferguson, "The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred", a reviewer for "The Economist" described how many regard Ferguson's two books on the Rothschilds "as one of the finest studies of its kind". Jeremy Wormell wrote that while "The World's Banker: A History of the House of Rothschild" had its virtues, it contained "many errors" which meant it was "unsafe to use it as a source for the debt markets".


title: Niall Ferguson

text: Writing in "The New York Review of Books", Robert Skidelsky praised Ferguson: "Taken together, Ferguson's two volumes are a stupendous achievement, a triumph of historical research and imagination. No serious historian can write about the connection between the politics, diplomacy, and economics of the nineteenth century in the same way again. And, as any good work of history should do, it constantly prompts us to ask questions about our own age, when once again we have embarked on the grand experiment of a world economy without a world government."


title: Niall Ferguson

text: Ferguson sometimes champions counterfactual history, also known as "speculative" or "hypothetical" history, and edited a collection of essays, titled "Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals" (1997), exploring the subject. Ferguson likes to imagine alternative outcomes as a way of stressing the contingent aspects of history. For Ferguson, great forces don't make history; individuals do, and nothing is predetermined. Thus, for Ferguson, there are no paths in history that will determine how things will work out. The world is neither progressing nor regressing; only the actions of individuals determine whether we will live in a better or worse world. His championing of the method has been controversial within the field. In a 2011 review of Ferguson's book "Civilization: The West and the Rest", Noel Malcolm (senior research fellow in history at All Souls College at Oxford University) stated that: "Students may find this an intriguing introduction to a wide range of human history; but they will get an odd idea of how historical argument is to be conducted, if they learn it from this book."


title: Niall Ferguson

text: In 2003, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger provided Ferguson with access to his White House diaries, letters, and archives for what Ferguson calls a "warts-and-all biography" of Kissinger. In 2015, he published the first volume in a two-part biography titled "Kissinger: 1923–1968: The Idealist" from Penguin Press.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: The thesis of this first volume was that Kissinger was greatly influenced in his academic and political development by the philosopher Immanuel Kant, and especially by an interpretation of Kant that he learned from a mentor at Harvard University, William Yandell Elliott.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: Ferguson has defended the British Empire, stating, "I think it's hard to make the case, which implicitly the left makes, that somehow the world would have been better off if the Europeans had stayed home." Ferguson is critical of what he calls the "self-flagellation" that he says characterises modern European thought.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: Historians and academics have widely criticised Ferguson's views on empire. His views have been described in various terms, from "audacious" yet "wrong", "ambitious" and "troubling", to "false and dangerous" apologia. Rhodes Professor of Imperial History Richard Drayton has stated that it was correct of Seumas Milne to associate "Ferguson with an attempt to "rehabilitate empire" in the service of contemporary great power interests". Cambridge professor Priyamvada Gopal said Ferguson was peddling hackneyed, self-aggrandising myths of empire. In a piece for "The Guardian", she wrote that Ferguson's "history" is a fairytale for our times, putting the white man and his burden back at the centre of heroic action.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: Jon Wilson, a professor of the Department of History at King's College London, is the author of "India Conquered," a 2016 book intended to rebut Ferguson's arguments in "Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World," who catalogues the negative elements of the British Raj, and describes the "Empire" TV program (2003) as "false and dangerous" Wilson agrees with Ferguson's point that the British innovations brought to India, civil services, education, and railways, had beneficial side effects, but faults them for being done in a spirit of self-interest rather than altruism.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: About Ferguson's claim that Britain "made the modern world" by spreading democracy, free trade, capitalism, the rule of law, Protestantism and the English language, Wilson charged that Ferguson never explained precisely how this was done, arguing that the reason was the lack of interest in the history of the people ruled by the British on Ferguson's part, who therefore could not perceive that the interaction between the colonisers and the colonised in places like India, where the population embraced aspects of British culture and rule that were appealing to them while rejecting others that were unappealing.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: Wilson argues that this interaction between the rulers and the ruled is more complex, and contradicts Ferguson's one-sided picture of the British "transforming" India that portrays the British as active and the Indians as passive. Wilson charged that Ferguson failed to look at the empire via non-British eyes because to do so would be to challenge his claim that Britain "made the modern world" by imposing its values on "the Other", and that the history of the empire was far more complicated than the simplistic version that Ferguson is trying to present.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: Matthew Carr wrote in "Race & Class" that "Niall Ferguson, the conservative English [sic] historian and enthusiastic advocate of a new American empire, has also embraced the Eurabian idea in a widely reproduced article entitled 'Eurabia?', in which he laments the "de-Christianization of Europe" and the secularism of the continent that leaves it "weak in the face of fanaticism"." Carr adds that "Ferguson sees the recent establishment of a department of Islamic studies in his (Oxford college) as another symptom of 'the creeping Islamicization of a decadent Christendom'," and in a 2004 lecture at the American Enterprise Institute entitled 'The End of Europe?',


title: Niall Ferguson

text: Ferguson struck a similarly Spenglerian note, conjuring the term "impire" to depict a process in which a 'political entity, instead of expanding outwards towards its periphery, exporting power, implodes—when the energies come from outside into that entity'. In Ferguson's opinion, this process was already under way in a decadent 'post-Christian' Europe that was drifting inexorably towards the dark denouement of a vanquished civilisation and the fatal embrace of Islam.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: In 2015, Ferguson deplored the Paris attacks committed by Islamic State terrorists, but stated he was not going to "stand" with the French as he argued that France was a lost cause, a declining state faced with an unstoppable Islamic wave that would sweep away everything that tried to oppose it. Ferguson compared the modern European Union to the Western Roman Empire, describing modern Europe as not that different from the world depicted by Edward Gibbon in his book "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire". Ferguson wrote that:Uncannily similar processes are destroying the European Union today...Let us be clear about what is happening. Like the Roman Empire in the early fifth century, Europe has allowed its defenses to crumble. As its wealth has grown, so its military prowess has shrunk, along with its self-belief. It has grown decadent in its shopping malls and sports stadiums. At the same time, it has opened its gates to outsiders who have coveted its wealth without renouncing their ancestral faith. Ferguson wrote the mass influx of refugees into Europe from Syria was a modern version of the "Völkerwanderung" when the Huns burst out of Asia and invaded Europe, causing millions of the Germanic peoples to flee into the presumed safety of the Roman Empire, smashing their way in as the Romans attempted unsuccessfully to stop the Germans from entering the empire. Ferguson writes that Gibbon was wrong to claim the Roman Empire collapsed slowly and argues that the view among a growing number of modern scholars is that the collapse of the Roman empire was swift and violent; unforeseeable by Romans of the day, just as the collapse of modern European civilization would likewise be for modern Europeans.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: In 2017, Ferguson opined that the West had insufficiently heeded the rise of militant Islam and its global consequences in the same way it failed to predict that the rise of Lenin would lead to the further spread of communism and conflict around the world:Ask yourself how effectively we in the West have responded to the rise of militant Islam since the Iranian Revolution unleashed its Shi’ite variant and since 9/11 revealed the even more aggressive character of Sunni Islamism. I fear we have done no better than our grandfathers did.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: Foreign intervention—the millions of dollars that have found their way from the Gulf to radical mosques and Islamic centres in the West.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: Incompetent liberals—the proponents of multiculturalism who brand any opponent of jihad an "Islamophobe". Clueless bankers—the sort who fall over themselves to offer "sharia-compliant" loans and bonds. Fellow travellers—the leftists who line up with the Muslim Brotherhood to castigate Israel at every opportunity. And the faint-hearted—those who were so quick to pull out of Iraq in 2009 that they allowed the rump of al-Qaeda to morph into Isis.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: A century ago it was the West's great blunder to think it would not matter if Lenin and his confederates took over the Russian Empire, despite their stated intention to plot world revolution and overthrow both democracy and capitalism. Incredible as it may seem, I believe we are capable of repeating that catastrophic error. I fear that, one day, we shall wake with a start to discover that the Islamists have repeated the Bolshevik achievement, which was to acquire the resources and capability to threaten our existence.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: During a 2018 debate, Ferguson asserted that he is not anti-immigration or opposed to Muslims, but felt that sections of Europe's political and intellectual classes had failed to predict the cultural and political consequences of large scale immigration. He stated that Islam differs from Judaism and Christianity through being "designed differently" as a political ideology that does not recognize the separation of mosque with the secular and temporal, and that the Muslim world has mostly followed an opposite trend to Western society by becoming less secularized and more literal in interpreting holy scripture.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: He concluded that if Europe kept pursuing large scale migration from pious Muslim societies combined with poor structures of economic and cultural integration, especially in an era when existing migrant communities are either unassimilated or loosely integrated into the host society, it is "highly likely" that networks of fundamentalist "dawah" will grow in which Islamic extremists draw in the culturally and economically unassimilated Muslims of immigrant backgrounds. Ferguson has pointed out that even when living in Western nations, both he and his wife Ayaan Hirsi Ali have to live with permanent security measures as a result of her public critiques of Islam and status as a former Muslim.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: Ferguson supported the 2003 Iraq War, and he is on record as being not necessarily opposed to future western incursions around the world. It's all very well for us to sit here in the West with our high incomes and cushy lives, and say it's immoral to violate the sovereignty of another state. But if the effect of that is to bring people in that country economic and political freedom, to raise their standard of living, to increase their life expectancy, then don't rule it out.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: Ferguson was initially skeptical of Donald Trump's bid for the 2016 United States presidential election. During the Republican Party primaries, Ferguson was quoted in early 2016: "If you bother to read some of the serious analysis of Trump's support, you realize that it's a very fragile thing and highly unlikely to deliver what he needs in the crucial first phase of the primaries ... By the time we get to March–April, it's all over. I think there's going to be a wonderful catharsis, I'm really looking forward to it: Trump's humiliation. Bring it on." Trump eventually won the nomination.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: Three weeks before the 2016 United States presidential election, after the Access Hollywood tape scandal, Ferguson stated in an interview that it "was over for Donald Trump"; that "Trump had flamed out in all three Presidential debates"; that, "I don't think there can be any last minute surprise to rescue him [Trump]"; that there was no hope of Donald Trump winning Independent voters and that Trump was "gone as a candidate", adding that "it seems to me clear that she [Hillary Clinton] is going to be the first female President of the United States. The only question is how bad does his [Trump's] flaming out affect candidates for the Senate, candidates for the House, further down on the ballot."


title: Niall Ferguson

text: After Brexit, Ferguson stated that Trump could win via the Electoral College if certain demographics turned out to vote in key swing states. Trump was elected president and the Republican Party retained control of both the Senate and House of Representatives.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: In 2018, Ferguson argued that a Hillary Clinton presidency would have been more disruptive to America, and that Clinton would have been "immediately" impeached as Trump supporters would have likely believed that the election was rigged. Ferguson stated that he regarded himself "in the middle ground" in a generally polarized public and media opinion on Trump's presidency. He elaborated that while he found Trump's personality "pretty hard to take", he cited several positive achievements undertaken by his administration, including America's stronger economic performance and noted that he found Trump's foreign policy stances on China, North Korea and the Middle East an improvement over that of the Obama administration. He further opined that the media was more focused on Trump's behaviour on social media than the "competent job" being done by members of his administration.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: In 2019, he wrote an op-ed in The New York Times arguing that the China–United States trade war was the beginning of a Second Cold War between the United States and China, and that despite the risks of the showdown the introduction of an external enemy similar to the Soviet Union could prove beneficial by reducing political polarization in the United States.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: During the 2020 United States Presidential election, Ferguson noted that contrary to arguments from Trump's opponents that he only appealed to older White men, statistics showed his support among Black and Latino voters had risen. He opined that Biden was likely to win the presidency, but that the Democratic Party would not see a "blue wave" of support as it had tried to turn the election into "a referendum on Trump's handling of COVID-19" when there "hasn't been anything exceptionally bad about American performance" and the Democrats had misjudged the mood of voters concerned about law and order following the Black Lives Matter protests. After the election was concluded, Ferguson stated that both Trump and the "far-left of the Democratic Party" had lost.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: Ferguson criticized the 2021 U.S Capitol attack committed by supporters of Trump, arguing on Twitter that the participants should be prosecuted and that Trump's behavior had cost the Republicans the Senate. He argued that Trumpism was likely to remain a force within US politics and likened it to Jacobite Pretenders who sought to revolt in order to restore the House of Stuart to the British royal throne after the Glorious Revolution.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: In an article from November 2016 in "The Boston Globe", Ferguson advised that Trump should support the efforts of the Prime Minister, Theresa May to have the UK leave the European Union as the best way of breaking up the EU, and sign a free trade agreement with the United Kingdom once Brexit is complete. To stabilise international relations, Ferguson speculated that Trump could give recognition to Russia as a Great Power, and work with President Vladimir Putin by giving Russia a sphere of influence in Eurasia. In the same column, Ferguson advised Trump not to engage in a trade war with China, and work with President Xi Jinping to create a US-Chinese partnership.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: Ferguson argued that Trump and Putin could work for the victory of Marine Le Pen (who wants France to leave the EU) and the "Front national" in the 2017 French elections, arguing that Le Pen was the French politician most congenial to the Trump administration. Ferguson argued that a quintumvirate of Trump, Putin, Xi, May and Le Pen could then result in a stable "world order" that would reduce the likelihood of international conflict.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: In its edition of 15 August 2005, "The New Republic" published "The New New Deal", an essay by Ferguson and Laurence J. Kotlikoff, a professor of economics at Boston University. The two scholars called for the following changes to the American government's fiscal and income security policies:


title: Niall Ferguson

text: In February 2010, during the Greek government-debt crisis, Ferguson appeared on the "Glenn Beck Program" predicting that if interest rates rose in the United States it could experience a similar sovereign default and mass civil disorder to what was occurring in Greece. He also praised the Tea Party movement. Later in the year he called for the Federal Reserve under Chairman Ben Bernanke to end its second round of quantitative easing.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: In November 2012, Ferguson stated in a video with CNN that the U.S. has enough energy resources to move towards energy independence and could possibly enter a new economic golden age due to the related socio-economic growth—coming out of the post-world economic recession doldrums.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: Ferguson was an attendee of the 2012 Bilderberg Group meeting, where he was a speaker on economic policy.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: Ferguson was highly critical of Britain's vote to leave the European Union, warning that "the economic consequences will be dire". Later, after backing the Remain campaign during the referendum, Ferguson changed his mind and came out in support of Britain's exit from the EU.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: In May 2009, Ferguson became involved in a high-profile exchange of views with economist Paul Krugman arising out of a panel discussion hosted by PEN/"New York Review" on 30 April 2009, regarding the U.S. economy. Ferguson contended that the Obama administration's policies are simultaneously Keynesian and monetarist, in an "incoherent" mix, and specifically claimed that the government's issuance of a multitude of new bonds would cause an increase in interest rates.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: Krugman argued that Ferguson's view is "resurrecting 75-year old fallacies" and full of "basic errors". He also stated that Ferguson is a "poseur" who "hasn't bothered to understand the basics, relying on snide comments and surface cleverness to convey the impression of wisdom. It's all style, no comprehension of substance."


title: Niall Ferguson

text: In 2012, Jonathan Portes, the director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, said that subsequent events had shown Ferguson to be wrong: "As we all know, since then both the US and UK have had deficits running at historically extremely high levels, and long-term interest rates at historic lows: as Krugman has repeatedly pointed out, the (IS-LM) textbook has been spot on."


title: Niall Ferguson

text: Later in 2012, after Ferguson wrote a cover story for "Newsweek" arguing that Mitt Romney should be elected in the upcoming US presidential election, Krugman wrote that there were multiple errors and misrepresentations in the story, concluding "We're not talking about ideology or even economic analysis here—just a plain misrepresentation of the facts, with an august publication letting itself be used to misinform readers. The "Times" would require an abject correction if something like that slipped through. Will "Newsweek"?"


title: Niall Ferguson

text: Ferguson denied that he had misrepresented the facts in an online rebuttal. Matthew O'Brien countered that Ferguson was still distorting the meaning of the Congressional Budget Office report being discussed, and that the entire piece could be read as an effort to deceive.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: In 2013, Ferguson, naming Dean Baker, Josh Barro, Brad DeLong, Matthew O'Brien, Noah Smith, Matthew Yglesias and Justin Wolfers, attacked "Krugman and his acolytes," in his three-part essay on why he dislikes Paul Krugman. The essay title ('Krugtron the Invincible') originally comes from a post by Noah Smith.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: At a May 2013 investment conference in Carlsbad, California, Ferguson was asked about his views on economist John Maynard Keynes' quotation that "in the long run we are all dead." Ferguson stated that Keynes was indifferent to the future because he was gay and did not have children. The remarks were widely criticised for being offensive, factually inaccurate, and a distortion of Keynes' ideas.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: Ferguson posted an apology for these statements shortly after reports of his words were widely disseminated, saying his comments were "as stupid as they were insensitive". In the apology, Ferguson stated: "My disagreements with Keynes's economic philosophy have never had anything to do with his sexual orientation. It is simply false to suggest, as I did, that his approach to economic policy was inspired by any aspect of his personal life."


title: Niall Ferguson

text: In spring 2018, Ferguson was involved with College Republican leaders at Stanford to oppose a left-leaning student take over of the Cardinal Conversations initiative. In leaked emails, he was quoted as asking for opposition research on the student involved. He later apologized and resigned from the said initiative when emails were leaked revealing his involvement in the events. "I very much regret the publication of these emails. I also regret having written them," Ferguson wrote in a statement to "The Daily".


title: Niall Ferguson

text: Ferguson was an early skeptic of cryptocurrencies, famously dismissing his teenage son's recommendation to buy Bitcoin in 2014. By 2017, he had changed his mind on Bitcoin's utility, saying it had established itself as a form of "digital gold: a store of value for wealthy investors, especially those located in countries with weak rule of law and high political risk." In February 2019, Ferguson became an advisor for digital asset protocol firm Ampleforth Protocol, saying he was attracted by the firm's plan to "reinvent money in a way that protects individual freedom and to create a payments system that treats everyone equally". In March 2019, Ferguson spoke at an Australian Financial Review Business Summit, where he admitted to being "wrong to think there was no ... use for a form of currency based on blockchain technology... I don't think this will turn out to be a complete delusion."


title: Niall Ferguson

text: Ferguson has stated that he identified as a Scottish nationalist as a teenager, but moderated his views after moving to England to study history. He has argued that Scottish nationalism is sometimes fueled by a distorted view that Scots have always been oppressed by the English and is misconceived by people from outside of the United Kingdom as the choice between being Scottish or English. Ferguson states that in contrast to the subjugations of Wales and Ireland, Scotland was united as an "equal" country to England during the Act of Union, and cites events such as King James VI of Scotland inheriting the English crown, the failed Darien scheme to colonize Panama which prompted Scottish political elites to support the Union and that Scots were an integral part of the East India Company to question the narrative that Scotland was oppressed. Ferguson has also argued (citing Walter Scott's "Waverley") that Scotland after the Jacobite rebellion remained a land divided by warring clans and religious factions, and that the Union helped to quell some of the conflicts.


title: Niall Ferguson

text: During the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, Ferguson supported Scotland remaining within the United Kingdom, citing potential economic consequences of Scottish independence, but argued that the "No" campaign needed to focus on Scotland's history of cosmopolitanism as well as economic points to save the Union. In 2021, ahead of the 2021 Scottish Parliament election, Ferguson argued that the Labour administration under Tony Blair had made a mistake in believing devolution would stem Scottish nationalism, but instead it enabled the Scottish National Party to assume regional power and criticised the SNP government of Nicola Sturgeon for its management of the Scottish economy, education and freedom of speech. Ferguson furthermore claimed that the best way for the British government to thwart independence and the SNP's separationist demands was not by "unthinkingly accepting the SNP's argument that it has a moral right to a referendum on secession every time it wins a parliamentary election" and allowing a slim "Yes" vote to decide the outcome, but instead by following the example of Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien and minister Stephane Dion's who handled the Parti Quebecois's calls for Quebec secessionism by taking the matter to the Canadian Supreme Court and introducing the Clarity Act rather than letting it solely be up to "a slim majority of the voters of Quebec if Canada broke up."


title: Niall Ferguson

text: In 2011, Ferguson predicted that "Grexit" (the notion of Greece leaving the Euro currency) was unlikely to happen, but that Britain would leave the European Union in the near future as it would be easier for Britain to leave the EU owing to the fact it was not part of the Eurozone and that returning to a national currency would be harder for countries who had signed up to a single currency. In 2012, he described the Eurozone as a "disaster waiting to happen".