I suspect that the fiscal and monetary consequences of 2020 will require us to take some remedial

action way sooner than 2029.

So yeah, enjoy the party.

I think it'll be a shorter one than it was a hundred years ago.

To call 2020 an historic year is an understatement to say the least.

But what's less obvious is how to put the pandemic of 2020 in historical context.

What lessons can be learned about a response to past

public crises? Can these lessons be applied to the one we're living through now?

And what may lie ahead post-Corona as we transition from this most unusual head post Corona.

As we transition from this most unusual year,

I thought it would be good to check in with Neil Ferguson.

Neil was a historian and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and he's the managing

director of GreenMantle, a macroeconomic and geopolitical advisory firm. As a

professor, Neil has taught at Oxford, Harvard, and Stanford.

A weekly columnist for Bloomberg News,

he has published numerous books, 15 in total,

including The Square in the Tower,

Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook, which I highly recommend. It's about. networks and

this book reminds us how vulnerable networks are to contagion.

From the earliest days of the pandemic, Neil assembled a slide deck to chronicle everything he was learning about the crisis as it unfolded and provided historical context for his analysis.

Almost weekly he'd update the deck and share it with friends and colleagues which came to be known among us as the monster deck

Now close to a thousand slides

...