The Debt Crisis No One’s Talking About - Sir Niall Ferguson

TRIGGERnometry

Konstantin Kisin & Francis Foster

News, Society & Culture, Politics

4.5 • 3.4K Ratings

🗓️ 4 January 2026

⏱️ 75 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sir Niall Ferguson is a Scottish historian, author, and public intellectual known for his work on economic history, empire, and global politics. | Hypnozio: Expert hypnotherapy https://sponsr.is/hypnozio_Triggernometry Triggernometry is proudly independent. Thanks to the sponsors below for making that possible: - Wild Alaskan Company: premium, wild-caught seafood. Go to https://wildalaskan.com/TRIG for $35 off your first box - Go to https://sponsr.is/hypnozio_Triggernometry and use our code TRIGGER15 to grab 15% off your first subscription with Hypnozio - Füm: Head to https://www.tryfum.com/Trig and use promo code TRIG to get your free gift with purchase, and start The Good Habit today! Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Substack! https://triggernometry.substack.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Shop Merch here - https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: marketing@triggerpod.co.uk Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry: Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. 00:00 - Introduction 01:41 - What Is Money? 06:29 - The Connection Between Money And Precious Metals? 12:46 - The Formation Of Banks 18:47 - The Renaissance Era 25:23 - Why This Happened In Europe And Not Elsewhere In The World 30:55 - Risk 40:51 - The End Of The Reign Of Kings 49:42 - How Did You See The 2008 Financial Crash Coming? 54:23 - Are We Headed In A Direction Similar To The 1920/30s? 01:02:22 - The Addiction To Borrowing 01:11:06 - Chinese Debt 01:13:33 - What's The One Thing We're Not Talking About That We Really Should Be? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	We don't seem to be able to live within our means.
0:05.0	I mean, we really are in trouble in that aspect of things.
0:07.0	Are we not?
0:08.0	Yes, deep trouble.
0:09.0	If you borrowed to consume, well, that way lies trouble, and that's what we've been doing.
0:14.0	You're finally going to be forced, whether you're China, Europe, the UK, the United States,
0:20.0	to do something radical. And this is where Mr. Millay is
0:24.5	interesting. Are we headed in a sort of 1920s direction, 1930s direction? The ideologies are the same
0:33.3	old, same old. It's sort of depressing that we can't come up with new material, but... Those who enter adulthood without a clue about how interest rates work, who don't know what
0:44.8	a bond yield is, who've never made an investment in the stock market, and never will. Those people
0:50.5	will have worse lives than the people who get in form. You will be poor.
0:58.0	Samuel Ferguson, welcome back to Trigonometry. Good to be back. You are, of course, one of
1:02.8	our favorite historians to have on the show. And the thing that we want to talk to you about today
1:08.5	is money. One of the things you have been prominent
1:11.7	in trying to raise attention for and awareness of is the level of indebtedness the Western
1:16.7	world is in, particularly as it relates to our military spending because there's some historical
1:21.0	patterns that are very unfavorable on that side of things. We'll get into that. But we thought
1:27.3	you being one of the world's most
1:29.0	interesting and prominent historians, the first thing we should talk about is something you wrote
1:32.4	about immediately after the financial crisis in your book called The Send of Money, which is money,
1:38.5	money, debt, finance. And the best place to start, I think, is right at the very beginning, which is what is money?
1:45.8	And where does it come from?
	...

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