Niall Ferguson is here. He is an economic historian. He is a professor at Harvard. He is an author. You may also be familiar with his documentaries which are broadcast on PBS. His writings about the economic crisis and a potential rupture in U.S.-China relations have received much attention and controversy. His most recent book is now in paperback. It is called "The Ascent of Money, a Financial History of the World." I am pleased to have him back at this table. Welcome. Although it was a different table that we still use. This is a little smaller table. NIALL FERGUSON: Did you break it? Did you throw it at someone? (LAUGHTER) CHARLIE ROSE: Turned it over on them. OK, economic recovery. In the United States, lat quarter, 3.5 percent growth. Is there a global economic recovery under way? NIALL FERGUSON: I think there’s a global economic recovery, which looks actually rather more sustainable than the U.S. recovery. Most of the U.S. recovery is in the form of stimulus from government, the cash for clunkers program and the encouragement to first time home buyers. That accounted for a really large percentage. CHARLIE ROSE: More than 50? NIALL FERGUSON: Pretty close to half. You add those two things together and then the rest of it has to do with inventories. I don’t think this is a sustainable recovery yet. The recession is technically over, but I will be very surprised if the next quarter’s numbers are as good, because these programs are expiring or have expired. The global recovery is more interesting, because China, and not only China but also India and Brazil, plus a whole bunch of other mainly Asian economies, are growing much faster than I think anybody would have predicted six months ago. Not many people back in the dark days of the spring thought that even China would bounce back this strongly. But with growth now at an annual rate of around 10 percent and, interestingly, consumer growth in China growing even faster than that, there’s clearly a global recovery. But the engine of growth is not the United States. For the first time -- and one might say in a century -- the engine of growth in the world economy is no longer the United States. It’s China. CHARLIE ROSE: But it hadn’t been the United States for a number of years. NIALL FERGUSON: The engine of growth in the world economy was China plus the United States in the last ten years. But it was very much China plus the United States. You can actually figure this out. If you look at the decade running up to the crisis, 1998 to 2007, two-fifths of total growth in the world economy was China plus America. But of that two fifths, the United States was the lion’s share just because it’s still the biggest economy in the world. CHARLIE ROSE: And how much of it these do with the Chinese stimulus? NIALL FERGUSON: A lot, because that in relative terms is a very, very big shot in the arm of China’s economy. Plus, China’s stimulus kind of works better. It turns out that... CHARLIE ROSE: That’s the way it is with a command economy. NIALL FERGUSON: You have Keynesian policies where you aim to stimulate demand through massive government expenditure more easily in a controlled economy than in an open economy like that of the United States, which is a point, incidentally, that Keynes made in the 1930s. If you look at the forward to the "General Theory," the 1936 classic, in the German edition, Keynes says that the policies he recommends of deficit-financed government pump priming will work better in a controlled, totalitarian economy than in a free, open economy, and that’s still true today. CHARLIE ROSE: So what’s this sort of -- your own sense of the American economy over the next two or three years? NIALL FERGUSON: Well, I’m relatively pessimistic about how fast growth is going to be. The administration earlier this year forecast that the economy would grow next year by 3.5 percent, then by 4 percent, then by 4.5 percent after that. I think that’s highly unlikely to happen. My guess is that the economy will grow in real terms at closer to 2 percent a year for the next few years. And the reason I think that is that the U.S. consumer just can’t bounce back in the way that we’ve been used to seeing in previous recessions. We’ve reached the limits of leverage on household balance sheets. When you’ve got debts that are equivalent to around 120 percent of personal disposable income, there’s just no way that you can go back out to the shopping mall even if the credit card companies were cutting you some slack, which they’re not. So I think if the U.S. consumer is essentially going to be behaving in a parsimonious, even thrifty way, there’s no way the U.S. economy can grow at the rates we’ve seen in the past. CHARLIE ROSE: But is that the bind we’re caught in? On the one hand we’ve been living in this consumption society where China and other places have been a saving economy, and now we need to be a consumption economy to fuel our economy even though in the long term we need to be a saving economy? NIALL FERGUSON: I think this is the problem, and there’s no way that you can have the old style, debt-fueled consumption that was at the heart of our growth really over the last 20 years once you reach this level of indebtedness. So that game is over, and we’re in the process of a huge global rebalancing which requires Americans to become more thrifty and requires Asians to become rather more profligate. We need the Chinese to go out shopping. We need them to go out... CHARLIE ROSE: But that’s their concern, whether they have created a domestic demand that will replace the international demand for what they manufacture. NIALL FERGUSON: Gradually they are moving in that direction, but you can’t do that sort of thing overnight. There is some evidence -- I was in Hong Kong recently talking about this to people who are expert about the Chinese consumer -- there is some evidence that they are actually going out and shopping. There’s a bit of a myth actually that the Chinese households are big savers. That’s not actually true. Most of the savings that goes on in the Chinese economies is by corporations who make more money than they know what to do with. So actually Chinese households are beginning to save less and they are going out and they are spending more. But you can’t transform a culture as thrifty as China’s in the space of a few months. This will take years to unfold. CHARLIE ROSE: The key to the Chinese economy is creating a demanding middle class. NIALL FERGUSON: Right. You need in the end to switch China’s manufacturing to domestic demand and away from foreign demand. The Chinese model has been export driven really for decades now, but particularly for the last ten years. They focused on getting a bigger and bigger market share, and particularly of the U.S. consumer market but also the European consumer market. And they did this by keeping their currency weak. But of course they did it by becoming... CHARLIE ROSE: And there is enormous pressure on the part of the United States and others to get them to... NIALL FERGUSON: And this pressure achieved nothing. On the contrary, when the crisis struck, China canceled all the slight appreciation that they’d allowed and reverted to a straight dollar peg. Now, that’s really, really important, Charlie, because one way that the U.S. can get itself going again is by letting the dollar weaken, because that will stimulate U.S. exports, and that’s something that unofficially, tacitly has become American policy. But the Chinese will piggyback on that. CHARLIE ROSE: You will never see politician say that. NIALL FERGUSON: They’re all in favor of the strong dollar. CHARLIE ROSE: Exactly. (LAUGHTER) NIALL FERGUSON: And the more you hear them say that they are in favor of the strong dollar, the more you know the dollar is going down. So that’s an old and long-established American practice. It goes back to the 1970s when John Connolly, who was Richard Nixon’s Treasury Secretary, said to the Europeans of the dollar "Our currency, your problem." We’re doing it again this time around. It’s yet another dollar devaluation designed to get the economy going. But the Chinese are piggybacking on this, because in effect, if we go down, the currency of China, the renminbi, goes down, too. So interestingly, China is not only growing its own domestic demand, actually it’s also building up its export market share again. Anybody who’s on the wrong side of that process, like that Europeans with their increasingly strong euro or the Japanese with the strong yen, is getting killed because the Chinese are just killing their manufacturing exports. CHARLIE ROSE: All right, let’s talk about the prospect for America, because you make these terrifying analogies to the British empire, you know, that our best days are behind us, that "Chimerica," which was a grand bargain, is going to fall apart, that our dollar will not be the reserve currency, that we are looking at a deficit that is out of control. So we should just give up. NIALL FERGUSON: One should never give up. That’s an important thing to bear in mind. But one should always beware of British historians. CHARLIE ROSE: Exactly. (LAUGHTER) NIALL FERGUSON: My friend Paul Kennedy did this in the late 1980s, and of course it was the Soviet Union... CHARLIE ROSE: "The End of America" or whatever his phrase was from that book. NIALL FERGUSON: I think that one has to look carefully that the problems that the United States faces and draw analogies with great caution. CHARLIE ROSE: But you do it. NIALL FERGUSON: Well, I do it with caution. Let me put it this way. At the end of World War II, the United Kingdom was as indebted in relation to its gross domestic product as the United States is today if you include private debt. Most of Britain’s debt was public death. Today the United States has a huge mountain of private and public debt. And the public debt mountain is getting bigger very fast indeed, with a $9 trillion cumulative debt over the next ten years. I don’t think anybody, even Paul Krugman who loves deficits, would acknowledge that’s an unsustainable path for the U.S. CHARLIE ROSE: What did Keynes say about deficits? NIALL FERGUSON: Keynes if he were alive today would say that this was excessive and unsustainable, because most of this deficit is not a Keynesian stimulus package. That was less than $1 trillion. Most of it is a structural deficit because the United States spends much more every year regardless of whether there’s a boom or bust than it raises in taxation. So this can’t be justified in Keynesian terms. It’s a fundamental crisis of public finance, which the political class in Washington seems unable to address. CHARLIE ROSE: And that’s the problem, they do not the political will to do that. NIALL FERGUSON: It is a question of political will because the underlying strength of the U.S. economy is almost certainly greater than that of the British economy in 1945. But public finance -- and this is one of the points I trying to make in "The Ascent of Money," can trump your economy even if you have a wonderful work force, tremendous natural resources, and all the rest of it. Think of Argentina. And my worry is not only that there’s a British imperial parallel but there’s also a Latin American parallel here, that the United States is in danger of evolving... CHARLIE ROSE: Argentina? NIALL FERGUSON: Well, in the sense that Argentina was about the fourth-richest country in the world 100 years ago, and over that 100 year period systematically blew it as a result of mismanagement of its public... CHARLIE ROSE: So the currency was worth nothing. NIALL FERGUSON: Currency after currency. How many currencies did they have? How many defaults? The United States is on an unsustainable fiscal path, and we know that path ends in one of two ways. You either default on the debt or you depreciate it away, you inflate it away with your currency... CHARLIE ROSE: So we’re running out of money because we... NIALL FERGUSON: Or you can end up with too much money. Rather the opposite. If you print money... CHARLIE ROSE: We run out of money because, a, it’s worthless and the more you print, or you run out of money because, you know, you’ve got all this debt and you can’t service the debt. NIALL FERGUSON: What you run out of is credit. Remember, the United States relies on foreigners who currently hold half the federal debt to finance its borrowing habit. If foreigners lose confidence in the U.S. as a borrower, and if they lose confidence in the dollar as a currency, then things can turn ugly quite quickly. And that seems to be... CHARLIE ROSE: Do you think -- I talk to these people as much as you do, as you know. They don’t seem to me that they are about to be frightened by the American economic future. I do not hear them saying, oh, my god, it’s over for America so we better not, a, by any more dollars or, b, we better not -- better find alternative investments. NIALL FERGUSON: But these are the same people who in late 2006 and early 2007 were telling me and perhaps you that there would never be another recession in the United States because the great moderation... CHARLIE ROSE: What about the Chinese who are buying the debt? They’re saying "We buy the debt because when we look around, it’s the best place, because we still have confidence in America." NIALL FERGUSON: Well, that’s not really what they think. It may be what they say. Two things. First of all, they’re buying less than they used to when we need them to buy a lot more. In 2007 at peak they were buying three quarters of all the new debt issued by the U.S. Treasury. Now it’s about 10 percent. We are issuing much, much more and they’re buying much less because they feel about $2 trillion is about enough, really. If you look at their international reserves, which are predominantly held in dollars, they have a huge amount of... CHARLIE ROSE: It was about $1 billion dollars a day for a while. NIALL FERGUSON: It was an extraordinary amount of money flowing from China to the United States to finance our borrowing habit. CHARLIE ROSE: So we could buy their goods. NIALL FERGUSON: So we could buy their goods. Vendor finance if you like. And it worked well for a time. But I always argued that Chimerica was unstable. That’s why it was called "Chimerica." It was a pun on the word "chimera." And I think it was a chimera and I think it’s proved to be, certainly from the vantage point of the United States. I think it served China much better than it served the United States. They have been growing their economy at 10 percent a year. They’re on track to overtake us by 2027. CHARLIE ROSE: Overtake us not per capita, but overtake us in terms of the size of the economy? NIALL FERGUSON: In terms of the gross domestic product. No in per capita terms. That will take many, many years. CHARLIE ROSE: With their billion and a half population, right. So you they will happen when? 2030? 2050? NIALL FERGUSON: Well, I’m going to be quoting Jim O’Neil of Goldman Sachs, whose projection was on 2027 -- and I always joke on April 14 at 2:30 in the afternoon, China’s GDP would exceed that of the United States. But it’s credibly in that ballpark. And that’s a real historical moment. There hasn’t really been a point in the last century when anybody looked like doing that. A few people thought Japan might in the glory days of the 1980s. But I think the Chinese challenge is the more credible one, not because of the sheer size of China, but also because they do have a model that seems to deliver, even if it delivers at the expense of others. And that’s why I think that you are currency policy is a source of concern. CHARLIE ROSE: But you also argue about China that as their economy grows, their politics have to change, and they’re unlikely to change. And therefore when the game looks bad for them they’re going to turn nationalistic, and then the problem becomes an aggressive China. NIALL FERGUSON: I think this needs to be a concern as the Chinese leadership changes. The next generation of Chinese leaders I think will be more assertive. And they have up their sleeve this wonderful trump card. If things go wrong -- and they may. Let’s face it, every Asian economic miracle is punctuated by at least one financial crisis. If things go wrong, they can call on a formidable popular nationalism. That’s a sentiment which we know as historians can always be called upon when the going gets you have to economically, which it will... CHARLIE ROSE: But your premise is based on two things. One, the Chinese political system will not change, a. And, b, the United States won’t have the political will to deal with this deficit. NIALL FERGUSON: I think both of those are reasonable assumptions. CHARLIE ROSE: On this very same program that you’re on, the director of the Office of Management and Budget says that we will take the deficit of 2009 and by 2012, 2013, we will halve it. So by the time this president finishes his first term, we will cut the deficit in half. So that suggests some political will, if you believe him, to do it. NIALL FERGUSON: Well, it’s would still therefore be around 6 percent of gross domestic product. Now, that is a very large deficit in any normal circumstances. To halve it from 12 percent of GDP to 6 percent doesn’t constitute fiscal stable sags. You still will be borrowing around $1 trillion dollars. CHARLIE ROSE: But it constitutes progress, for god’s sake. NIALL FERGUSON: It’s progress. But my question is, where in their plans to we get to budget balance, because it’s clear from the forecast that he himself has made that the U.S. continues to run a deficit over a ten-year horizon. And if you look further beyond ten years, because it’s very important do that, and take into account the unfunded liabilities of the Medicare and Social Security systems, the position of the United States verges on bankruptcy, because, although we have a $10 trillion debt, the unfunded liabilities are $100 trillion. And that’s something that it seems to me one can’t likely dismiss. CHARLIE ROSE: Warren Buffett as we speak today made a huge multibillion dollar, $30 billion to $40 billion investment, in railways, saying, "This is my confidence in the American economy." NIALL FERGUSON: Well, good luck to him. CHARLIE ROSE: Well, he knows something about economies and investments, doesn’t he? NIALL FERGUSON: Oh, sure, and his track record has been very impressive until so very recently. And it’s been less so. CHARLIE ROSE: It was less so last year, but it’s come back. NIALL FERGUSON: So it’s possible that he’s right and I’m wrong, I don’t rule that out, and that all is going to be well and the U.S. is going to bounce back. CHARLIE ROSE: Are you prepared to say, "It’s either Buffett or me" in terms of analysis? NIALL FERGUSON: I’m happy to bet with him, although I probably can’t put down quite as much money as he can in his bet. I’m a humble academic. But it does seem to me a better bet would be to put money on not just China but actually China’s trading partners. I would rather by Australian railroads than American railroads because I know that stuff is being shipped from Australia to China in much larger quantities than is currently being shipped coast to coast in the United States. I mean, actually, freight traffic on U.S. railroads is at an extraordinarily low level right now with very little sign of improvement. So he’s a very optimistic man, I would say. CHARLIE ROSE: And you think he’s making a serious mistake. NIALL FERGUSON: I do, because I don’t see that the United States can grow at rates rapid enough to make that investment pay cheap, though the price may be. Now, of course, it’s reckless of me to take on Warren Buffett. But you know what? CHARLIE ROSE: What? NIALL FERGUSON: This is a moment in history when the things that have been true for his entire life may have ceased to be true. The biggest problem that anybody faces today is that their lifetime experience -- even if their life as long as Warren Buffett’s -- is no longer a reliable guide to the future. Why? Because we just missed a great depression by a hair’s breadth, and we missed it by throwing a vast quantity of money at the U.S. economy, by running a deficit as large as we ran in World War II in peacetime. Nobody knows whether that will create unintended consequences that will slow the economy down. My instinct is that it will. CHARLIE ROSE: Let me go to a little tangent real quick. Was that the wrong thing to do, to throw that money -- at a time the time that this economy needed somebody to do something dramatic, are you suggesting that the things they did was wrong? NIALL FERGUSON: No. There were two policies, one of this which was more important than the other. The monetary policy that Ben Bernanke pursued at the Fed, particularly after the Lehman crisis laugh year, of a massive expansion of the monetary base, was clearly the right policy. And that’s the policy Milton Friedman would have recommended had he still been alive. CHARLIE ROSE: Who was a great monetarist. NIALL FERGUSON: Who was a monetarist, and saw the cause of the Great Depression as being bank failures and monetary tightening by the Fed. We learned that lesson. But the other policy, the Keynesian policy, involves adding an enormous deficit on top of an already large structural deficit. And I don’t think that that has been anything as important in getting the economy out of the depression scenario. And I think one has to make that distinction. The fiscal policy could turn out to be OK as long as we know how to stabilize it. But right now we don’t. Right now we are clearly out of fiscal control. And at some point, the world is going to wake up to that and say it’s no longer sense to believe pile these bonds up in a reasonable expectation that the United States will either depreciate the debt away by letting the dollar fall through the floor or will actually start to call into question its own commitment to these payments. And default is not a scenario we can rule out, let me put it that way. CHARLIE ROSE: "Default is not a scenario we can rule out." We will default on our debt, and therefore what does that mean? NIALL FERGUSON: What will happen first is that we’ll default on the commitments made under the Medicare and Social Security systems. That default, the domestic default on our, as it were, domestic creditors, is an almost certain outcome. The only question is which president takes it? Which president grasps that and admits that we cannot possibly fulfill those commitments? The other question of default seems to me less likely. We’re not likely to default on our outstanding bonds held by foreigners. But foreigners may begin to question the sustainability of a fiscal policy that requires us to borrow $1 trillion dollars a year. What they’ll do when we do that... CHARLIE ROSE: Wait, stop. Everybody believes that. Everybody believes that you cannot continue at the pace we do. Everybody agrees with that. But they do not necessarily assume there are not policies and actions that can prevent the disaster of default that you are arguing are inevitable. NIALL FERGUSON: Of course there are. For example, the United States could introduce a value added tax. CHARLIE ROSE: Right. NIALL FERGUSON: Or a federal sales tax. CHARLIE ROSE: Right. NIALL FERGUSON: But can you imagine this Congress doing that? CHARLIE ROSE: I don’t know. It depends on the options they look at, at the time. You have people like Roger Altman coming on this program saying, "They’re going to have to have a value added tax." If they look at this thing and Niall Ferguson is saying to them, "This is the disaster you face," perhaps they’ll say, thank you, Niall, we better do something and add a value added tax. Maybe they’ll begin to believe you have to change the taxing policy. NIALL FERGUSON: But remember Winston Churchill’s great observation that the United States always does the right thing when all the other possibilities have been exhausted. I feel we’re doing that now in the realm of fiscal policy. And the reason I mentioned default is not because I think United States is going to turn into Mexico or Argentina overnight. CHARLIE ROSE: Well, you almost suggested that earlier. NIALL FERGUSON: Let me make this point really clear, because it’s absolutely crucial. In order to persuade investors to continue to buy U.S. government bonds we will have to offer them a higher interest rate for their money. Now, when that happens, the bonds go down in price, the yields go up, our fiscal crisis immediately gets worse because the cost of servicing in vast $10 trillion debt goes up. That’s what worries me most, because what you could then get is a situation where real interest rates go up. And that’s crippling for a heavily indebted economy, just as it’s crippling for a heavily indebted household. That’s why I worry about Buffett’s bet. That’s why I think the U.S. could slow down in 2010, 2011, not speeding up. CHARLIE ROSE: Who do you know of note from whatever background, academia, government, Wall Street, believes exactly as you say? NIALL FERGUSON: Let me name just one. CHARLIE ROSE: Just name one. NIALL FERGUSON: Ken Rogoff. CHARLIE ROSE: He’s coming on this program this week. But he comes from the same place. NIALL FERGUSON: He comes from the same university, but I wouldn’t say he comes from the same place. He’s an economist, a very distinguished economist who used to be at the International Monetary Fund. He and I think very similar ways about this problem, to name but one. I think if you were to ask George Soros is he optimistic... CHARLIE ROSE: I agree. George Soros -- on those three I agree. So what about Paul Volcker, who’s a distinguished American, former chairman of the Federal Reserve? NIALL FERGUSON: I think if anything he is more pessimistic than the two people I just mentioned. Of course, it’s hard for him to express publicly his disquiet because of his official position. CHARLIE ROSE: So you think the Obama administration is just wrongheaded? NIALL FERGUSON: No. Listen. I don’t want to criticize some very clever individuals who are grappling with a huge historical problem. CHARLIE ROSE: Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, Ben Bernanke... NIALL FERGUSON: These are some of the smartest -- Christy Romer -- some of the smartest people in the world. I have huge regard for all of them. CHARLIE ROSE: So therefore -- what’s the difference between them and you? If the people who have the power -- what’s the difference between the people who have the power -- NIALL FERGUSON: Charlie, they don’t have the power! The Congress has the power! That’s what people don’t understand about the situation we’re in. Right now the president proposes with his clever advisors helping him, but Congress disposes. And it will be Congress that decides whether the health care bill ultimately adds to the deficit or does not. CHARLIE ROSE: But are you suggesting that if they halve the deficit in four years, that that’s not putting us on the track to a balanced budget if they continue that kind of progress? NIALL FERGUSON: It’s not because their numbers, their ten-year numbers that they put in the budget, don’t put us on course for a balanced budget. They put us on course to carry on borrow a $1 trillion dollars a year as far as the eye can see. And that, it seems to me, is a recipe for trouble. Because there comes a point -- and this is one of the lessons of financial history -- there comes a point when the international markets simply can’t take anymore. And what’s interesting about this is it’s non-linear. It’s not that people gradually lose faith in the credit worthiness of a country or gradually lose faith in a currency as an international reserve currency. It can happen quite suddenly. Expectations change. That’s what the British experience tells you. In 1945, Churchill still thought of the British Empire as a mighty force equal in power to the Soviet Union and the United States. But it was a heavily indebted empire. Debt GDP was about 250 percent. What’s more, the British then embarked on health care reform. The National Health Service, thinking that they had limitless funds to devote to rewording themselves to the sacrifices of the war. CHARLIE ROSE: I will remind you that the American health care reform system that is proposed is supposed to be deficit neutral. NIALL FERGUSON: Yes. We’ll see if it really is. I’d be impressed. CHARLIE ROSE: But here is the idea. Nobody thinks that America is -- the world order is changing. And you point that. There’s a new economic order and there’s a new political order. We know that there’s a level of shift of power to the east. And the president knows it, everybody in Europe knows it. That’s not an idea that people are suggesting is not true. NIALL FERGUSON: But it’s not that they don’t say it, but do we grasp what this means? For 500 years the world has moved in the direction of the west. And the United States was the last of the great western powers to benefit from this shift of resources from east to west. We’re living through a change that ends 500 years of history, a great rebalancing of the world that will see Asian powers become equal in their statue in economic terms and then geopolitical terms. CHARLIE ROSE: Is it a zero-sum game? NIALL FERGUSON: It can be. CHARLIE ROSE: But is it or not? Maybe the United States is better off with a smaller share of a larger pie? NIALL FERGUSON: Of course. But, you know, the share is always going to be getting smaller as these Asian economies grow and as we slow down. And I think the big question, which I don’t really see being addressed, is how do you cope with the rise of a credible rival? The Soviet Union was never going to have an economy the same size as the United States. It never came close. And today Russia’s economy is 4 percent the size of the U.S. We are facing a genuine superpower, a real economic rival. And I don’t think American foreign policy has yet adapted to that. I think there’s an assumption with Chimerica... CHARLIE ROSE: What would it do to suggest it had adapted to that? What would it do? NIALL FERGUSON: Let me put it this way. There is a very clear dilemma which isn’t often enough discussed, and that is this -- do we accommodate China’s rise and do we accept, rather as Britain accommodated the rise of the United States, that one day it will be the dominate power of the world and we just better live with that? Or do we try to balance it the way the United Kingdom sought to balance the rise of Germany by making alliance with the other powers that region, India being the obvious candidate? That is the dilemma that’s right at the heart of U.S. foreign policy today. And yet I have the impression we’re so distracted by our colonial wars -- and I call them colonial wars quite consciously in Iraq and Afghanistan, that we don’t see that big picture. The Chinese see it very clearly, and at least one of the superpowers in this game is thinking in the right kind of terms about the way the world is going both economically and geopolitically. CHARLIE ROSE: Niall Ferguson, whose book, now in paperback, is called "The Ascent of Money," which is also the title of his documentary. Thank you for joining us. Tomorrow night, former Vice President Al Gore. END 14