When historian Niall Ferguson, author of The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World (Penguin Press, November 2008), warned a banking conference in the Bahamas in November 2005 of troubles to come, nobody would listen. “The theme of my speech was that it would not take much to cause a drastic decline in the liquidity that was then cascading through the global financial system,” he later wrote in the introduction to his bestseller.
