In a recent interview, when asked “What will be the best investment opportunity coming out of the pandemic,” Renowned financial historian Dr. Niall Ferguson said that he would have to go with Bitcoin.
According to the bio on his website, Ferguson is currently the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution (part of Stanford University), which is “a public policy think tank promoting the principles of individual, economic, and political freedom.”
He is also a senior faculty fellow of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard, and a visiting professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing.
Ferguson, who was named in 2004 as one of TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world, has taught at Cambridge, Oxford, and Harvard.
In 2008, he published the book “The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World“. This was later adapted for television as a five-part documentary that won the 2009 International Emmy award for Best Documentary.
Ferguson’s most recent comments about Bitcoin during an interview with Andrew Bary, an associate editor at Barron’s, which was published as an article on Friday (December 4).
When asked “what will be the best investment opportunity coming out of the pandemic,” Ferguson replied:
“I’m going to go with Bitcoin. It has had a stellar year, up 165% year to date. [It’s now above $19,000.] If, at the beginning of the year, you had said, “The pandemic is coming. It’s going to be very disruptive. Should I choose gold or Bitcoin?” you would have been right to choose Bitcoin because gold is only up 21%. So Bitcoin returns have been an order of magnitude higher.”
He then went on to explain why Bitcoin has managed to perform so well during this pandemic:
“In a pandemic, financial history can be accelerated. We’ve seen that in just the same way that the use of coins as money was accelerated by the Black Death. Payments in kind were yielding to a cash economy in Europe, and this was accelerated in the 1340s. The acceptance of Bitcoin as a digital asset, a quasi-digital gold, has been accelerated by this pandemic. Almost every month, some major figure in the mainstream investment world has said, ‘OK, now I’ll take Bitcoin seriously.’ This process of institutional adoption has further to run.”
