Niall is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, as well as current or past lecturer at Harvard, Oxford, LSE and visiting professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing. This conversation gives the listener an opportunity to hear how Niall Ferguson analyses the current pandemic when compared with the historical precedents of other catastrophes. He talks about failure of many western Countries to learn lessons from those, many in Asia, who acted with coherent policies, and where the fault lines lie. This gives a taste for his upcoming book'Doom & The politics of Catastrophe'.We then move to the monetary responses of the financial authorities. He discusses the issue of debasement of money, explosion of debt and the inflationary implications of such episodes, as well as mechanisms to remedy these unsustainable imbalances. Niall assesses the merits of bitcoin, gold and those countries like Italy, for whom the debt trap is immense.