rworld 09-June-2010

Well I saw the thing comin’ out of the sky
It had the one long horn, one big eye
I commenced to shakin’ and I said “ooh-eee”
It looks like a purple eater to me

It was a one-eyed, one-horned, flyin’ purple people eater

Fifty-two years ago today, 9 June 1958, Sheb Wooley’s Purple People Eater hit number 1 in Billboard magazine’s top 100 singles in the United States.

Maybe because I was then a newly minted impressionable teenager, flying purple people eaters still represent all those possibly dangerous possibly silly fears that lurk disguised only to one day “come out of the sky.”

This week I came across something that made me “commence to shakin’.” It was a lecture by Niall Ferguson presented to the Peterson Institute for International Economics, 13-May-2010, and titled Fiscal Crises and Imperial Collapses: Historical Perspective on Current Predicaments. The occasion was the 9th Annual Niarchos Lecture sponsored by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. Coincident with the recent Greek economic crisis, the lecture could hardly have been more prescient.

One of the strengths in this lecture is that Ferguson is a historian. So you get a panoramic sweep over a couple hundred years nicely captured in historical events and made accessible in tables and graphs. Ferguson weaves a compelling story that the fall can be swift indeed.

[W]hat I want to emphasize this evening is the nonlinearity of fiscal history, the suddenness with which things can go wrong in the realm of public finance and from there to the realm of geopolitics.

Ferguson’s diagnosis is that many Western countries, with a few exceptions like Canada, now seem poised on a precipice of excessive debt burdens. Failure to learn from previous fiscal crises, weak political resolve needed to address the issue, and limited policy options (fiscal pain, inflation, or default) complicate the situation. Scary stuff indeed.

After his exquisite analysis, however, I found it disappointing that Ferguson did not draw the obvious conclusion (“there must be a better way”) nor ask the obvious question (“what is it?”).

To the relief of teeny-boppers everywhere, Sheb Wooley’s one-eyed one-horned monster was actually a purple-people eater. I’d guess that sovereign debt is a purple people-eater, that it’s already landed, and that it doesn’t want to be in a rock and roll band.

I said Mr. Purple People Eater, what’s your line
He said it’s eatin’ purple people and it sure is fine
But that’s not the reason that I came to land
I wanna get a job in a rock and roll band

 

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Links
1. Full lyrics of The Purple People Eater.
2. YouTube video of Sheb Wooley performing The Purple People Eater.
3. Event transcript of the Ninth Annual Niarchos Lecture by Niall Ferguson (pdf).
4. Video of the Niarchos Lecture by Niall Ferguson. Note: the talk by Ferguson does not begin until the 8 minute mark in the video.
5. Slide deck used by Niall Ferguson in the Niarchos Lecture (pdf). The video does not show the slides clearly, so you may want to view it in conjunction with this slide deck.