fasten your seatbelt: the world is sleepwalking into an era of political and economic upheaval akin to the 1970s — only worse.

[billwanhua]

'Why shouldn't it be as bad as the 1970s?': Historian Niall Ferguson has a warning for investors

Niall Ferguson warned Friday that the world is sleepwalking into an era of political and economic upheaval akin to the 1970s — only worse.

www.cnbc.com

Ferguson said the catalyst events had already occurred to spark a repeat of the 70s, a period characterized by financial shocks, political clashes and civil unrest. Yet this time, the severity of those shocks was likely to be greater and more sustained.

“The ingredients of the 1970s are already in place,” Ferguson, Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, told CNBC’s Steve Sedgwick.

“The monetary and fiscal policy mistakes of last year, which set this inflation off, are very alike to the 60s,” he said, likening recent price hikes to the 1970′s doggedly high inflation.

“And, as in 1973, you get a war,” he continued, referring to the 1973 Arab-Israeli War — also known as the Yom Kippur War — between Israel and a coalition of Arab states led by Egypt and Syria.