niall ferguson. manus: after the break, niall stays with us.will talk a little bit more about the federal reserve -- do we have qe? that is on the questions that came up. stay with us for a little bit more. ♪ francine: welcome back to "the pulse," live from london. we are back with renowned harvard university history professor and author, niall ferguson. thank you for sticking around. we went around the world in 10 minutes, has you do on bloomberg. you have this great book out on harry kissinger -- what is the one thing that surprised you the most, that you think about a lot when you think about henry kissinger all: it may not seem obvious in his political career, as he is trying to focus on geopolitics, but there is something he said when he was the young academic which i think applies to monetary policy as well as it applies to geopolitics. he was talking about strategic decision-making. he talks about the problem of conjecture. he says you can take a decision on the basis of your knowledge and intuition, or you can wait. you can wait for the

. >> the dem kraict debate and niall ferguson when we continue. >> rose: funding for charlyeastd by american express, additional funding provided by: bloomberg, a provider of multimedia news and information services worldwide. >> from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. >> good evening, i'm al hunt of bloomberg view. charlie rose is on assignment. we begin with a first democratic presidential debate. five candidates took the stage at the wynn hotel in las vegas last night but all eyes were on the two frontrunners. hillary clinton and bernie sanders traded jabs on wall street reform. >> my plan would have the potential of actually sending the executives to jail, nobody went to jail after a hundred billion dollars in fines were paid. and would give regulators the authority to go after the big banks. >> in my view, secretary all street regulates congress. and we have got to break off these fights. >> clinton went on the offensive against her opponent on gun control. >> is bernie sanders tough enough on guns? >> no, not at all. i think we have to look at the fact that we lose 90

charlie: i expect people that pick up this book will say -- kissinger, niall ferguson, a historian, andn they see idealists. they say, "really? idealists?" niall: this might seem like a provocation and i imagine there will be some viewers who are reeling. calling kissinger an idealist. charlie: one biographer said to me, an idealist? niall: i am running up against the most -- at one extreme, some people think he is a criminal but even in the middle ground, the majority of the people will say he is the realist. he is the bismarck of our time or a machiavelli of our time. as i read through his private papers and his correspondence and diaries, to read thoroughly what he is written as an academic, i was struck at how critical he was of bismarck. he was not at all a realist. whoarck was somebody reoccupied him, the man who unified germany. when you read the unpublished book that he wrote about bismarck, he only published a part of it as an article, it was really a critique of bismarck's realism. here i mean realism in the sense that all i care about is the interest of my state, and i will d

. ♪ niall ferguson is here, he is a professor of history at harvard.is latest book is " kissinger: it has been 10 years in the making. james baker calls it a masterpiece. i employ to have him back at this table. welcome. a masterpiece, secretary baker said. niall: i will take that. charlie: how did this come about -- how did this come about? brit?e -- this i think i was the second or third on the list of people he approached. i told the story in the preface in the spirit of full of -- full disclosure. we were talking history at a party. we got on. we were talking about world war i. after a kind of courtship, he suggested that i write his biography. charlie: he was courting you. niall: it was his idea. and i said no. i hesitated. but eventually, i could not resist it. what happened is after i had said no i cannot do this, he wrote one of those henry kissinger letters. i declined. after much agonizing. he wrote and said -- what a great pity because i had just made up my mind that you were the ideal person to do this. moreover, i just found 150 boxes of m

also in new york, niall ferguson, a professor of history at harvard.eased to have all of them here. his biography of henry kissinger has just been published. carol, you have been following the story. exactly what happened? carol: they saw each other at a lunch. putin made a grand entrance. he sat at the table where the president was an clinked champagne glasses, then went into a private meeting which , lasted 90 minutes. you know, i have covered this president for six years and i have covered other meetings and this was the first time the u.s. officials came out of the meeting and felt like they were not arguing about the terms of what the problem is. they were more arguing about how to approach the problem. charlie: margaret, what can you add to what we may know? margaret: putin was only in the country for about seven hours. it was very much, i am here, i am making a statement, and i am leaving. officials,k u.s. their favorite tagline is, it is hard to get inside putin's head. that really sums up what this meeting was about. this meeting went on far l

. >> niall ferguson joining us there. >>> top of the hour, media buzz, howie, good morning to you. >>ria. we'll look at whether the press began swooning over hillary clinton after her strong democratic debate performance and the odds of joe biden getting in seem to have cooled quite a bit. donald trump, ben carson, ted cruz, hillary all combining loudly that their coverage is unfair, that they're the victims of media bias. brit hume will weigh in on that one. >> see you at the top of the hour. >>> we've wondered for weeks if joe biden will run for president. the answer does not lock like it's imminent. the political panel breaks down what that could mean for the campaign. we'll look ahead next with our panel. stay with us. quiet! mom has a headache! had a headache! but now, i... don't. excedrin® is fast. with 2 pain fighters, plus a booster, excedrin® ends headaches fast. in fact for some, relief starts in just 15 minutes. excedrin®. wow, that was fast. presenting excedrin® geltabs. fast headache relief... ...that's even easier to take. try excedrin® geltabs. also available in migrain

. >> niall ferguson joining us there. >>> top of the hour, media buzz, howie, good morning to you. >>aria. we'll look at whether the press began swooning over hillary clinton after her strong democratic debate performance and the odds of joe biden getting in seem to have cooled quite a bit. donald trump, ben carson, ted cruz, hillary all combining loudly that their coverage is unfair, that they're the victims of media bias. brit hume will weigh in on that one. >> see you at the top of the hour. >>> we've wondered for weeks if joe biden will run for president. the answer does not lock like it's imminent. the political panel breaks down what that could mean for the campaign. we'll look ahead next with our panel. stay with us. >>> welcome back. vice president joe biden leaning toward a presidential bid, but a definitive answer may be weeks away. ed henry reporting biden is calling his fellow democrats in key states like iowa and new hampshire, the vp telling them he may jump into the race over the next month. are his supporters willing to keep playing the waiting game? ed rawlins, former

niall ferguson in his volume one of his biography of henry kissinger makes that point powerfully. i gave a commencement address to your go at columbia university, and that was the one piece of advice i gave to the policymakers can which is to read history, we a lot of it, read it obsessively. absolutely critical. this is a great contribution to that, two of the future policymakers. i relationship with the dennis goes back a long time. i've spent a large part of my crew tried to talk to us into taking jobs. he worked in the bush 41 administration as the middle east negotiator. we've been wrong the other side of each other. i prepared then governor clinton first debate in 2008 and dennis was in the white house during the campaign. we were on opposite sides. nonetheless, we asked, really begged denis to stay for six months, three to six months. we turned that into eight years, including one see in a nato meeting with his about to leave and i said dennis, you can't leave. i think he was coming back to actually. he said i promised the trustees at this cute i will come back. i said abou