Niall Ferguson can be expected to provide food for thought when he delvers a lecture at the University of Geneva on Thursday - even if not everyone agrees with him.

The self-styled Scottish financial historian, famous for his television programmes explaining the world of finance through the prism of history, is the guest speaker for the annual Prix Latsis awards ceremony, honouring bright post-graduate students.

Speakers at previous Prix Latsis ceremonies include Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize winning economist, who appeared a the university in 2008.

Ferguson, a Glasgow-born academic, has delighted in trashing the ideas of Stiglitz and supporters of John Maynard Keynes, the British economist who came back into fashion when the 2008 financial crisis hit.

His lecture about “power and finance” promises to “shed historical light on the political consequences of financial crises”.

Ferguson is not an economist per se, but his academic career has evolved in a way that has increasingly taken his study of history into the realm of finance and economics.

A graduate of Oxford, he is a professor of history at Harvard University and a professor of business administration at the university’s business school, in addition to holding the Philippe Roman chair of history and international affairs at the London School of Economics.

Ferguson, 46, has reached a wider audience as a prolific writer of history books, several of which are bestsellers.

He pens columns for the Financial Times and presents programmes on television, where he regularly appears in interviews.

And he has even begun to dabble in the business of finance himself as a consultant to GLG Partners, a London-based hedge fund.

His 2008 book, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World, formed the basis of a Channel 4 series in Britain that was also broadcast in the US by the Public Broadcasting Service.

In this book, Ferguson is unabashedly declares that finance is an enabler of progress, even with its booms and busts.

The development of the mechanisms of credit, debt and capital have been as useful as technological inventions in lifting the prosperity of people and nations, he argues.

Despite its bad reputation, at a time when attacking banks is a popular pastime, finance is at the base of human progress.

Ferguson argues that financial bubbles are always destined to burst but that, despite this, we are still better off because of the advances made in the use and administration of money.

His penchant for going against the grain was displayed early on in books, such as The Pity of War: Explaining World War One, in which he argued that Europe would have been better off if Britain stayed out of the war.

The historian is happy to promote other controversial ideas on his website.

He is currently tilting at topics as various as “the end of the euro” (he believes the single European currency is doomed to failure) and what he calls the “fraudulent claim” of the Australian Labour government in taking credit for that country’s escape from the worst of the global recession.

The Labour party, which narrowly won re-election  in Australia, pumped 52 billion dollars into the economy aided by Stigliz, the Keynesian economist.

Ferguson says other factors, including luck and the fact Australia did not have a subprime real estate problem, were responsible for the country’s ability to ride out the storm so well.

“Labour has stimulated the Australian economy in the same way that Ned Kelly used to stimulate the economy of Victoria,” he said.

Elsewhere, there’s a column about how “today’s Keynesians have learned nothing,” in which he tilts at those - including advisers to US President Barack Obama - who advocate massive injections of government stimulus, rather than fiscal tightening to deal with the debt.

Ferguson has not yet turned his attention to Swiss banking, although he would be no doubt adept at analyzing the country’s banker-client secrecy laws.

However, his latest book, High Financier: The Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg, tells the story of how a refugee from Hitler’s Germany established  S.G. Warburg, the London-based bank.

He describes Warburg as a complex man but notes that he followed a “strict ethical code” that set him apart from the “mere speculators and traders who inhabit today’s financial world”.

The Prix Latsis event begins on Thursday at 6 pm at the Auditoire Piaget of Uni Dufour.