GM94: When Capitalism Reboots and Crashes Again ft. Mark Blyth

We are literally turning the corner into the rebirth of 19th century imperialism. We're closer to great power conflict and we've been in a very long time. Europe is naked and defenseless and we're literally doing what they did in the 1930s. There's a brilliant book that you should read. Everyone should read called "Appeasing the Bankers". Financial caution on the road to war by Jonathan Kirschner. And he basically shows how the Banque of France and Banque of England basically appease the crop out of the Germans because they might lose a few basis points on their guilds. I mean this is where this type of thing can get you. Imagine spending an hour with the world's greatest traders. Imagine learning from their experiences, their successes, and their failures. Imagine no more. Welcome to Top Traders Unplugged. The place where you can learn from the best hedge fund managers in the world so you can take your manager, due diligence, or investment career to the next level. Before we begin today's conversation, remember to keep two things in mind. All the discussion we'll have about investment performance is about the past. And past performance does not guarantee or even infer anything about future performance. Also understand that there's a significant risk of financial loss with all investment strategies. And you need to request and understand the specific risks from the investment manager about their product before you make investment decisions. Here's your host veteran hedge fund manager, Niels Kostrup-Larson. Welcome and welcome back to another conversation in our series of episodes that focuses on markets and investing from a global macro perspective. This is a series that I not only find incredibly interesting as well as intellectually challenging, but also very important, given where we are in the global economy and the geopolitical cycle. We want to dig deep into the minds of some of the most prominent experts to help us better understand what this new global macro-driven world may look like. We want to explore their perspectives on a host of game-changing issues and hopefully dig out nuances in their work through meaningful conversations. Please enjoy today's episode, hosted by Alanda. Thanks for that introduction, Niels. Today, I'm delighted to be joined by Mark Blithe. Mark is William O'Rode's 57 Professor of International Economics and Professor of International and Public Affairs at Brown University. His research focuses on international political economy, and he is the author of a number of influential books, including "Inflation, a Guide for Winners and Losers", "Osterity", "The History of a Dangerous Idea" and "Angry Nomics". So, Mark, it's a pleasure to have you on "How You Doon". Very good. Very good. I mean, it's a new year. It's a whole new way of dealing with international politics. There's so much to discuss. Let's go. Absolutely. And those books, you've written. I mean, they were written over the course of the last decade or two, but they seem particularly timely at the moment, probably touching on all the major issues we have to get into today. The one that's killing me just now is when I was writing the book on "Inflation", that he just referenced, what I was thinking about writing, I kind of got distracted into that book, was a book called "Burning Down the House", which is about America's turn against all greed investments, and the relationship to that to the dollar and international politics and the whole thing. And if people are curious, you can go to the London School of Economics website for their think it's the center for Europe, I think it's called. And I did a talk there where I outlined basically what this book would be, and I did it at the start of 2025. And it's spooky. Everything I said has come true, everything to the point that if I write the book now, by the time it comes out, everything would move on. Like, I mean, it's instantly redundant because things have moved so fast. I was talking about things that I thought would take a five-year period. We're already done in a year. Yeah. So, things have shifted. Okay, well, I encourage people to check that out. Before we get into the main topics, we always like to get a sense from our guests as to how they got involved in economics and markets, etc. I know you're from Scotland, originally, how did you get interested in economics? A really good question. I gave a little bit of this in a paper I wrote once. It's buried in an edited volume. No one reads, unfortunately. I remember being 13. I think I was 12 or 13. And you remember Panorama, the British TV show? Yes. So, I'm 13, so it's probably about 1980. And it's the big revolution and intellectually and politically in terms of macroeconomics. And there's this new thing, the new kid on the block called "monitorism." "Monitorism", right? And "monitorism" is this new shiny thing that says, "Well, control inflation." And the old way of doing things, "cainsy and macro" is on the way out. And emblematic of this, I remember this distinctly, and a friend of mine tried to find it in a panorama archives and couldn't, but I didn't hallucinate this. This is literally the origin story. They did a kind of like game show model off. So, you imagine like some young spiv, very 1980s world, comes out with his nice suit and a young lad, a London business school. And he's got a monetarist model. It's got six equations. And no matter what data you throw into it, it says, if you tighten the money supply, inflation disappears and everyone becomes a millionaire. I exaggerate slightly. And then they bring on this guy who's from, I'm sure he was from Manchester. And it was a canesian macro workhorse of structural models. And it had some kind of sub like 6,000 equations, and it mimicking this sector and this sector and imports and exports, whatever, right? And whenever you fed into it, it basically said, "Inflation's going to stick around growth will be low, and we don't really know what to do about it." And right in front of me was what was going on five or six years later when I got to university in the pages of the macroeconomics textbook, whereby the transition hadn't yet been made from that canesian world into a kind of, let's say what we'd now call new business, real business cycles, rational expectations world. And monetarism was this kind of weird bridge between the two. And I remember watching that thing on TV and thinking to myself, "Oh, this is bullshit. This has to be bullshit." But I don't trust this guy in the new suit for a start, right? He's far too slick. He's far too confident. He's got a tiny strip down model. I'm 13, I don't know what a model is, right? But it just didn't smell right. And it seemed like the other guy was genuinely had spent years building up this model. And it was giving results he didn't understand, which seemed to me to be more actually intellectually honest. And I think that was the kernel, that's where it started. And it's where I started to get interested, not just in economics, but economics is a thing in the world. So I try and explain myself this way to other, to other economists, which is I'm not really an economist and it's true. My PhD is actually in political science. But I got really interested in economics is a thing in the world. And what I mean by that is it's not just a, Milton Friedman had a great line about this one. Economics isn't just a camera, passively recording events. It's an engine driving them. And when you get to define how the economy works, what it is to be optimal in some situation, what policy has to be because anything else would be crazy in terms of economics. When you get to accuse an opponent in a debate of economic illiteracy, right, all of these are incredibly powerful weapons. And the ability to frame the world in a certain way saying, this is the way the truth and the light and the only way things can be. I mean, that just is an astonishing political resource. And that's where that's what I've been interested in. That's how I got into it. And you could see this clearly with Mrs. Thatcher's Premiership, particularly in the first term. The whole idea of selling council houses to turn people into petty capitalists doing stock market flotations of national assets to get people interested in the stock market. It was about, as some people might call it, changing people's subjectivities, changing their very sense of who they are. And that's well beyond technically mapping how the economy works. That's what it's really all about. That's really what's its state. Interesting. Well, I mean, it's hard to know where to start giving that backdrop. But I think a lot of the things you're talking about are very relevant. And actually, one of the things I wanted to kind of kick off of this is shift from neoliberalism to, well, whatever it is we're into now. We had a Gary Gerstel on a while back. He's written a book that is in full of the neoliberal order. So it's something that is definitely topical. And obviously, you talk about Thatcher in the early 1980s. And that was the rise of neoliberalism. And today, and I know you've written about austerity and free markets. And now we've moved into more, I guess, populism. So, I mean, from your perspective, how do you trace that rise and fall of neoliberalism and how do you define what we're moving into now in this new regime? So, this is all in the middle of angrilyomics. The book I did with your fellow Irishman, Eric Lonergan. And I gave a kind of ported history of the way that the global macro works. And it comes from doing talks in tech conferences. Because tech people want to know about the economy. And I want to know about whether tech people are full of nonsense or not. So, there's things in trade for me to be going along and telling them about stuff and then I learn stuff from them. But to talk to these folks, I had to figure out a way of making it make sense to them. So, develop this analogy. And I figured that I was a bit more than an analogy, which is think about capitalism as a laptop. And you get different types of laptop. But if you drop them on the floor and pop them open, they all have the same sort of basic configuration, right? And I think about an economy as various institutions as the hardware. So, let's think about labor market, capital markets, regulatory regimes, etc. And then you've got the software, which is the governing ideas, the operating system, you like, that runs those institutions, qua-hard, and a given historical era. And if you do, you can tell a specific forward story about the rise, if you will, of global capitalism, particularly from the 1870s onwards, as a kind of international gold, that's the biggest regime, hard money, very little intervention from the state, very much lazy, pure free market, etc. As a set of coherent ideas and a set of robust institutions. But just as computers over time have bugs in the software, if you're on them long enough, so does capitalism as a computer. And the bugging the software and the gold standard was deflation, which ultimately crushes wages, and then leads to the second international, which leads to the reaction against socialism, which leads to idealism in World War I. So, the big crash and sort of reset that comes out of this is the terrible 20s in the revolution of the 30s. And then we get into the 9040s in the post-war settlement, and basically the Latin landers write lads and let's not do that again. So, you get a radical limitation on the mobility of carbonyl, you get a reigning in a finance, you get the construction of a whole bunch of not warfare states, but welfare states, where your basic idea is, if we can get the investor class to remain at home and force them to invest at home under good terms, we can basically create high levels of investment. That pays for high-real wages. Productivity increases then continue that on, and we end up with sort of, you know, the type of regime that we had from the 40s through the 70s. Now, that was great. It worked for a while. The first one was very capital friendly, this one was very labor friendly, and that was kind of the bug in the software, the bug in the software. There was a few, but one of the big ones, of course, was inflation, and inflation is a tax on investment. If you think you're going to go 5% real, 5 years hence inflation goes to 10%, you might as well, you know, burn the cash now. Well, it doesn't work, basically. So, that was the bug. You got the system crash around inflation, and then you got the big reset, and the big reset in the 1980s, Neal Liberalism, see, we would get there, was a react into the failure of that system. And what was that? That was a big hardware modification called, let's let rip on globalization. So, privatize, integrate, globalize, financialize, deregulate banking globally and locally, open up capital markets, get rid of controls on foreign share ownership, et cetera, et cetera. So, all that, I level stuff, but then domestic privatization, labor market, liberalization, a huge kick to trade unions, et cetera. And that's to work well for a long time. Otherwise, if independent central banks is the ultimate governor, it's like really important. So, it's a hugely different set up from what we had previously. And the bug in the software, there was because you're relying essentially on one credit to fill in for a lack of real wage growth, because this thing is a giant concentration machine that sucks everything up to the top. As you build huge amounts of financial fragility into the system and leverage, that goes tits up in 2008. And basically, you ask the central banks to come in and fix it. Well, they've only got two tools. They can buy and sell assets, the reason low of the price of money. They try both, that crosses even greater inequality on the wealth side. This is in the US turbocharged, by the rise of a tech boom at the same time, which increases asset concentration even further. And we basically stagger along in a world in which people are basically real wages have been static of the levels since the 1970s. Meanwhile, the economy's generated trillions, literally trillions in wealth, which has gone to an increasingly small number of people. Now, the reaction to this has been various forms of populism. There was a left wing one at one point. The still one is one, to a certain extent, if you look at what's happened in New York, if you think about AOC in Bernie, those folks are still around. But as Carl Poyani said about the 1920s, the reaction to big economic collapse tends to be on the right rather than the left, because the right can more easily pull on the notion of the nation and the notion of the community that somehow been betrayed by these elites, these global cosmopolitan's. This is a very old story. We have lived this history before. And unfortunately, we seem to be living it again. So I think about neoliberalism. I don't actually think about the ins and outs of Milton Friedmer and any of this sort of stuff, the Montperlen society. That's all good and true and other people have written about it. I think about this as a series of basically large-scale capitalist computer crashes of which the latest iteration has been neoliberalism. We basically are, I mean, if you think about the high point of globalization, I've done some empirical work on this recently. If you look at cross-border FDI, if you look at cross-border M&A activity, even if you look at trade, but then control for directionality, I mean, the peak of globalization and that whole regime was around 2007, 2006, before the crisis. We are nearly 20 years out of that equilibrium. We're basically doing what happened after World War I, but going through the uncertain 20s and into the revolutionary theories. What do you see comes next? I mean, how do you describe the world comes next? Because as you say, it's bugging itself, right? That makes sense. And I'll see it touch in a point that we've been through these cycles before. There is a sense of recurring cycles, and almost at each regime soles the seeds of destruction. As you said, the more interventionist policies of the 60s, 70s, then that for foster the desire for capitalism, which then we see in the quality, then that has to be addressed. There's a perennial shifting to try and solve the last problem. And we're currently, I guess, what are we trying to address? Well, well, well, the great paradox of the moment. But if you think about the great paradox of the moment, I mean, the person who's weaponized this the best is President Trump. And President Trump fully recognizes, you know, the sort of the, if you will, how to weaponize this as a politics. And he points out, you know, that basically what's happened is, you know, this, and, you know, the MAGA allies, et cetera, the global elite. They don't care about you. They've run off with everything blah, blah, blah. But then it gets turned. Then it's like China, forgetting to mention that sort of what actually happened was American firms left and went to China. So if you want to blame anyone, blame the American firms, right? That, you know, one of the massive problems here is wage stagnation. Everyone talks about a cost of living crisis. The president poo poo's it. Why? Because he's part of the concentration machine that's making things go even more up to the top. So there's this weird sort of like instability in that coalition. And you see this with the fragmentation around marjorie tail or green, how bad and struggling to control MAGA. Now that we're basically back to 19th century imperialism, you know, there's a lot of contradictions in this. So, so to get back to your question, you know, where does this all go? It's incredibly uncertain. I mean, one part of this, and a very simple way to think about it. And this is the book that I wasn't tending to write. But I think it's already out of date. And other people have been telling the story already is the United States is not just decided that doesn't like windmills. One of the reasons behind Venezuela, obviously, is control of oil supplies. And they just take an attitude that like, either they don't care, they don't believe, or they think they can find some technological hail Mary to climate change. Now, the figure is something in the region of for every 1.2 gigatons or 1.12 giga, one of our own order managers. One very large number of gigatons, the earth's surface goes up by 0.1 degrees. So, it's cooking. It's just physics, right? Are you talking about this stuff is like arguing with physics. Physics doesn't give a shit. So, you know, you can deny it and do whatever. And what we've now got as a government and they said, we're going to double down on carbon. We have executive orders that are bringing back big, beautiful coal. This is the 18th century, right? If you think about the hemispheric land grab, Venezuela, Sattraps and Argentina, cooperative allies in Chile, the threats to Canada, the faint to Greenland, which I'm quite convinced will happen and will break NATO. All of this is about basically we're going to run a carbon-powered continent. Meanwhile, China is basically covering the rest of the planet in panels and EVs. And that's basically the fault line that's going to define the next decade. How that plays out, that's anyone's guess because all of it is very fragile. Well, as you say, climate change, you know, it's a structural challenge to be addressed. I mean, we have other structural challenges here at the moment in terms of defense spending. And I guess what's interesting about these structural shifts, demographics as well, third one, aging populations, is they come at a predictor time of already high deficits. I mean, obviously you've written a book about austerity before. I mean, from your perspective here and now, okay, bond market vigilantes haven't exactly come back yet, but they're maybe lurking in the background and certainly deficits, you know, at a level that would normally be associated with a recession, particularly in US. You only have got a seven or eight percent deficit in a recession before. Now it's the norm. Right. How does this get results? On the one hand, there needs to be huge spending on structural factors and at the same time there needs to be deficits need to be addressed. And austerity is not politically palatable at the moment. Well, it's not just politically palatable. Let's start with your study point and then go to the deficit point, right? In that book on austerity, my assumption was the following that if you don't do something that obviously self-harms, which you have went ahead and did, which is to cut public spending at a time when the private sector is over-saving because it's in recession, all you will do is shrink GDP and you'll end up with more debt rather than less. That's what they did. Congratulations. They lost a decade of growth. We know this doesn't work. So if you were to do this now with bigger deficits and a heightened moment of populism, that would just be a suicide note. So let's just take that off the table, right? Now, second thing is my mistake in that book was I presumed the growth rates, if you didn't do this, or even if you did it, but stopped doing it, would actually rebound. And what we did was we built a kind of global system that we described earlier, whereby once we broke it and filled it with liquidity and essentially made the cost of capital free, which brought us crypto sparks and other things that basically create assets for the top and liabilities for below, we gave up on real investment, and ultimately we had a decade of austerity in Europe and growth rates didn't rebound. So now we do have a problem. I mean, Italian growth rates are so low in their debt so high and they don't have a printing press that if it wasn't for basically the ECB backstopping them, the bond market vigilantes would be all over them. France can't pass a budget. I mean, you know, these are real constraints, particularly for people who aren't sovereign. Now, I don't want to run down the MMT line of all you need is a printing press. I'm a great believer in the current account, right? So, you know, you don't have to go there. But again, when you get to the United States, I mean, I'm nearly 60 years old. I've been in the United States for nearly 40 years. I can't tell you the number of times people have said to me the deficit is unsustainable. I mean, we've been saying this for 40 years. It's like, really, are we going to do this again? Right? We forget about the demand side for this. It's the same with the UK. Every time a guilt auction happens, it's three times over subscribed. But it's through a tipping point as far as this question. Where would you go? I don't know. If you look on market perspective, if you look on market vigilante, you're basically taking a short position on something, which means you're going to have to cover that short position with the long somewhere else in the system. If you think everybody's in debt, where's your hedge? Is it gold? Well, gold is obviously, it has been nice to me. So it just paid gold to 20,000 an ounce. Okay, what does that solve? My point is, I just find it bizarre that at this point in time, yes, there are real issues. France needs to pass a budget. We have aging populations. But we're literally turning the corner into the rebirth of 19th century imperialism. Europe is naked and defenseless. And we're literally doing what they did in the 1930s. Everyone should read called appeasing the bankers. And he basically shows how the Bank of France and Bank of England basically appease the crap out of the Germans because they might lose a few basis points on their gilts. I mean, this is where this type of thing can get you. So, you know, I just want to resist it. In the case of the US, obviously, there is a capacity for higher taxes. I mean, absolutely. You can do more taxes, right? Yeah. I mean, taxing is the percentage of the economy is less there than in Europe. But that aside, I mean, you touched on Trump, MAGA, global affordability. It has become the buzzwords. You've written about inflation, but it's not necessarily inflation at the even the problem at the moment. It's high prices. Right. It's the level. It's not the delta. That's exactly it. Right. How does that get resolved? Or does it? Well, it does. I mean, so there's a funny thing. I don't know if you had an echo of this over an island, but in 2022, 23 when inflation was really tearing along, maybe 23, 24, there was this thing about the disconnect. And what they talked about with the disconnect was the fact that people like me would get on TV and mansplain. Well, you know, we've looked into the numbers and it seems that the underlying rate of inflation is now 3. Gillian percent and we expected to go to 3.7 Gillian percent. And he does what happens. And if we look at core, but what core tells us is this, and everyone's going to the supermarket going, how much do you want for eggs? This is absolutely outrageous. Right. Groceries level has gone up 24 percent since the pandemic in the United States. It's a quarter. Right. Things have gone up and they don't go down. Right. That's the crisis. Now, what is it that my tribe does? We look at the delta. We look at the rate of change in the level. The fact that the level hasn't got has gone up and stayed up is actually isn't of interest to us. Yeah. Now that's that's your disconnect and you wonder why people don't believe us. Right. We should be utterly concerned about the fact that groceries have gone up 25 percent. Nothing much has changed. Right. We haven't lost a quarter of the agricultural labor force. Right. So maybe there's something to this argument that when you have two firms that control the entire cereal market, and people kind of lose their price anchor, they might be able to push things up a little bit. And then when people get used to paying eight bucks for a smaller box of cereal, they just do. Right. I think that's where this is. The other one is, you know, housing. Starting with that just privatization is going across the world. We basically decided we were only going to build houses for people who could afford them. And if you do that, you're going to have a housing crisis. If you don't have a big state-owned rental sector, ultimately you will have a housing crisis. We've been brewing this since the 1980s. If you go to a place like Canada, Canada is a Toronto hugely expensive city. Incredibly difficult to live there. You'll be 120,000 Canadian and basically you're struggling to make ends meet. But despite that, they've built literally somewhere in the region of about 200,000 condo units. Yeah. But they're all $4,000 a month for rabbit huts. So how do normal people access this? And are they new schools? No. Are they new shops? No, they're not. Right. They're down on the waterfront because that looks cool in the brochure when you're selling to your investors. So yeah, I mean, an absolute arse of this globally as well. So, you know, yes, there's a lot of anger out there and it's very justified. Yeah. I mean, it begs the question. I mean, you could say where the economics go wrong. I mean, is it that MAC is that this preoccupation went macro and looking at variables like the general level of inflation, unemployment, like that they're not really the issues. Obviously, inequality, the number of people with a house, the actual price of groceries. I mean, a macro of economists just got the wrong dashboard. Is that fair to say? I don't know if they've got the wrong dashboard, but they might look into the wrong indicators because they're incentivized to look in different ways, right? I mean, I've got an example of this, right? But I think it was 1989 or 1999 and maybe it was out of 2000s. The Brits didn't think about this as the high point of globalization markets can do everything. Things seem to be going well. Inflations disappeared. Real wages were actually rising. It was looking like it was good, right? And the Blair government commissioned a review on British food security. And you know what they concluded? As is a country that imports two-thirds of its food, right? L-L-T-T. Let's leave it to Tesco. That's the food security, right? So, if you're in a world whereby, oh, those markets, they're amazing to do everything, right? And it seems to be tracking along and it's all good. It's like central banks and inflation could grow. We have anchored people's expectations. No, 500 billion Chinese people joined the global labor force and prices collapsed. That's what happened. You're just claiming credit by standing on the sidelines with your signaling models. When you look at that way, they're looking at the wrong things. And also, I mean, there's a very simple thing here is like the administrative class of which I am part, right? We don't longer live near normal people. We don't send our kids to the same schools as normal people. You know, we think we have a crisis of our income falls below 300,000 and there are people trying to get by and for it. And that's the vast majority of people. And you know, and our crises are completely different from there. So, we're just blind to the fact that basically, a grocery basket going up 25% with stagnant wages is a huge societal problem. We don't see it. But what is the solution? I mean, around the world, the solution to the affordability crisis seems to have been more fiscal supports, which justified politically and morally, I guess. But obviously, there's nothing to address deficits or put finances on the stable. You think that's fair enough? Is that the right response, you think? Well, again, you know, sort of like pivoting back to deficits on this. I mean, ultimately, if you continue to run this for another five years and you start to have food riots and you're talking about deficits, they will come and bottom your house down with justification, right? Now, you know, what's the answer to this? Look, we've been running a global experiment on when or takes all for the past 40 years. And we're doing zero about the fact that ultimately this is what's going on. And you know, this goes beyond sort of simple policy regimes or what we do in a given moment, right? The gold standard, go back to that. That was a concentration machine. That's what gave us socialism 1.0, right? Then there's the collapse of the thirties, which gives us fascism as a reaction to the collapse of everything. That has its own genocidal solutions. I thank God didn't work and it will be defeated it. Then you have a kind of social democratic era that works for a while, but ultimately is bad for carbonyl, so carbonyl rebels against it. Then you've got this incredibly pro carbonyl regime that just is another concentration regime, but it always the top. And, you know, these are the giant macro things which are driving this. And, you know, to me to sort of like stop and go, you know, go check about those deficits, it's like, you know, the house is bottom and down and you're like, Jesus, I better see that wrong. I mean, one of the curious, I suppose, transitions we've seen in the last while, I mean, you talk about, okay, they shift to socialism, then they shift to a fascism. This time we haven't seen really a strong shift back to the left. It's been more to the extreme right, more than anything. What does that mean for us from an economic, from a policy perspective? Is that more worrying? Oh, it's a player. Well, it's less worried in the sense that basically, with one third of every country obese and old and unfit and ill, our chances of like marching into somebody else's country are massively reduced. So, you know, there is that. But, you know, but the serious point is, who's benefited from the concentration regime? Not just a very top, a top 10%. How do assets compound over a lifetime? Who are the people that vote twice as much, the old? So, what do you get? You get regime maintenance policies that will never touch wealth holders. It's like, you know, you want to do a good one like, let's think about this one, dementia cure. This is something that's going to bust every health system across the developed West. We all know it, right? So, when Theresa may comes in and says, maybe we could have a little tax to prepare for this, you're out. You're done, right? The Aussies have been smart about this. The Aussies sell a sovereign well fund. And the sovereign well fund, the future fund is basically hypothecated for future healthcare expenditures. They are actually thinking ahead. The rest of us are absolutely in denial about this because we can't vote against the boomers. That's how this really begins to stick. Why is it that basically millennials and younger are freaking out about the future and about housing and everything else? Because it is ludicrously expensive because their wages are low because we brand a regime that allowed firms to take everything in the US corporate profits are 12.5% of GDP. Historically, it's 4 to 6. We've traveled it. That's going to 5% of the population at most. But when you just break it down, it's like really simple. But I suppose my point is that what you say is correct and we had occupied Wall Street. We've had – and I suppose we had Bidenomics, which was somewhat progressive. But why has that kind of progressive agenda, it hasn't resonated more with the US? Because the other corner of this thing that's weaponized is migration. And the left is completely unable to talk about maybe just doing an open-border policy for 20 years and assuming it would all work out was probably a bad idea. Maybe taking a global upsurge and refugees and dumping them in the poorest communities in our countries, miles away from the wealth holders who make the decisions was probably a bad idea, right? And they just completely screwed the pitch on this one, and still don't have any good answer to it. The right always have an advantage because they can talk about us, the citizens against them, the elites. And in a world where it's absolutely transparent, where the money is and the people of the money are not like the majority of us, that's such an easy card to play. I mean, think about the inability of the British Labour Party to even talk about these things. And when they do these stumble into this kind of Tory-esque policy of Rowan, the shorn of shoving everyone away, that doesn't really do anything about the fact that this is your demographic point. At the end of the day, you need some. And here's why you need them, it's very simple. An economy stripped down to zero, I'll be very new classical for a minute, is the number of people, the number of hours worked, and the quality and quantity of capital they work with. So unless you want AI to replace the third of all jobs because you're running our workers, your productivity is going to crash. And if your productivity does crash, then you're going to have to work more hours. But given the fact that you want to work less hours, and in the UK, 800,000 people have decided to have a bit of a lie down since the pandemic, that you can't actually get enough people in the labour market, then you think about the damage that's been done to your domestic labour supply through the collapse of skills training, really shitty job, zero-hour contracts, massive stress on single earners, particularly single women and single women with kids, right? You've got a highly stressed underpaid workforce. The only way you can balance this out is if you bring new people in, and then you have an answer. No, we'll stop that, and that'll solve all our problems. Well, as you say, we've got this problem, looming problem of healthcare, dementia, a child's good heart, I don't know if I read that book, that was a critical observation he had in that, of it, that'd been inflationary. But there's the basic need for the workers, and you see it, I see it here in Ireland, all the healthcare workers are from overseas, and the problems only get bigger and worse. So you've got these inherent tensions, immigration being won, the old versus the young, the young have been under the one, and then the acid holder versus those who have not. What is the flare point, do you think? So is there a peaceful political way to resolve this? I mean, there's a book from a few years ago by a historian at Stanford, whose name escapes me, called Someone Like the Four Horsemen, and he basically points out the only time you ever solve this stuff is when you get plague, famine, pestilence or war, it levels the playing field. I hope that he's wrong. You can look back to sort of like the period of 1940s, 1950s, as a big let's not go down that road moment, it is possible to do other things. But when you do that, you really have to redesign the system, you have to break it, you have to stop it being a concentration machine, you have to do big institutions of redistribution, locally, and globally. And nobody is in favor of this, nobody wants to try this. You have a left, it's intellectually and fiscally paralyzed, like they wake up in the morning thinking of a deficit, where the house is on fire. And then you've got a right, don't give a shit about the deficit, never has, only talks about it when the left is in power, right? Openly says, as they did in the Bush administration, deficits don't matter, we've proved this time and time again. And then when the even call Biden, the left is hilarious, but when the other side gets in, it's like, oh, that deficit and the debt, it's the most terrible thing. And then people fall for this garbage every time. Meanwhile, the house is bonding down. I really don't know where this goes. This is why I can't write the next book. I genuinely don't know where this goes. I fear for the paths it could take. The path of least resistance is always to spend more money, allow inflation to be higher, you know, politically. And that's effectively the route that you can do that. You can do this if you're grow through its hire. And this is something you've got to say about the Trump administration, right? Trump administration, 2017 had a face off of the federal reserve, he said, don't you dare tighten the Twitter battle. And it's not because they gave in on this one, but the Fed's on reset said, maybe we could run the economy a little bit hotter, we don't always, oh, look, wages are going up, quick reason, trust rates, maybe we can bark off a little bit. And they actually did. And what you got was sustained wage growth in a higher average growth rate in 2018 and 2019 prior to the pandemic. Trump comes back and does the big tax cuts, which are really going to kick in this year, etc, etc, US growth rates tracking at about 3%, everyone in Europe would murder for 3%. If you've got 3%, and you're running 4% inflation, basically your debt eats itself. If you're running 1%, you've got 100% debt to GDP and all these tensions, you're Europe and you've got a lot of trouble. Problem, if you think that basically slashing public spending, that was the solution, good luck putting the fires out. No, it's true. I mean, and this is the, the Trump, I guess, optimistic scenario. You've got AI, you've got productivity growth and that you'll have strong economic growth and debt is sustainably because of that. I mean, if we do get better productivity growth from AI, that has social consequences as well. Obviously, we're seeing that at the margin. It's hard to know how big an issue it is, but certainly anecdotally, it seems to be. But it seems to be floured up the income skill, which is why people are paying attention to it, right? So here's the pop quiz I always ask people in this one. What's the fastest growing job in the United States? Has been for a decade. What do you think it is? I heard you on another podcast. It's some kind of healthcare worker. Right, exactly, because if you do it basically by percentage increase, it's data scientists, but it's like 200,000 to 400,000. If you do it by volume of jobs, like millions of jobs, it's not a surprise. It's elder care nurse. There's no AI for that shit. There just isn't. There may be some apps that help you remind yourself to not walk across the road because you don't know where you are or something, right? But that's pretty much it. So, again, the long-term effects on this sort of productivity. If it is, it's going to basically take a slice through college graduates and that's going to really piss off the middle classes. So that's going to be interesting to see how this one plays out. But ultimately, it really is just the same old story. You're right. You print more money, right? And you get inflation. Well, you know, I mean, I just did a book on this. Actually, monetary inflation is actually a monetary hate me for it. If you want to read the review, we go on the Wall Street Journal. Yeah, money can cause inflation, but so can giants supply shocks. And what we heard in 2021, 22, 23 was two giant supply shocks. America outsourced its ability to produce most things and they stopped getting them. QED prices went up. Europe lost its gas station. QED prices went up. Money was involved, but oh, they were running the printing presses. Actually, Germany had higher inflation in the United States. There was no Biden stimulus checks in Germany, right? So, you know, inflation comes from multiple sources, not just deficits. I mean, we're stuck. We talk about this in the book and the inflation book. We're stuck in this 1970s mentality as if the world was still 1970. And we will live in a post-industrial digital economy. It's completely different. Why would we expect things to work out the same way? Well, I guess that, yeah, the economy is structurally different, but that's the concern that we're heading back to the 70s and the 70s being a period of higher spending, you know, central banks would add credibility, without an mandate to really address inflation. But can't they do it anyway? I mean, let's think about what happened in this inflation. Not one central bank raised their policy rate above the actual rate of inflation. There was no vocal shock. Nobody said, let's make loads of people unemployed because they knew it would be politically disastrous. Absolutely. And the idea that basically, the signals from the central bank credibly reduced inflation, no, the supply chains came back and you found Qatar. Like, let's be honest about what actually happened, right? So, yeah, I mean, the whole sort of like technology of central banking and the justification for what well in the nice years, what well in the great moderation because there was nothing to do. And the minute the volatility returns, you know, I talked about this at the bank of England to pay the bank of England. I think these guys have been handed a poison chalice. We expect them to do everything and they've got two tools, which are quite blunt when it comes to doing most things. Well, did you say, I mean, that was the tool for the 2010s. The central banking was the only game in town. The result was acid growth, only because we made it. It was a policy. Well, that's right. Yeah. Right. We do have a fiscal side of the ledger. But what we've said is you're not allowed to do that. You can't do that. And if you do do that, bad things will happen. Leave it to the central banks. Now, if you want to know where all the debt came from. Let's be honest about this. Has there been high spending in periods? Absolutely. But if you look at all the debt to GDP ratios, they blow up in 2008, 2010. Oh, I wonder what was going on then. I wonder who were we bailing out with that point? And they went up again in COVID, right? The notion that we've been spending like drunken sailors on migrants. It's just bullshit. It's these two structural facts. You touched on the UK and labor and their inability to articulate, I suppose, I don't know, you sort of coherent policy. But certainly there's a sense of an economic malaise in the UK at the moment. I mean, is it just Brexit or are there more? I mean, you mentioned Brexit didn't help. So let's get the guy who did Brexit to run the shop because that'll clearly work. What they had is they basically went long and open financial economy with London as the growth engine. London generates 34% into British GDP. Pretty much all the other regions, Scotland marginally now and again is GVA positive. They see underlying code of GDP. Everybody else essentially loves off transfers. So you've hollowed out your entire economy. And how do you do that? Well, let's think about the world 50 years ago. Bolton may not have been the most attractive place to live, but it was a functional place and Bolton made stuff. And it then sent stuff on a train to a place called Birmingham. Birmingham assembled this stuff. And then a bloke in London financed it and you shipped it somewhere. Fast forward 50 years. London doesn't give a crap about Bolton couldn't find it on a map. Bolton doesn't make stuff anymore. Birmingham occasionally makes things. But it's really about football tourism universities and a few other things these days. And what London cares about are the other globally connected cities where you'd bake finance. Now if you go to London, everything's fine because that financial model, that growth model that works on that local scale is there but it's not earning enough money to basically do the transfers to the rest of the United Kingdom. And you don't do anything anymore. At a conversation recently with a guy, very successful software developer really wants to do something for a mutual hometown of Dundee. And I put a set on this piece of research that basically pointed out that like Dundee is Bolton, right? Dundee is like, you know, name a dozen towns in the north of England. This is northern France. This is where you're getting the populist reaction because what we did we said was, why do we take our capital and move it abroad? Why do we just import stuff that we make cheaper because it's more efficient? And then somehow the labor marketable adjusts. And it did adjust it adjusted to unemployment, not long-term unemployment and working at Asda. That's what we did. We did it to ourselves. So, you know, is there a short-term policy fix where there's hell no? This is 40 years in the making. Is there a long-term policy fix? Yeah, there is. And you're seeing it, which is essentially the reassertion, if you will, of different types of national sovereignty in the desire to rebuild industrial capacity. It may not be efficient from the economic point of view, but Britain has one strategic sector and one strategic sector only is defence. And basically, and they won't do it because they're idiots. But basically, you should double down on this as much as you can. You should take advantage of the fact that you're outside the EU's regulations on data. You should basically have AI drones, everything like that. You've got contract from the Norwegians and others to build frigates. You actually have a sustainable defence sector. Go along on that. What else should you do? Do the British government done several times before? Build housing. And I don't mean hand wave reforms to the home counties, so they don't get annoyed. Build three million houses. Go out and do it. Then keep it on the state's balance sheet. Build them as high-quality housing. And when you do that, you actually reduce your debt. Why? Because if you're building this at four and finance and at five, and you're income sex, that's net income reducing your debt, so you keep it on the state's balance sheet. What else do you do? Well, just those two things. Think what it would do is skills. We don't need it. Trust me, I'm an academic. I graduate lots of people from universities with social science degrees. We could do with a few more HVAC guys. If you try and get an electrician at your house, how long does it take and how much does it cost? If you actually had housing that was quality that people could build and learn skills doing, that would also free up labour and mobility. If you invest in your defence, which you're going to have to, because the Americans are about to take Greenland and NATO is over, then you can see where this becomes a productive thing. A really great book for people to have a read of. It's a big book. It came out a couple of years ago and it's very prescient for the moment. It's by a historian at Harvard. Old Guy now, well, in his 80s, called Charlie Meyer. And it's called The Projects State. And what he does is he tells a kind of history of the world through Europe from 45 on. When he says, look, we must understand what happened here. It wasn't just that technology and entrepreneurs and social forces. States had projects. They did things. The Cold War was a project to stop another state project. The Italian state was a project to suppress domestic communism. The French state was a project to balance out urban and rural. And everybody knew what was at stake and what the goal was and how you're on it. And in the 1990s, we just went, we don't do that anymore. Let's just go with this whole market thing. And you get exactly what happens. You get concentration, de-industrialization, de-skilling and inequality. Well, remember what we are seeing, a bit of a snapback towards industrial policy. We're seeing this of the U.S. We're seeing this in definitely in Germany, a little bit in France as well. I mean, it sounds like you see that that's a good thing. In the U.S. context, it's hard to know exactly what the objective of Trump's tariffs are. I mean, various explanations are put forward, but certainly that re-industrializing, re-invigorating, manufacturing is part of it. But some people will say, well, yeah, that's fine, but a lot of those jobs won't come back because robots did manufacturing. I think there's a thing that is real. Again, we're not in the 70s. To me, the big weakness of Liz Truss wasn't basically the insanity of our budget. It's the fact that you don't get to deregulate the banks twice. Bush, yeah. You don't get to do that again because we've done it. And once you've done it, you have to deal with the consequences of this. Not to do it again. And part of the thinking on industrial policy does have the nostalgia that we can go back to the French dead planning and all the rest of it. And yeah, you can't, and there's lots of sectors where this works. I mean, hell, look at China. Five years ago, there was no such thing as green tech exports. Now, somebody showed me a video of the other week of a lapo in Syria, the rebuilding after the Civil War. It's a drone shot. Every single roof is panels. Like every single roof, they won't have a grid. It'll be distributed, when Europe took Qatar's gas, or there's rather the share of Qatar's gas that was going to go to Pakistan, because we outbid them. Pakistan is never enough to run their grid. So autonomously, and quite apart from the state, large chunks of Pakistan society said, let's just get our hands on some panels. 20% of Pakistan now runs off the grid. It's the fastest solar transition in human history. So all this stuff is there. All this stuff is possible. And it's all kind of like, you know, why are they into it? Now, you know, can you, can you and should you do industrial policy? Yes, because you know, you know, it kind of can't defend itself. I mean, this, this is literally a question of life and death at this point. Let's leave it to Tesco has reached its end and completely failed. So we're going to do this. Well, some of the jobs we take about robots. Yes. But Elder Care Nuss won't, HVAC engineer won't, Plummer won, Sparky won. So why they say let's not try. But take the case of the UK. I mean, is there even the policy flexibility to do that? I mean, does it require spending? And I mean, is there a fiscal space to actually do that? The fiscal space, I mean, again, it's this thing like every, every treasury options three times over subscribed. Why do you keep coming back to this? It's just not true. What the markets want is a credible growth story. Why is it that guilt yields are higher than other yields? Simply because of one thing, embedded inflation is higher. So they want to basically have a margin to protect the, you know, that's fair enough. But obviously you did touch on the list, the back of which was obviously a bit of a lot of incredible story. Yes. If you told markets here, what we're going to do, obviously United States is about to short us. You would get any of your money back on a 30 year bond of the United States is occupied by Russia. Clearly we need to actually that. Kingdom is occupied by Russia. We need to do something about this. So here's what we're going to do. Here's the bits. Here's how it fits together. And we're going to do it over multiple parliaments. We've got cross-party agreement. This is the way we're going to go forward. If you did this, the bond market will be like, sure, have another 20%. And also, why do we have to just finance it through that? I mean, this huge amount of financing you can do in United Kingdom through, for example, reforming the so-called self-employed sector, which is one giant scam as far as I can figure out. You've got massive tax avoidance. You've got all these shelters. You're the Edinburgh partnerships, the Scott's law partnerships. I mean, there's so much avoidance. I mean, Jesus, go down to a high street and you see tax avoidance, Turkish barber, Kurdish barber, American sweet shop. What is all that crap? That just tax avoidance and money laundering scams. What's missing is political will to do that. I mean, why has a coherent economic package of policies not emerged? It's a lack of. Because they've got no imagination and they've been told by. In the morning, this is, I think, the British government works. Basically, the chancellor gets a call from a treasurer, saying, "This is how much you can spend today, is if they're running a corner shop." Then the bank of England gets on the other phone and says, "And if you try and spend more than that, this is what we'll do to interest rates." And they go, right, well, our job down there is to sit and adhere to the fiscal rules. And these are rules that were written for a higher growth, low volatility environment. And now you've got low growth and high volatility and you're trying to hit a moving target. Good luck with that. I'm a pretty good shot. I couldn't get near it. Yeah. I mean, moving to Europe, I mean, we have seen Germany taking a radical change in policy that they obviously released at that break, committed to her infrastructure defense spending for. I mean, basically, along the lines here, talking about. Exactly. I mean, it sounds like you think that is the correct route to go. That's the only way to do it. What else are they going to do? I mean, half the bridges in the. I mean, people forgot the Merkel era, right? You know, Merkel did this thing. Stability, right? You know, I'm going to say nothing changes, right? When, you know what, you know, a situation where nothing changes is called being dead, right? And for 15 years in terms of public investment, unprivate investment to large part, Germany was dead, but my God, that they balanced the budget. To this day, you go into a hotel in Berlin and try and run a Zoom call. It's a disaster. The digital infrastructure is non-existent. They just simply forgot to invent, like they confused, dead, shrewd, guilt, and investment. And they saw them as a radically different thing. So somehow investment happens when there's no investment, but to investors to take on some debt in the hope of a return. When the private sector does this, everyone goes, "Oh, you're a genius, mate." "Wow, it's brilliant, right?" Public sector does this. "Oh, my God, it's terrible, we have to stop this immediately." You mentioned Trump, NATO, Greenland. It sounds like you think it's inevitable. I mean, okay, how does that impact the international order? What happens after this? Well, it could be badly. So, I mean, it being quite explicit about this and the new national security doctrine that came out just about a few weeks ago, basically, it says this is what we're going to do. But it was quite clear from day one. I mean, you know, I didn't have Canada on my Bingo card, but when you think about it from basically the point of view of the MAGA folks, their definition of the world is the following. We sold our souls to China. You didn't basically allow the American firms to do what they did. But nonetheless, China's now a peer competitor. Europe's useless. They've been basically leeching office for years. They don't do anything. They have huge non-tariff barriers. They don't allow our whiskey and motorcycles in the country, while we have to take theirs. A lot of this is self-interested in John Distan downright wrong, but nonetheless, that's the way we think about it. So, how do we rebalance this? Well, basically, we're not really big believers in sort of the post-war democratic rules based order. We think that's part of the problem. We allowed the WTO to go under. We are quite clear that we are concerned with tariffs, both for revenue and also perhaps as a way of Scott Besson keeps saying, of addressing global imbalances. These are people who think the trade balance runs a financial account and not the other way round. And if that's the case, what do you want? Well, you realize now that you're at a technological point where China's not just a peer competitor. If you were to sail the Navy to Taiwan, they would sink it. And then what do you do? You go straight to nuclear dominance as your last option. All right, if we were to back off from that, but still have influence, what would we need to do? Well, they're going to pave the world with panels. We can't compete on that basis. What are we going to do? We'll double down on hydrocarbons. We are going to basically be the hydrocarbon continent. We're going to basically control global oil supplies. Yes, many people may be shifting off of it, but we can use our tariff policy to make sure people buy our oil. For example, Japan, 150 billion. South Korea, 100 billion, I think. Europe, what was the figure that was insane figure? 450 billion over like two years. It was like, if you add those three together, it's more than a matter of producers and hydrocarbons. But the direction travel is clear, right? If you want to be our friend, you need to buy our oil and that's going to screw up your green transition. And that's our point of competition with China. If the Americans manage to get Taiwan to build high-end Farbs in Arizona, once they do, they don't have a government in charge, they don't have a crop about Taiwan. And what we've done with Venezuela is to basically not just bring about the Mondo blockchain. This is the 1970s. You get to run. These are sat traps. When you have a regime we applaud, like El Salvador, Argentina, you got our help in cooperation. If not, we're going to actively undermine you. Greenland is there basically because of the defrosting of the North, of the polar ice cap and the shipping routes around that control, the shipping routes, plus also rear earths. We stopped doing that and we outsourced the whole thing to China. Turned out that was a bit of a mistake. It's hard to do that stuff because of environmental laws, even in Trump's America, but it's bloody easy to do it in a big sat trap called Greenland. Canada is basically an oil and parts and wood supplier and then everything else runs hemispherically. China gets the run basically Southeast Asia. If the Indians want to buffer them a little bit, we'll sell them some weapons. And Europe frankly would bode with them. We think they're all parasites and they can just either sort themselves out with the Russians or go under. And that's basically it. So that is the world view as outlined in this document. Yeah. Regional blocks. Take it seriously. This is what they think this is a better long term for America. And there's a certain point of view we go, all right, so what would be the rationale for that? Well, if there is the case that global warming is real, you're not going to solve this problem even if everybody panelled the air. There's already enough stuff out there that's like it's a bit of a problem. Sea level rise is baked in et cetera. We're going to need transformative technologies. You're going to have to basically do carbon capture. You're going to have to suck it out the air and store it somehow. And you know, we can pretend that that's not true. We're going to have to do geoengineering whatever. Again, this is what these guys think, right? So we're going to concentrate on the frontier technologies. We're going to basically use our comparative evangelism oil and gas. China can use what seem to be the technologies of the future, but they're actually just the technologies of the moment. And ultimately, you know, we will survive this and we will prosper. That's the long term hedge. Because the alternative is actually like fractionalization and decline. And regardless of whether it's mega or the liberals, the American ruling class cannot cope cognitively with the idea that they're not in charge. You just can't. From a kind of capital markets perspective, you know, this is a radically different world. I mean, I've seen terms of free markets, et cetera, that we lived through for the last 20 years. I mean, what are your thoughts on the head at impacts the dollar, if at all, these guys want a cheaper dollar and they're already getting it. So already, what is it, down 20%. Yeah. I mean, that's about 10% maybe last year, maybe a bit more, yeah. So I mean, in terms of the reserve staff, it says that something, well, I mean, it's kind of a rock in a hard place for everybody else, right? I mean, we'll make it worth less and you'll still buy it. Why? Because what are you going to do? Just buy more gold and it's great. And as gold goes up, what do you do? Liquid is some you go to buy some dollars so you can buy oil. I mean, you know, and Europe can't do a Europe would literally need to become rather than export Veltmeister, which they've been living off for the past decade. They need to basically become much more consumption orientated, spend a hell of a lot more domestically reorientate their entire industrial structure so that they import more because that way people would hold euros. They're just done enough out there to make it worthwhile, isn't it? So basically, Americans are like suck it and see, you know, we'll lower the value. That'll help us rebalance. That's Europe. My account and see your problems. John Connelly all over again. In conscious of time, we're nearly up on an hour. I mean, we've talked a lot about the challenges, which are fairly obvious. And we've brushed on some of the possible solutions. I mean, put it all together. I mean, taking an economic political economic view for the next five years, are you more optimistic? Obviously, there's lots of reasons to be cautious. But from an economic growth perspective, do you think it'll be higher or lower? Do you think inflation will be higher or lower? Do you think any of these social problems will get addressed? I think that the United States, if things don't go bad geopolitically, which is an increasing possibility, we'll continue to grow a higher rate than the rest of the world, the rest of the rich world, I should say. And Europe's going to be basically still in trouble, still in paralysis. My favorite example at the moment is France. When your government can't agree to pass a budget, space pains in the same position. That you've got a problem right there before you go anywhere else. But it's increasingly uncertain and fraught how much we can align it. Markets are just big dumb stupid-adding machines at the end of the day. Things go up, so buy more because things go up. What is it? 70%, 60% of your growth is driven by mag stocks, et cetera, by the magnificent seven. If AI boost proves to be true, then that's a huge problem for the US, because 20% of people who own 80%, 70% of the stocks, whatever it is, essentially will go, "Oh, my 401k." And then at that point, they will stop spending. And then you could risk a real recession under real collapse and growth, so the AI bubble popping is a real issue. Fundamentally, just at the point now, we're, you know, could markets continue in this way? Yeah, if nothing happened, I mean, yeah, sure. But you know, as Macmillan said, "Events, dear boy, events." I mean, that's what we need to look out for. And the problem of events is, you don't know they're coming, because they're events. But what we're doing is we're loading up the bar. We're loading up the chamber of the revolver of events with random events. And that's the thing that I worry about. One thing we do like to get people's perspective on, particularly first-time guests is, you know, advice to people who are interested in reading more about economics and learning more. I mean, you touched on some interesting books there. The project state was won. And the other things that were very influential and you obviously, our guests, or, sorry, our listeners were going, "Check out your books, but anything else that you would point people to that have been influential for you." Yeah, I mean, it's, if you really want to do something quite historical, but very contemporary, go back and read a book that captured everybody's imagination and written in about 1994 called "The State We Are In" by Will Hutton. Right, yeah. And you know what? It's the same thing. It's almost as if nothing's changed, right? And just reflect on that, because we went through boom, and we went through Boston, we've been through, and the world's obviously a very different place, but you can read that book as if it's published now. Interesting, right? So that's one. In terms of long-term stuff that, like, I think I've just absolutely classic books is a, but two brilliant books by the economist Albert Hirschman. The first one is called "The Passions in the Interests." And it's a bit of a detour in the sort of philosophy, political theory. It's only about 110 pages long, and it's in big print. It's basically an essay in the classical sense. It's beautifully written. And what he does in that book is basically say, "In order to have capitalism, you need to have people who think like capitalism." And getting people to think like capitalist was not normal. Karl Pionni makes this end point, but he does it in a much shorter, beautiful way. It's kind of like Foucault with it, any of the jargon. And basically, it's about how liberal subjects are created and the arguments for them. So they're simply because arguments for capitalism before its triumph. And if you read that, you will read things that you hear coming out of the mouth of bothersome today, and they have no idea that they're channeling and our arguments from 300, 400 years ago. And the other one from horsemen is called the rhetoric of reaction. And it's a fabulous book because you get to play horsemen bingo once you've read it, which is anytime that you hear an argument, "Oh, you can't do that," or "This will lead to terrible things." You can actually put it in four buckets, which is perversity, jeopardy, futility, jeopardy, and futility, jeopardy, perversity, right? So here's how it goes. Well, you know, you say that you want more immigrants because we don't have reminisce the economy will shrink, right? But if you do, British society will be torn apart, jeopardy, right? Well, you know, the problem is the deficit's huge and we're going to have to face it at some point. And if we don't face it, ultimately, there'll be inflation. And that's even worse than what we've got now. Jeopardy, probably, with a bit of futility if you don't do it. You get my point? You can basically dump any and all arguments into these things. Now, it doesn't mean they're wrong, but it means you should always give them a good sniff, because these are what he calls the rhetoric of reaction. And it's always good to have your rhetoric read our own. Interesting stuff. Well, definitely good suggestions for people to check out. And obviously, people can follow your work. Obviously, I've mentioned your books. I think you're somewhat active, on social media. Yeah, I was for a while. And then I discovered that if I stop being active on social media, I can write a book. And it's also, I mean, I used to love Twitter 10 years ago, but now it's just like it's just bots and all right. So that's annoying. And then when you go on blue sky, I hate to say it's just sort of like liberals bickering with each other. So I don't know. I think it's a bit of a dead space. I still post stuff out. Have I'm going to give a talk or have I do it? Like, for example, when you send me the link to this, I will say to everyone, and if you want my one hour new year's rant, here it is. And that'll get a lot of traffic. But I don't actually engage in social media because you're actually arguing with a bot. Yeah. Okay. Well, certainly will appreciate you posting this out. Oh, absolutely. But thank you very much for coming on and fascinating to get your perspective. And definitely all of the topics that you research and write on hugely relevant today. So thanks again. And from all of us here on Top Traders Unplugged, stay tuned for new more contact, we'll be back soon. Thanks for listening to Top Traders Unplugged. If you feel you learned something of value from today's episode, the best way to stay updated is to go on over to iTunes and subscribe to the show so that you'll be sure to get all the new episodes as they're released. We have some amazing guests lined up for you. 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