TRIGGERnometry - David McWilliams：＂We Can Avoid a Great Depression＂

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00:00:34.540 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry.

00:00:37.360 I'm Francis Foster.

00:00:38.780 I'm Constantine Kissin.

00:00:39.960 And this is a show if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

00:00:44.940 And a fascinating guest we have for you today.

00:00:47.420 He is a superstar Irish economist, broadcaster.

00:00:50.580 He just told us he's the host of the number one podcast in Ireland, David McWilliams.

00:00:54.800 Welcome to Trigonometry.

00:00:56.240 Konstantin, thank you very much for having me.

00:00:58.820 And Francis, it's great to be here.

00:01:00.100 What's the crack, boys?

00:01:00.840 Are you enjoying the lockdown?

00:01:02.480 I am.

00:01:03.200 Francis, not so much.

00:01:04.240 He's stuck completely on his own in a flat in London,

00:01:06.440 and that's why he looks increasingly more and more like my grandmother.

00:01:09.920 Well, you know, I always thought your grandmother was a very attractive lady.

00:01:15.700 I'll tell her you said that, David.

00:01:17.200 Yeah, so if you want to morph into, you know, an attractive grandmother. 1.00

00:01:22.780 year old in Ukraine.

00:01:24.320 From Ukraine? Look, there's a career ahead

00:01:26.800 of you. I'm sure there's a niche.

00:01:30.120 Absolutely.

00:01:30.900 It's 2020. I can be whatever I

00:01:32.760 want. Exactly, exactly, exactly.

00:01:35.360 Exactly. Well, David, welcome.

00:01:37.200 It's fantastic to have you.

00:01:38.620 This interview has been a long... You don't want me having cups of tea?

00:01:40.620 No, no, mate. You go for it. We've got one here

00:01:42.560 with the Trigonometry branding, of course.

00:01:45.300 But it's been a long

00:01:46.740 time in the making, this interview, so it is a pleasure

00:01:48.720 to have you on. And what

00:01:50.660 a time to have the conversation.

00:01:52.780 I mean, obviously, very, very uncertain times, very significant times as well.

00:01:59.820 What do you make of what's happening now, and particularly the economic impact of the lockdowns that we've seen around the West?

00:02:06.740 Is this the beginning of a Great Depression?

00:02:09.320 Jim Rickards, who you will know from the festival that you co-organize, Kilkenomics, we had him on the show a couple of weeks ago, and he said, we're already in a Great Depression.

00:02:19.040 What is your reading of things?

00:02:20.720 Well, I think Jim is right if you decide that a Great Depression is measured by GDP falls, unemployment, fiscal deficits, all that sort of stuff.

00:02:32.100 It's very clear that we're in Great Depression territory in terms of what's going on right now.

00:02:36.700 The question is whether or not the Great Depression materializes.

00:02:39.980 The Great Depression was a 36-month affair.

00:02:43.500 It went over three years.

00:02:44.860 It started in about 1931, 1932.

00:02:47.540 The interesting thing is it didn't start directly after the Wall Street crash.

00:02:50.720 It took a couple of years to materialize, and it went on until the Americans broke with the gold standard and started printing money, which is probably the opposite of what Jim would recommend be the solution.

00:03:04.180 So I would say that we are, if we don't fix the next couple of months, there is a chance that there will be these ideas, these things, these long tails, like talking economics, that in actual fact, the economy will continue to weaken.

00:03:22.800 However, the problem at the moment is really a lack of money.

00:03:26.400 It's a cash flow problem that most small businesses, big businesses are quite OK, but most small businesses are running out of money simply because the trust in the system has broken.

00:03:39.080 So, for example, if you run a small business and you have credit lines with your creditors and they are 90 days in good times when everything's normal.

00:03:47.280 So you send out your invoices, you actually use your invoices as invoice discounting.

00:03:52.080 So, invoices in a non-panic situation are actually as good as cash.

00:03:58.240 So, you go to the bank with your invoices and you say, look, these guys owe me 10 grand or 100 grand.

00:04:03.180 Will you give me cash against that?

00:04:04.780 The cash is, yeah, listen, the bank says we'll give you 70 grand.

00:04:07.520 So, invoice discounting is a way in which small companies manage cash flow in normal times.

00:04:12.320 And the reason I focus on small companies, lads, is that small companies are actually who employ the vast, vast majority of people.

00:04:18.960 So this obsession with Google and Facebook and all these big companies, the big oil companies, which I'm sure we'll talk about, they were big, they're getting smaller.

00:04:28.700 I suspect they'll be very small by the end of this afternoon.

00:04:33.060 But the point is, so let's talk about who I would regard as the real heroes of the economy, the small businesses.

00:04:38.900 So let's come back.

00:04:40.220 So the cash flow problem.

00:04:41.740 Most small businesses don't have a big pool of cash.

00:04:45.320 They don't have investors that are generous.

00:04:47.080 They certainly haven't been able to ride that stock market bonanza over the last seven or

00:04:53.940 eight years and turned their stock into cash.

00:04:56.260 So they're very much week-to-week, month-to-month players.

00:04:59.520 And something like this really shocks them.

00:05:01.920 And what happens in a situation like this is that the trust dissipates.

00:05:06.040 It's not that you don't trust the guy, but it's basically you fear that they are going

00:05:09.820 to run out of cash in the same way you're running out of cash.

00:05:12.560 So basically, all credit lines are truncated.

00:05:14.820 They used to be 90 days.

00:05:16.140 They truncate down to, let's say, 10 days.

00:05:18.300 So any rollover finance, which is, again, what all small businesses need,

00:05:23.360 and they use each other as banks.

00:05:25.320 That's the interesting thing.

00:05:26.300 Small businesses don't go to the banks and say, can I have a 10 grand overdraft?

00:05:29.520 What they say is, I'm dealing with this guy.

00:05:31.400 I've been dealing with him for 10 years.

00:05:32.580 I'll use his invoice or his cash flow to bolster my cash flow.

00:05:36.160 And that starts to atrophy, as it's doing right now.

00:05:39.540 what you find is small businesses good businesses go out of business because of a lack of money

00:05:46.180 which is probably the least reasonable way in which a small business can go out of money the

00:05:53.760 problem with the lack of money if there's a lack of money you just print it okay so what i believe

00:05:58.220 has to be done now is something that economists call helicopter money which comes after milton

00:06:02.920 friedman's idea that you basically drop money out of a helicopter it's like if you've ever seen the

00:06:08.060 beginning of

00:06:09.620 Apocalypse Now. Have you ever seen that?

00:06:12.440 Helicopters come in. Imagine that,

00:06:14.020 except they're dropping money, not napalm.

00:06:15.820 So it's much nicer.

00:06:17.920 It's a whole different experience.

00:06:19.820 If you see them on the horizon, it's like, yeah, come on,

00:06:21.960 come on. A bit of

00:06:23.980 Wagner as well. It's always good, you know.

00:06:26.520 But

00:06:26.840 I think that's going to happen.

00:06:29.700 I think that has to happen. I think that's the only way

00:06:31.800 because it's a very simple

00:06:33.360 thing that's going on here.

00:06:35.900 Two things. Number one, we have to

00:06:38.060 make sure that small businesses don't collapse, okay,

00:06:40.760 and that they exist when we come out of the lockdown.

00:06:43.380 That's the first thing.

00:06:44.440 Second thing is we've got to ensure that all the government spending

00:06:47.940 that's going on now doesn't lead to austerity.

00:06:50.520 And by that, I mean it doesn't lead to a massive increase

00:06:53.180 in the debt-GDP ratio, push-up debt servicing costs,

00:06:57.400 and prompt austerity two or three years down the road.

00:07:01.180 So the last thing we want is economies hit by COVID,

00:07:04.360 than just about recovering

00:07:06.520 and then hit again by austerity.

00:07:08.480 And the way in which you do that

00:07:09.560 is the central bank pays for everything.

00:07:11.580 And this sounds like magic

00:07:13.580 because it kind of is.

00:07:15.120 And I speak as a former central bank economist.

00:07:17.480 That's my training.

00:07:18.800 And I was very, very much part of the inside

00:07:22.240 in my youth many, many years ago

00:07:25.260 that the awesome power of central banking

00:07:28.560 is the following,

00:07:31.020 that they just print money.

00:07:33.420 they make it up. There's no balance sheet. There's no gold. There's nothing they need

00:07:38.180 against it. They print money. That is why central banks are so powerful. And it's why

00:07:42.660 for hundreds of years, one of the key battlegrounds in all politics, in all kingdoms,

00:07:50.080 in all princelings, in all fledging democracies is who prints the money. You probably should have

00:07:55.980 realized there was something up in Cuba when they made Che Guevara their first central bank

00:08:00.760 governor after the revolution that was clearly a signal to sell if you could get out of the place

00:08:05.600 but the point is whoever prints the money has got the most power right and the power vested in the

00:08:13.160 bank of england the federal reserve ecb bank of japan is phenomenal and it's right now that we

00:08:20.100 have to what i would just say is turn right on the tops now at the moment the bank of england

00:08:27.180 and the ECB and whatever are playing around with this,

00:08:30.420 what I would call bond jiggery-pokery.

00:08:32.520 So what they're saying is, yes, we will give you lots and lots of money,

00:08:35.700 but basically it has to go through the banking system,

00:08:37.680 and then the banking system acts as the middleman,

00:08:39.240 and the middleman then gets it to you.

00:08:40.980 Now, that demands that the small business that we're talking about

00:08:44.320 has to go to the bank in the first place, has to fill out a form,

00:08:47.320 has to look for a grant, has to give the bank, you know,

00:08:50.400 five or six years of back profits, et cetera,

00:08:53.760 big balance sheets, has to wait, has to get rated.

00:08:56.280 It's too long.

00:08:57.780 So my solution is very, very simple.

00:09:00.540 It's not just my solution.

00:09:01.560 Actually, Milton Friedman came up with it.

00:09:04.240 It was basically you just credit the bank account

00:09:07.020 of small business with a zero or maybe two zeros at the end.

00:09:10.380 And what this does is it most importantly dissipates

00:09:14.760 the fear that we're going to default on each other.

00:09:18.540 And then the system begins to easily breathe again.

00:09:21.880 And those credit lines that we are truncated

00:09:24.180 and we're actually screaming bankruptcy

00:09:25.900 they go back out two months three months four months and we rest easy in the lockdown and then

00:09:31.900 we wait for the doctors to tell us what time we should come come out whether it's next month or

00:09:37.900 the month after whatever so to answer your question I don't see a great depression unless of course

00:09:45.700 the authorities are profoundly unimaginative and they stick to what they're doing at the moment

00:09:51.040 They have to do a hell of a lot more very quickly.

00:09:54.100 It can be done.

00:09:55.120 I think we're moving in that direction.

00:09:57.140 And let's see what happens in the next couple of weeks.

00:09:59.260 Francis, before you jump in, let me just ask to follow up on this.

00:10:01.960 And then you go ahead, because you have lots of things you want to tell us, David, about as well.

00:10:06.540 But, David, if I'm one of the great things about you is you're very good at explaining economics to people who aren't economists, right?

00:10:12.260 But if I'm an ordinary person and I'm listening to what you're saying, which I am an ordinary person listening to what you're saying, right?

00:10:18.640 You don't believe that, mate.

00:10:20.060 Come on.

00:10:20.480 No, I'm very special. Of course, I am. But my point is, I don't have the economic understanding

00:10:25.860 and knowledge that you do, right? But what I'm hearing is, well, we're going to create money.

00:10:30.640 Now, if I'm an ordinary person, I'm going, well, I don't know how, I don't know when,

00:10:34.720 I don't know where, but surely that has some negative impact somewhere. Otherwise,

00:10:38.860 we'd be doing it all the time, surely? Well, it's a very good question, right?

00:10:42.560 The reason central bankers are regarded as the most conservative people in the

00:10:48.440 economic, savannah, let us say, okay?

00:10:52.940 And again, as I say, I worked in one for quite a while,

00:10:56.420 is because they build up credibility

00:10:59.280 about fighting inflation.

00:11:01.960 That's the thing.

00:11:02.640 We will not let inflation take over.

00:11:05.260 And the reason you build up credibility

00:11:07.740 about fighting inflation

00:11:09.700 is when you're faced with deflation,

00:11:12.620 which we're faced now where prices are falling,

00:11:14.640 you actually can unleash this awesome power.

00:11:17.460 and people believe that you will do the right thing.

00:11:20.880 So that's why central banks are very important.

00:11:22.960 In the wrong hands, at the wrong time,

00:11:25.920 a central bank can destroy a country by destroying the currency.

00:11:29.540 You saw that in Zimbabwe, for example.

00:11:31.820 Central Bank of Zimbabwe destroyed the currency

00:11:33.860 so much so that the humble liter bottle of Coke

00:11:37.580 became the unit of account in Zimbabwe

00:11:40.080 during the hyperinflation, right?

00:11:41.940 So in the wrong hands, at the wrong time,

00:11:43.880 the central bank can destroy the country.

00:11:45.640 in the right hands at the right time, Central Bank can save the country by doing exactly this,

00:11:51.400 which is by creating money. One of the great myths of economics is that money has value.

00:11:57.220 It has only value in its social context. People actually believe it, right? Which is why, for

00:12:02.920 example, if I take five euros out of my pockets, which has no intrinsic value, there's no intrinsic

00:12:09.500 value in the piece of paper, the value is only that I believe that it can buy me two cups of

00:12:14.100 coffee, right? That is a mind game that we play with each other. And so the essential thing about

00:12:21.620 money is that it has no real value other than the value that we ascribe to it. And that value comes

00:12:28.320 from our knowledge that the central bank won't print too much of it in normal times. So there

00:12:33.040 won't be too much of it around. So that is answer, first part of your question. Second part of your

00:12:39.860 question is then do you have to mop this money up later on because it's still in the system and

00:12:44.820 the system yes you do and that's a you do the thing called open market operations where the

00:12:48.800 central bank just comes in and literally taps the banking system on the shoulders and listen mate

00:12:52.220 give us that cash that's sitting idle in your accounts the bank says fair enough you're going

00:12:57.200 to pay us you said yeah we pay a bit of interest thanks it's fine okay you have it that's how it

00:13:01.040 works it's called open market operations it's a trade done at the end of every day you can do

00:13:05.160 that very very easily and the third issue is then if you aren't worried about inflation if this can

00:13:12.200 be done why don't we do it all the time okay why doesn't it all happen and that again is the

00:13:16.620 credibility that we vest in the institutions it's a bit like saying to an army if you like killing

00:13:20.960 people why don't you do it all the time you know because that's what they do right and we decide

00:13:26.880 that our ministries of defense are sufficiently trustworthy that they don't send fellas out 0.97

00:13:32.600 killing you all the time you do realize you're talking to a russian david

00:13:36.200 well in the in russia you have an entirely different attitude but you see what i mean 0.96

00:13:45.800 you know that that that uh there are many many extraordinary powers that can be

00:13:52.760 unleashed by a democratic government uh not least its own military it's police force for

00:13:59.460 example here in ireland what i love about irish cops is they don't irish cops are great i've been

00:14:03.860 watching them for the last couple of days they don't police the country they negotiate with the

00:14:08.760 country it's so nice you know like you've got fellas out drinking pretending they're all because

00:14:12.760 our lockdown is that basically we can't go more than two kilometers from our house and we can

00:14:17.740 only be with people in the house so you look at fellas on the pier down beside me who clearly do

00:14:21.940 not live with each other and have been i've found each other in that beautiful way that alcoholics

00:14:27.340 find each other on piers and open spaces. And the cops, rather than being heavy-handed with them,

00:14:32.900 just negotiate. Come on, lads. Be reasonable, whatever. So what I'm saying is there is an

00:14:38.000 awesome power that democratic countries can unleash upon their people. Central banking is

00:14:42.200 one of those. And as long as that power is not abused, it's very credible. And then when you

00:14:47.940 have to do it, you do it. And David, I was reading one of your articles in which you were talking

00:14:53.140 about one of the silver linings of this crisis because obviously there's plenty of negatives but

00:14:57.580 there will be positives that emerge in particular you believe that we are going to create a

00:15:01.840 population that is more socially aware absolutely do you still believe that yeah i think that uh

00:15:08.660 i think that the soft issues of economics are much more interesting than the hard ones so

00:15:13.280 balance of payments inflation exchange rates the idea that's very simple stuff but what's really

00:15:18.060 interesting is soft ideas so sociability trust credibility uh what they what they call the social

00:15:25.680 fabric social capital and social capital is based on having a very strong sense of community so if

00:15:31.460 you contrast for example the reaction of northern european countries uh i don't include the uk and

00:15:38.000 that is uk is a slight outlier no i'm only joking but there has been we left mate we left apparently

00:15:45.420 so. Brexit means Brexit. Brexit means Brexit. It's great that Brexit has not been spoken about as

00:15:52.980 well, which is fantastic. Yeah, what a relief, mate. We're getting tired. No, I think, so what

00:15:57.780 you see is that the crisis, you know, this expression where you hear all the time in the

00:16:04.240 health service, which is that 100 people died today, but X amount of them had underlying issues,

00:16:10.500 underline health problems, underline conditions, they call it, right?

00:16:18.040 I think that the crisis, any crisis, reveals a hell of a lot about societies.

00:16:23.840 Actually, one of the more interesting things about crisis is what it tells you about the state of the country

00:16:28.820 and the difference between, let's say, the United States and Northwest Europe has been quite profound.

00:16:36.880 And it's the following, is that the United States, in the same way as a patient who has underlying conditions, is more fragile in the face of the pandemic, a country that has underlying conditions, those conditions are exposed in the pandemic.

00:16:53.320 So what you see in Northwest Europe is social solidarity, a belief in science, a belief in the government, an understanding that the police force and the medics working together are actually working in our favor.

00:17:06.140 and they believe in what's called in economics the paradox of aggregation which is basically

00:17:12.220 that what is good for the individual is not always good for the collective so basically if

00:17:16.800 the collective say we should all stay in then we stay in even though it subjugates individual rights

00:17:21.600 to the extent that we believe that we have them in the united states i think what you've seen is

00:17:26.860 an exposure of these underlying um conditions so the death rate is much higher it's much higher

00:17:32.720 amongst poor people. Why? Because the infrastructure isn't there. The public hospitals aren't there.

00:17:38.040 The president is regarding the entire thing as, he's seen the entire thing through his own

00:17:43.640 personal lens. How do I, Donald Trump, play out in this? He has the governors bidding for PPE

00:17:48.940 equipment against each other. Inequality is exposing the fact that poor people are dying

00:17:55.560 in much greater numbers. You know, I could go on. But my sense is that the social solidarity that

00:18:01.900 has been evidenced is very, very significant, and it changes the world. So I'll give you an example.

00:18:10.240 In 1945, in the United Kingdom, Britain wins the Second World War, okay, with the Allies, of course. 0.80

00:18:20.000 I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I have to laugh at that a little bit.

00:18:25.340 No, so do I. I mean, the idea that the Brits won the Second War is, for me, a complete palaver.

00:18:31.000 Constantine's people won the Second World War.

00:18:33.380 Russians won the Second World War.

00:18:35.480 And then the English speakers came in on the far side and, you know, whatever. 0.97

00:18:38.740 But anyway, my point is, let's go back.

00:18:41.440 Had you said on the eve of the surrender of Hitler,

00:18:47.740 when Churchill is bestriding the globe and is at Yalta

00:18:52.960 and he's talking to Roosevelt and Stalin and et cetera,

00:18:56.200 that Churchill would have been defeated

00:18:58.520 in the next general election,

00:19:00.440 you've said, no way, that's not possible.

00:19:02.660 But what happened in the Second World War

00:19:04.460 was the trauma of the war

00:19:06.260 and the social contract

00:19:09.620 and the extraordinary coming together

00:19:12.160 of the people in the Second World War

00:19:13.900 changed profoundly the way they looked at the world.

00:19:17.760 So suddenly they said,

00:19:19.020 actually, let's have a national health service.

00:19:21.300 Let's have a free education.

00:19:23.380 Let's have a national this, that, and the other.

00:19:25.240 The soldiers coming back from the front said, no, no, no, we're not going back to the same.

00:19:28.960 We're not going back to, you know, Toffs running the place, as was the case after the First World War. 1.00

00:19:33.700 We're actually going to change the country.

00:19:36.780 So, you know, Churchill gets kicked out.

00:19:40.000 It's amazing.

00:19:41.760 Less than 12 months after he wins the Second World War.

00:19:45.620 And what he's replaced by is a reflection of the national solidarity in policy, which was a Labour government.

00:19:53.720 I'm just doing this for our UK viewers because it's important to see things from the UK perspective.

00:20:01.280 That's one example.

00:20:02.300 You'd think after the Spanish flu, for example, in the United States, the 1920s is without a doubt the most technologically and financially sophisticated decade in most of the 20th century.

00:20:16.100 Think about what happened.

00:20:17.980 So the Americans respond to this trauma by extraordinary technological innovation.

00:20:23.720 electricity, radios, telegrams, telephones, cars, all this sort of stuff. So my sense is that

00:20:30.080 there is a way to look at this, Francis, which is that the social glue, the social capital that has

00:20:39.760 become more adhesive in the crisis could be used as a platform of which to change societies for

00:20:49.000 the better and do you think that the youth can become a vanguard for change because they're the

00:20:54.280 ones as far as we know at this point who are least affected by the virus so you were proposing that

00:21:01.060 actually they should be the ones at the vanguard of reinvigorating the economy starting everything

00:21:05.680 up and let's get some youthful energy changing our economies francis they're the least affected

00:21:11.840 by the virus but most affected by the shutdown that's so like everything you should see through

00:21:17.840 generation well you should you could you can see the world through these generational lenses

00:21:24.020 i remember years ago interviewing uh tony ben do you remember tony ben yeah of course yeah yeah

00:21:30.640 and i was presenting a show here in ireland after my central banking days when i when i went rogue

00:21:36.100 and abandoned abandoned sort of conservative economics and went down to doing media and all

00:21:42.200 Anyway, and I was interviewing Tony Benn in his house in Holland Park,

00:21:48.640 and he used to do all his research from this quite dusty, quite,

00:21:54.680 in actual fact, he looked, he would be a perfect person for the webcam era

00:21:59.200 because the back was always full of books, you know.

00:22:02.360 Whereas, as I said, we prefer the Fallujah, I've just been captured by ISIS look.

00:22:07.980 But whereas Tony Benn was very much the, if you imagine the economist says,

00:22:11.900 oh, I'm going on user 10 now.

00:22:13.540 I better put up all my books behind me

00:22:15.520 so I look very clever.

00:22:16.640 Well, Tony Blaine was clever.

00:22:17.820 That's the difference.

00:22:19.960 But he said something about generations.

00:22:21.880 He said, I was interviewing him.

00:22:23.400 He said, young man.

00:22:24.340 He said, young man.

00:22:25.160 He said, you and I have something in common.

00:22:29.500 And I said, what's this?

00:22:30.400 And I looked younger than my age at the time.

00:22:32.060 And he said, the young and the old

00:22:34.700 have one thing in common.

00:22:35.660 And I said, what's that? 0.99

00:22:36.340 He says, we're fucking bullied by the middle-aged. 0.96

00:22:38.440 i thought it was a really good expression to explain the way the world works so if you look 0.98

00:22:45.940 at the generational thing the youth uh in ireland where we've run the numbers uh ireland has a

00:22:52.940 population about 5 million of which about 1.4 million are under the age of 35 they should be

00:22:59.800 released straight away back into the economy to do their thing to create a youth economy it'll be

00:23:05.240 like do you remember uh logan's run did you ever see that movie from the 70s a long time ago great

00:23:10.220 movie great movie and the over 35s were all shot so if you were over 35 you couldn't go out in

00:23:17.640 public because you were so ugly you were getting wrinkles and all sorts of things right so i i

00:23:21.560 think that basically what we know to be serious what we know is the lockdown will be staggered

00:23:30.180 in terms of who we let out first, okay?

00:23:33.120 We clearly can't let out.

00:23:34.460 Like my mum is 84, I'm going to visit her now.

00:23:37.520 Her generation have to be kept in isolation 1.00

00:23:40.200 for as long as it takes, okay?

00:23:41.620 Because we know what the data tells us.

00:23:44.100 And then as you go down through the population,

00:23:46.040 you get less and less and less exposed,

00:23:48.700 or if you do get exposed, you actually can survive,

00:23:50.960 except for some very, very unusual cases

00:23:53.900 and unfortunate cases.

00:23:55.280 and ultimately there needs to be some sense of national collective immunity coming in so that

00:24:03.780 we can actually physically fight this ourselves so it strikes me that the first way you should

00:24:08.220 do it is to release the under 35s who don't live with their parents and i know in ireland and

00:24:13.540 britain that's a big problem because many people in their 20s in my generation obviously didn't

00:24:17.720 live with their parents but now that's the case they do but to the extent that there is a size

00:24:21.160 population in Ireland, the mathematics is about 70% of the under 35s are in employment and don't

00:24:29.000 live with their parents. So that's a big chunk. That's 700,000, 800,000 people here. I think the

00:24:34.700 UK figures would be multiply that by a factor of five, six, whatever UK population is now. I think

00:24:40.500 it's 65 million or something. Or is it 60 million? No, it's over 60 million. It's been over 60

00:24:45.440 in it for a while yeah there's fucking loads of you 0.93

00:24:47.440 so that's my my point is is and then the and then you know what i find interesting for francis is 0.93

00:24:56.400 we're very happy to cede authorship to the youth in terms of music in art and sport and lots of

00:25:04.340 areas we don't find it unusual that kids are making the running our people their 20s so i

00:25:11.540 think that this idea that there needs to be some sort of headmaster, middle-aged headmaster

00:25:18.100 in charge of the economy is kind of ludicrous. So I'd say let them out and do their thing. And

00:25:23.040 also because what's a very interesting thing is a thing in economics called scarring. So scarring

00:25:28.180 is what happens, and you see this in longitudinal surveys, if in your 20s you fall behind economically,

00:25:36.240 you never ever recover your wages are never never recover your status never recovers and ultimately

00:25:44.100 your entire world economically is dictated by relative failure in your 20s so it's called

00:25:51.000 scarring and you see this both in terms of individuals but also you see it in terms of

00:25:56.900 generations so generations who leave university for example or leave college or come into the

00:26:01.640 education in the midst of a recession actually do considerably worse over the long term for

00:26:07.940 generations who actually leave college or leave school, come into the workforce in a boom. This

00:26:13.060 is very interesting. And it's got to do with your sense of yourself and how you're negotiating,

00:26:16.680 lots of issues. So scarring is something that we cannot risk. This generation who came into the 1.00

00:26:27.100 labour force during COVID are scarred forever because of this. The way in which you actually

00:26:32.900 militate against these ideas is you release them early and let them do their thing.

00:26:38.920 And do you think moving forward now, looking at Europe as a whole,

00:26:43.480 do you think that the EU have handled this crisis well, number one? And number two,

00:26:47.840 the second part of this question is, do you think we're going to see the collapse of the EU as a

00:26:52.540 result of COVID as more and more countries, your Italys, your Serbians, have less faith in the EU?

00:27:01.140 Well, you've just, Francis, given me the next Daily Telegraph editorial.

00:27:06.580 As I've always said to clients of mine, when I was working in investment banking in the UK for

00:27:11.540 many years, I said to them, look, lads, if you really want to lose money, the quickest way to

00:27:16.640 lose money in Europe is read the Daily Telegraph, because it's always wrong, okay?

00:27:22.540 I write for the Daily Telegraph, David, but thank you very much for that.

00:27:26.900 Well done, David. Correct.

00:27:28.860 But it's, you know, I mean, Constantine, you know, on Europe, it's always wrong.

00:27:33.740 And the reason it's always wrong is because in general, the English upper class and their lackeys have never really,

00:27:46.680 this is going back to Agincourt, this has nothing to do with now, this goes back to the 14th century,

00:27:50.920 have never really got, when Edward II

00:27:54.260 defaulted on the Medicis, you know,

00:27:56.080 it goes back a long way, all this sort of stuff.

00:27:57.980 I've never really got Europe, and there's always this sense

00:28:00.100 that Europe is one iteration of crisis away from collapse, okay?

00:28:04.880 And here's the latest example of that.

00:28:07.620 My own, and of course Brexit spices that particular dish

00:28:10.320 in sort of a mental way, but my own particular feel

00:28:14.160 is that Italy is a big, it's a big problem 1.00

00:28:17.500 Because Italy, if you go back even to 1987 when you had a large lira devaluation, then 1991 you had a lira devaluation, 1993 you had a lira devaluation, you have these periodic crises in Italy and it hasn't been able to recover properly.

00:28:37.340 So every time there's a crisis in Italy, the legacy is slightly higher on employment, et cetera, slightly bigger budget deficit.

00:28:45.260 And poor Italians have been running a budget.

00:28:47.560 What people don't realize is that Italy has been running a primary budget surplus.

00:28:51.360 So on a day-to-day basis, it has been running a budget surplus for the last 15, 16 years, which is extraordinary.

00:28:59.560 The problem is they have a legacy of this massive overlap debt that they took out in the 70s, which frankly should be written off, I think.

00:29:05.360 Anyway, it may well be at the end of this.

00:29:08.420 And you've got, in Italy, you've got the, how would you describe it?

00:29:13.920 The Duden League are not a fascist party, but quasi-fascist party waiting in the wings, okay? 0.50

00:29:21.480 But my sense is that the European Union under the European Central Bank has behaved pretty well.

00:29:29.600 It has made a lot of money available.

00:29:31.580 European politicians, of course, have defaulted back onto traditional lines.

00:29:37.760 So you have what they call the frugal four, Austria, Germany, Netherlands, and Finland.

00:29:43.720 God knows why the Finns got involved.

00:29:46.000 But as a friend of mine said, with the exception of the Dutch,

00:29:49.620 there were three proper Nazi countries, Finland, Austria, and Germany.

00:29:54.000 And they can't get over that, but I'm only joking, right?

00:29:55.960 And then on the other side, you basically have the Catholics, right? 0.97

00:29:58.860 You've got us, the Spaniards, the Portuguese, the Italians, right?

00:30:02.960 The Catholics and the Irish and the Greeks, of course, who for a variety of history and geography are an exceptional case in the context of the European Union.

00:30:14.900 You know, you mentioned Serbia.

00:30:17.860 Serbs aren't in the European Union yet.

00:30:20.220 And I would say I actually spoke to a Serbian maid of mine that actually met her walking out here on the pier.

00:30:27.020 She's married to a maid of mine.

00:30:28.100 And I said, how are things back home, you know, in Serbia?

00:30:30.700 She says, man, we've gone through much worse than this.

00:30:33.560 The Serbs have gone through and caused much worse than this. 0.98

00:30:39.080 My sense is the European Union will muddle through.

00:30:42.120 I don't think it's going to be an existential crisis.

00:30:45.100 I think Germany and Holland, particularly Holland,

00:30:47.580 will buckle a bit on whether or not they support the rest of Europe.

00:30:54.760 Last Thursday, they had a big shindig at the European Council

00:30:58.040 nothing really happened but that's the way europe works it works it goes two steps forward one step

00:31:02.520 back two steps forward one step back but at the core of the european union which i think english

00:31:07.380 people don't understand is germany and germany does extremely well at the european union in fact

00:31:14.460 the european union particularly eurozone allows germany to recycle its current account surplus

00:31:21.280 and that is exactly what it wants to do and it will do that so they basically sell us mercedes

00:31:26.700 Sometimes we have money, sometimes we don't.

00:31:29.660 Then we borrow money from them to buy their Mercedes,

00:31:32.720 and periodically we default, and that's it.

00:31:35.060 And we reset the button.

00:31:36.040 And what you've seen in the Brexit negotiations was, you know,

00:31:40.840 that basically what England didn't understand, or British, not Britain,

00:31:44.440 conservatives didn't understand, was that they were facing Germany

00:31:50.240 across the table, nobody else.

00:31:52.660 and basically what happened is Gunter

00:31:55.960 just basically squeezed the Brits

00:31:58.060 and every time at the negotiations

00:32:00.280 and they just squeezed them and said

00:32:02.220 look, you're a small country

00:32:04.220 you have big notions based on history

00:32:06.800 you're not really at the races

00:32:08.360 we'll give you a deal 1.00

00:32:09.800 but don't fuck with us 1.00

00:32:11.180 and that's really what happened 0.99

00:32:13.000 and that's what's going to happen this year as well

00:32:15.020 You don't think that that was kind of

00:32:18.180 how they treated Theresa May

00:32:19.360 but Boris Johnson is going to be

00:32:20.560 in a much stronger position

00:32:21.620 given his large majority to do better?

00:32:24.860 That's internal politics.

00:32:26.080 I mean, nobody cares in the rest.

00:32:28.280 What people in England don't seem to understand is 0.99

00:32:30.260 we don't give a shit whether he's got a big majority or not, right? 0.98

00:32:33.820 That's your own internal dialogue. 0.99

00:32:35.760 And that's fair enough, you know?

00:32:37.260 I'm sure most English people don't even know

00:32:39.040 who's in the Irish government, right?

00:32:41.320 You know, these are who's in the French government.

00:32:43.260 What's the actual makeup of the National Assembly?

00:32:45.100 I'm sure most English people have no idea

00:32:46.760 what coalition Mrs. Merkel is on top of. 1.00

00:32:50.940 I'm sure of that.

00:32:51.620 right? Nobody cares about what goes on in your own country.

00:32:55.620 No, but my point isn't that the external forces care. My point is that Theresa May had lots of 0.99

00:33:01.200 people sniping. She wasn't able to get rid of people in her own party who were undermining

00:33:06.200 her efforts. With Boris Johnson, he made it very clear, you're either with me or you're out. And

00:33:10.880 people had to sign up to his pledges. And now the Conservative Party, at least, seems like they were

00:33:16.160 speaking with one voice under his leadership. Yeah, but it doesn't make any difference.

00:33:19.960 trade negotiations are about size, right? The little fella gets destroyed because there's 1.00

00:33:28.440 nothing to bring to the table. So, you know, let's cut to the chase. Half of the UK's trade,

00:33:36.600 both imports and exports, is with the European Union. Not one-third, not one-tenth, not 20%,

00:33:41.720 percent half okay flip it the other way 12 of the EU's trade is with the UK it's a it's it's a done

00:33:51.380 deal Britain will take whatever it gets and if it behaves well it'll do well to get a little bit

00:33:57.920 better and if it doesn't it'll go to WTO rules which are kind of a disaster for for which is

00:34:05.640 why, you know, there has never been a situation where a government goes into a trade negotiation

00:34:13.160 willingly in order to put up barriers. That's what's happening. It's bonkers. But that's

00:34:21.460 Brexit. It's boring stuff, you know. It's going to be something much more interesting.

00:34:26.020 I mean, you've brought up Brexit, and you mentioned that we haven't talked about it

00:34:29.780 for a long time. No, no. Just what I brought up was that

00:34:31.560 this idea that I see peddled in the British press

00:34:35.420 that Europe is one crisis away from catastrophe

00:34:39.300 is something I've seen since I was a kid here.

00:34:42.720 Since the 1980s, 1990s, I've seen it with Mrs. Thatcher,

00:34:46.500 I see it with John Major, I see it even through Tony Blair's period,

00:34:50.020 I see it with Gordon Brown being against the Euro, all that sort of stuff.

00:34:53.080 And then, of course, I see it with Cameron, I see it with Theresa May,

00:34:56.320 and now I see it with Boris Johnson. This is a thing.

00:34:58.780 this is a this is a disease this is a virus that is deep in the conservative party nobody else has

00:35:05.980 it we're all the rest of us have the vaccine euroscepticism right okay for some reason there's

00:35:13.660 a small population in the uk that doesn't have the vaccine and continues to show signs of as i said

00:35:19.720 the underlying conditions so you don't think that with germany because you wrote a very very good

00:35:25.980 article um for the various times where you explained that you know germany is in real

00:35:31.180 financial difficulties their economy is not doing well at all and the long-term prognosis

00:35:37.780 is pretty bleak you don't think that will weaken them when it comes to having a trade negotiation

00:35:42.940 well i think no no because it's kind of relative right so you've got two sides of the trade thing

00:35:50.200 you've got the trade side and the services side right uh in in terms of trade the germans are

00:35:56.400 very very strong still they make a lot of stuff they make a lot of heavy stuff uh they are heavily

00:36:02.480 diversified around the world in fact they make a lot of stuff that britain used to make like when

00:36:08.340 i was a kid the amount of cars on the road here in ireland made in britain was phenomenal that's

00:36:13.200 every second car you know you'd pick up things and i remember even my dad saying when he was a kid

00:36:17.980 basically everything was made in Britain. And all those things that were made in Britain 0.57

00:36:21.900 were increasingly made in Germany, and now a lot of them are made in China. So the German big fear

00:36:26.460 is that China will come after the German car industry in the way Germany went after the

00:36:34.120 Italian car industry, which was something that happened throughout the 1990s and into

00:36:39.100 the first decade of the noughties. With respect to Germany's overall position,

00:36:46.780 The basic problem with Germany, from where I'm seen as an economist, is that it doesn't

00:36:52.140 like to spend the money it earns, okay?

00:36:54.700 The basic problem with Britain is it likes to spend other people's money, right?

00:36:59.720 Because so Britain runs a current account deficit, Germany a surplus. 0.59

00:37:03.440 If you want to look at the two countries, what could really help the Germans is if they 0.83

00:37:08.060 expanded their budget deficit and began to spend money.

00:37:10.940 And in actual fact, if you've traveled in Germany recently, I did about a year ago,

00:37:14.640 I was quite shocked actually, you know, my memory of Germany had been of extraordinarily brilliant autobahns, for example.

00:37:21.260 I drove from Dublin to Croatia, don't ask, because we have a dog and our children demanded that I take the second dog to Croatia.

00:37:30.140 So I drove with the dog and anyway, in the German autobahns, I was quite shocked by, you know, they're not in great nick, you know, there's a lot of, there's a hell of a lot of traffic on the roads, etc.

00:37:42.440 So it's very clear that Germany could expand their budget deficit quite dramatically if they wanted to, but they really don't want to.

00:37:51.580 So I think the dilemma in Germany is twofold. One is how they deal with China.

00:38:00.380 And the second one is whether or not they expand their budget deficit, which would actually limit dramatically some of the conflicts at the heart of the EU.

00:38:09.740 uh interestingly i think the long-term implication of covid on china is that never ever ever again

00:38:18.260 will any of us at this i mean including the uk in this germany france the united states ever be

00:38:25.540 dependent on china for essential equipment i mean the idea of the western companies governments

00:38:31.820 queuing up and bidding with each other to buy little bits of face masks and things like that

00:38:36.840 in China. That will never happen again. And so I think the long-term implication of all this is

00:38:41.400 that the supply chain management that so dominated global economics for the last 20 years, of which

00:38:47.320 largely China was at one end and the rest was worth the other, okay, I think that's over. I think 0.93

00:38:51.760 we're going to see a huge amount of onshore and back into the European Union, back into the United

00:38:55.180 States, maybe even back into the United Kingdom of British companies, particularly some of the

00:39:00.120 big British pharmaceutical companies. And I think the reaction to this will be that the

00:39:06.360 alfresco globalization of the last, what, 20, let's say since the fall of the Berlin Wall,

00:39:13.320 will be replaced by more managed trade. And I don't think China will recover either its reputation,

00:39:18.280 its brand, or its assumption that everybody will do business with China no matter what. I'm not 0.72

00:39:25.220 too sure that's going to happen. Well, that's been one of the big issues that we've been talking

00:39:29.660 about to a lot of people particularly and i have noticed there seems to be a correlation between

00:39:33.580 being kind of on the right of politics and being a china hawk or a china critic i'm on i'm on the

00:39:39.900 center left of politics yes but but you're also problematic david you're still problematic because

00:39:45.940 you're not on the far left and you probably don't have your pronouns on your twitter account and

00:39:50.440 stuff like that oh man that's yeah anyway enough yeah let's not get you in trouble with your own

00:39:55.780 side. But on the China thing, David, it's, I mean, one of the things that is becoming very clear is

00:40:02.780 that while none of the externalities of doing business with China were visible to us, while

00:40:09.580 we pretended that, you know, there's no cost to doing business with China, everything was fine.

00:40:16.000 Now, suddenly, people are starting to realize, and, you know, in terms of the economic impact,

00:40:19.860 in terms of the national security impact. Also, you know, we used to talk about China's human

00:40:24.280 rights record no one talks about china's human rights record they're talking about concentration 0.78

00:40:27.880 camps now those are very different ways of framing the question yes yes yes i i think that look

00:40:35.160 what we know is that pandemics have lingering long-term influences we spoke about for example

00:40:44.680 the trauma of the uh pandemic flu pandemic but even if you go further back you go to back to

00:40:51.480 the outbreak of the plague in Marseille in 1720

00:40:56.220 had profound impacts on the French society.

00:40:59.600 The currency collapsed.

00:41:01.520 And if you can go back as far as the Black Death in Florence

00:41:06.940 and what happened thereafter was actually a renaissance

00:41:09.400 and huge increases in scientific inquiry and la-la-la.

00:41:13.480 So these have profound effects.

00:41:15.600 My sense is that after the Black Death, for example,

00:41:21.480 There was an extraordinary increase in anti-Jewish sentiment in Europe.

00:41:28.340 It was a phenomenal brutality towards Jewish communities because rumours were spread that Jewish folk had, I think, poisoned the wells.

00:41:40.300 What had actually happened was because the Jewish folks had been ghettoized by Christians, they didn't actually mix with Christians.

00:41:47.480 and therefore had a slightly higher rate of

00:41:50.620 they survived more because they weren't infected

00:41:53.860 because they didn't mix with the local population

00:41:55.260 but there was a vicious, vicious pogroms

00:41:58.820 against Jewish people in the late 14th century

00:42:02.140 and those pogroms really ended with the expulsion

00:42:08.060 of the Jewish community from Iberia

00:42:10.700 where they'd been there for a thousand years

00:42:12.740 so you have the historical evidence

00:42:16.800 that pandemic so for example Irish people were blamed for being for typhus in the United States

00:42:22.420 there was an outbreak of typhus in 1848 in New York or sorry cholera cholera and the Irish were

00:42:28.180 blamed and it was very much second nature in in American circles to blame the Irish as being

00:42:33.340 carriers of cholera but they just happened to be poor and poor people got this more than anyone

00:42:38.560 else. So I do think that there will be a material impact on China's brand from this. And I'm not

00:42:48.060 sure that it will play out, how it will play out geopolitically. But what I am sure of is that it

00:42:55.880 will play out in corporate boardrooms. The idea is, do we want to be so exposed to that country?

00:43:02.640 that's it do we want our supply chain to end in china where it might end in vietnam where it might

00:43:09.360 end in thailand where it might end in some other asian country our and do we want to be it's it's

00:43:18.140 it's like the supply line of an army do we want to be overstretched and i think that these are

00:43:22.880 these are big big issues and we have an addiction to and i use that word in its truest sense to

00:43:28.900 essentially cheap goods from time from china whatever it may be and it funds our lifestyle

00:43:34.940 and we see that as a universe that we're working with yeah yeah absolutely and we all and we until

00:43:42.240 now we we never questioned it do you think we're going to enter a world where people are going to

00:43:46.680 be like do you know what i don't mind paying an extra tenner for uh an electronic good as long

00:43:53.080 as it's not made in china and if it is i'm not touching it well i'm not sure it'll be that

00:43:57.720 extreme. But I think that the corporate world will change their perceptions of, as I said,

00:44:06.640 exposure to China. I'm not sure there will be a consumer boycott of Chinese goods. But the idea

00:44:14.860 that China is a neutral player in the world, I think, has been badly affected by this.

00:44:22.000 Yeah, that's a mild understatement, I think.

00:44:24.880 so you know and it's interesting and that's the funny thing about uh when we talk about europe

00:44:31.680 etc that there's actually much more that bonds us together and separates us in in these perceptions

00:44:38.020 that the european way for want of a better word which is shared by people in dublin manchester

00:44:43.640 london sunderland newcastle marseille you know cologne there is a european sensibility about

00:44:50.420 the way we run our societies our countries etc and as long as we fight amongst each other we don't

00:44:59.440 see that we've extraordinary similarities I mean I think it was Freud described the end of the

00:45:06.140 Austrian Hungarian empire where the Czechs and the Slovaks and all these characters he described it

00:45:12.100 as the narcissism of small differences nationalism and I actually do believe that in the European

00:45:18.060 British, European context, that what we're being narcissistic about very small differences

00:45:22.960 and one of the maybe enduring impacts of this will be to wake us up to the fact or alert

00:45:31.960 us to the fact that, you know, we're doing all this trade with China and maybe it's not

00:45:39.180 necessarily the sort of regime that we should be opening our arms to all the time.

00:45:44.340 And I think you'll see that change in the corporate world first.

00:45:48.060 That's really interesting. And in terms of the China thing, do you think that in terms of the other changes that result from the COVID situation, you talk about nationalism.

00:45:59.440 Obviously, there's been, you know, nationalism has been swept through Europe in recent years and been very successful.

00:46:07.360 Do you think that this will create more of that in the sense that people start to question other aspects of globalization?

00:46:15.700 We talk about China and, you know, outsourcing all manufacturing to China.

00:46:20.880 But there's also, you know, immigration that people have been very concerned about, particularly in this country for a long time.

00:46:25.780 And look, even as an immigrant, I understand that we've had a very large wave of immigration.

00:46:30.400 Right. So are people going to start to question, you know, the levels of immigration into our Western societies?

00:46:37.740 Are we going to start to talk about, well, do we need free trade?

00:46:41.120 Maybe we should just make everything ourselves, like all that kind of stuff.

00:46:44.340 Do you think there will be a market shift on those issues as well?

00:46:47.840 I suppose, guys, maybe the best way to look at all these big questions is whether or not there has been a fundamental change in attitudes or whether or not the pandemic simply accelerates trends that we already see.

00:47:03.280 Yeah. And those trends that we already see, as you said, are nationalism, protectionism, a sense of putting up the barriers.

00:47:15.140 But we certainly see those in the United Kingdom. And you don't see them to such a huge extent in the rest of Europe.

00:47:23.160 In fact, the most recent parliamentary elections have kind of seen a trancing of those forces.

00:47:29.480 But still, it's in the ether. You know, it's in the ether.

00:47:32.980 What I would like as a liberal and somebody who comes from a country that has had a sort of conversion to liberalism in later life, in our middle age, is that I know what nationalism is all about. 0.75

00:47:49.660 Irish people understand that nationalism can lead you up a ridiculous and very nasty and violent cul-de-sac.

00:47:57.640 So we know what it's like. 0.65

00:47:58.900 It's not a game for us.

00:47:59.940 It's not a sort of a, let's infantilise politics for a while and play with these little sort of smouldering embers and see what happens.

00:48:08.300 It's very dangerous.

00:48:10.580 But I do fear that the liberal Western order has been badly damaged by this virus and badly damaged by the economic downturn now and the long-term legacy of that, unfortunately.

00:48:23.700 And are you hopeful for the future, David, or do you think we're going to get into quite a tricky period post-COVID?

00:48:29.940 If we come back to where we started, Francis, if the policy response is radical now, and what you notice always in crisis is that what was radical becomes mainstream, what was mainstream becomes redundant.

00:48:46.680 okay so if we try and save our small business sector with the radical moves that I suggest

00:48:54.860 that we need I see the long-term implications being quite positive because I think we'll

00:48:59.340 actually come out of this quite quickly if on the other hand we let this go on for a while and we

00:49:03.800 follow COVID with austerity then I think all bets are off and I wouldn't be as optimistic

00:49:10.520 but I'm a great believer in that after having tried all other alternatives we will do the

00:49:16.520 right thing eventually well what a good uh good note to end the interview on david the last

00:49:21.780 question uh we'll ask you is the one we ask all our guests which is what is the one thing that

00:49:26.740 people aren't talking about that we really should be talking about as a society uh i i think that

00:49:32.080 the the the major change in all this in covet will be the change in people's perceptions of

00:49:37.940 what commuting is about what working is about um how our whole relationship with consuming

00:49:44.940 and consumerism.

00:49:45.740 If you look in, for example, the United States,

00:49:47.280 that online shopping went up by 30% in a month.

00:49:50.320 Of those people, this is food shopping, food routine.

00:49:53.560 Of those people, 50%, so half of them,

00:49:55.580 have never shopped for anything online before.

00:49:58.580 Now, this is a big change.

00:50:00.000 This is a massive change.

00:50:01.560 I think the way in which large companies

00:50:05.040 have been able to keep working

00:50:08.260 without any centralized function,

00:50:09.740 with people working from home,

00:50:11.060 profoundly changes the way in which we will be commuting.

00:50:13.980 I think it's now time to introduce things like road pricing for traffic, because traffic

00:50:21.320 is basically, road is real estate in Russia.

00:50:25.340 I wouldn't like to be in commercial property.

00:50:27.840 I think it's been profoundly overvalued.

00:50:29.600 I wouldn't like to be exposed there.

00:50:31.660 And so I think there's a lot of stuff that we're not actually talking, because we're

00:50:34.980 all talking about macroeconomic stuff and politics, but there's a lot of micro stuff

00:50:39.160 that will change profoundly as a result of this.

00:50:41.180 So I think it's quite interesting.

00:50:42.840 That's very interesting.

00:50:43.780 And who knows?

00:50:45.160 I mean, that's the one thing that my Eileen and I, my wife, we keep talking about is like,

00:50:49.100 what do you think some of these changes that have come in now with people shopping differently,

00:50:54.500 with people consuming less?

00:50:56.400 I mean, just in terms of our house, we've just found ourselves spending a lot less money

00:51:00.220 on stuff.

00:51:00.780 Yeah, us too.

00:51:01.920 We're not spending.

00:51:02.680 I think these changes are, you know, in a way, people demand permission to change their

00:51:11.260 behavior.

00:51:11.640 It's quite interesting if you look at psychology and whatever.

00:51:15.580 And COVID has given us permission to entertain a different way of living.

00:51:21.300 And I'm not sure that that is going to evaporate.

00:51:26.320 I think that that might have some significant legacy.

00:51:30.340 Fantastic, David.

00:51:31.000 Well, thank you so much for coming on Trigonometry.

00:51:33.540 For anyone who wants to check out your work, where do they go to follow you?

00:51:37.160 The best place is the David McWilliams podcast.

00:51:40.280 It's on iTunes and Spotify and all the usual, wherever you get your podcasts.

00:51:44.820 So it's the David McWilliams podcast.

00:51:47.200 A pleasure to have new listeners.

00:51:50.440 We'll send them all your way. Thanks, David.

00:51:52.640 Cool, guys. Take care.

00:52:10.280 Thank you.

TRIGGERnometry - May 06, 2020

David McWilliams：＂We Can Avoid a Great Depression＂

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript

TRIGGERnometry - May 06, 2020

David McWilliams： ＂We Can Avoid a Great Depression＂

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript

David McWilliams：＂We Can Avoid a Great Depression＂