Dan Tubb - The Roots of Brokenomics and Seeking a Way Out of the Debt Pit

Brokenomics is a word that describes the mess the world is currently in. Who better to discuss our present economic malaise than the presenter of LotusEaters Brokenomics, Dan Tubb. His background in the city gives him the understanding to unpack this issue. With the US hitting their debt ceiling (which is now over $30tn) as they do each year and most economies around the world running larger and larger deficits, Dan joins us to discuss how we got into this mess in the first place. Governments solution of simply printing more money seems to be be accelerating this global tailspin which the world economy is now in. Is there a way out of this mess and how would any solutions impact the general population. Tune in for Dan's expert analysis.

Dan Tubb spent 20 years as a Venture Capitalist & Asset Manager in the City before retiring in 2020 just in time to watch the world go completely mad. He was so enraged he started appearing on podcasts & radio to discuss western governments reckless actions including their economic self-destruction. Dan then joined LotusEaters as podcast host and for his own series Brokonomics which separates economic facts from the torrent of mainstream BS.

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TWITTER: https://twitter.com/Kingbingo_?s=20
LOTUSEATERS: https://lotuseaters.com/

US DEBT CLOCK: https://www.usdebtclock.org/

Interview recorded 11.5.23

*Special thanks to Bosch Fawstin for recording our intro/outro on this podcast.

Check out his art https://theboschfawstinstore.blogspot.com/ and follow him on GETTR https://gettr.com/user/BoschFawstin and Twitter https://twitter.com/TheBoschFawstin?s=20 

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Transcript

(Hearts of Oak)

Hello Hearts of Oak and welcome to another interview coming up in a moment with Dan Tubb.
Many of you will know him from Lotuseaters, he's been with them the last six months and does Broken Economics up to the 20th and I'd advise, recommend you all to go on that and watch those, it gives you great understanding. And this is not a topic we've touched on before and I realised it was essential that we do and Dan's experience in the city makes him perfect to unpack the economic mess that we are currently in. So we start looking at debt, we look at the discussions at the moment in the US on the debt ceiling, 31 trillion, and it's not just the US's problem, it's worldwide.
So he takes us around some other countries, discusses how we got into this problem, the different understanding and views I think on debt and money management across different generations and then he talks about solutions which could and maybe should be on the table to get us out of this. None of them palatable, none of them really appealing in a democratic system to voters but he talks about nonetheless what could be done to get us out and then we finish just on what he does to look after himself and take a path through the current mess. So taking responsibility and some things you can do personally for that. So a lot packed in. I know you will love listening to Dan as he looks at the mess we're in and also ends up with some of those possible solutions.

And today it is wonderful to have a regular on Lotuseaters podcast and host of Brokenomics on Lotuseaters, which is a word which describes a lot of what we face today.
And that is Dan Tubb. Dan, thank you for your time today.

(Dan Tubb)

Oh, no, it's an absolute pleasure. Thanks for inviting me.

Not at all. I really enjoyed watching. I think you're up to, what, 20, I think, on Brokenomics universal basic income, I think was the last one.

Yeah, it's been a good series. I wanted a platform to talk about some of this stuff.
And I've been working with Lotuseaters about six months now. And yeah, it's a wonderful professional set up and really enjoyed working with those guys.

Carl's done a phenomenal job over the last three years. I've been there a lot. But your background, you obviously spent 20 years venture capitalist in the city before hanging that up and then venturing into the world of media, of interviews and podcasts. And I get that gives you, that background gives you a, right and understanding talk about economics.

Yeah, it wasn't intentional. I basically meant to sort of step back more broadly and just sort of do the, you know, the odd thing here and there.
But then, of course, that was in 2019. And then, of course, we hit the pandemic in 2020, and I was just so outraged by this that I could not stay silent. And, of course, back in the early days there were only a few of us who were speaking out against it.
And I found that with my background, I was able to contribute something to the discussion, which perhaps some people were not bringing up, the more financial side of it. Although I talked about all of it, of course, it was also outrageous. And that then involved me in more and more interviews, radio, and of course, eventually to Lotuseaters, where I am now.

Well, maybe just we'll start on where we are currently, and I'll let you unpack it. At the moment, I think the current US mess, although it's not just in the US, with the debt ceiling negotiations.
And when I was looking back, I realized the debt ceiling was raised last by 2.5 trillion.
That was a year and a half ago, to a total of just over 30 trillion. And obviously, they're negotiating with it. And I guess they'll have to add another couple of trillion onto that, which they do each year. How on earth did the world get into such a mess whenever we are told one thing and governments seem to do something completely different.

Yeah, so I mean the debt, the 31 trillion, that's just the amount that they've already borrowed. They are committed to borrowing a significantly larger amount because the US has written into law that they will make certain expenditure on military, on social security, on medicaid, and if you add up all those, that debt that they are obligated to take on, you're well over 200 trillion at this point.
It is an extremely, truly extraordinary amount of money. Now, the 31 trillion is significant by itself because that's also about the same size as the US economy. So if you can think of the economy being about 30 trillion and the debt being about 30 trillion, it makes the maths easy for this next bit. The issue is which of those is going to grow faster. So if the economy is growing at say about 2% and it's very difficult to measure these days because the magic money tree has been turned on. So trying to figure out what is real growth and what is not is harder. But let's say the economy is growing at 2%. Well, the debt is now growing at 4%. So you can see that the debt is going to get larger than the economy. What that means is that the US, well it's not just the US, it's basically most of the Western world, they're in a debt spiral. What it means is the debt is going to get larger and larger every year and the servicing of that debt, so the amount that you're paying out just to cover your debt costs is going to go up all of the time. So let's bring this back to the UK, for example. In the UK, the biggest expenditure at the moment is the NHS. But debt expenditure is very close behind now. And it won't be that much longer before basically just servicing the debt. And of course, you're not getting anything for that. That's just paying off the monthly interest cost. That's going to overtake the NHS soon. And then our biggest expenditure is going to be something that we are getting absolutely nothing for.
So yeah, it's a complete mess, Peter.

You put up on one of your Twitter posts, which I found mesmerizing, was a website, I'll bring it up, which is US Debt Clock.
I find myself just being mesmerized by those figures going up.
But that's one side, that is the US.
And then, of course, you talked about the world.
And that's what's happening across the world.

So let's talk about that quickly while you've got it up.
Go for it. People can look at that. They see the US at the top there. And the key thing is you want that third column. So the ratio of the debt to the economy. And it's about 100% across most Western countries, although you get some like Japan, which are at 300%. But like I was saying, that's only the official debt. If you go back to the previous one now, so you can see the page on before, yeah, you can see that the sort of total debt up there in the top left-hand corner, then it breaks it down per citizen, so a total debt of quarter of a million dollars per citizen, and then right down in the bottom right-hand corner is all that other stuff that I was talking about, so the Medicaid and the social security and all the other sort of obligated spending that they've got, you look at that and it's well over half a million per citizen that is the debt obligation they've got to pay. So, you know, basically this has to break.
Shall I get into how we got into this? Because...

Please do! Please do!

So, as I start to get into this, I want to be, first of all, very clear that I'm not blaming anyone in particular, but I do have to talk about the generations. This is not to say that the, generation I'm going to talk about has done anything wrong, because I don't believe they they have, it's just that demographics are a key driver of this.
Okay, so we start our story back in 1950s, basically, early 1960s.
And the boomer generation came along and they were the largest generation the world has ever seen in proportional terms and also in absolute terms, they were also extremely large.
Now, they entered a, well, they were a very large generation entering a very small world.
And that had a couple of effects. One of the big effects was that they all started contributing to the economy.
They started working, they started producing. They all went out and bought a house, a car, a new suit, all those things.
And so the economy grew significantly over their time.
They also wanted to be generous towards their elders, which is a very understandable thing.
They wanted to take the existing provisions for pensions and welfare provisions that were available and the NHS, and they wanted to grow all of those.
And it is very easy when you've got a large generation being generous to a smaller population, which is a smaller population above them,
that's very easy to do. The problem is, is that now that large generation are on the receiving end of those benefits that were designed basically for a smaller population behind them.
And that's why we've got to the point now, whereas if you take the top items of expenditure, which is basically the NHS and pensions, you can see this cost and, you know, it's already extremely significant, but that is starting to grow even more significantly. So that's one factor.
And what it has led us to is basically the government, western governments, are now spending as if they are in a total war type situation, because governments have been in this situation before when they've been spending the type of levels that they've been spending now, but it's always been because they're in a total war situation. The thing with war, is that it ends eventually. When is the war on old age, on sickness and all of these other things, when is that ever going to end? It's not. So that's one factor. The other factor is that when the boomer generation came into the workforce, yes there was a lot of them so they grew the economy, but because there was a lot of them they were competing with each other for wages. So for the last 40 years, real wages have not increased. In fact, they never increased again after about the early 70s. So yes, wages went up every year. People are used to seeing their wages go up, but their wages have not gone up by more than the rate of inflation.
But assets have. So things like, you know, houses is the obvious example. The supply of new units never kept up, so asset prices have gone up significantly. So even though wages have not gone up, all of the asset prices have. And what's been happening over the last 40 years, as real wages have not been increasing, is people have been taking on additional debt in order to get that growth in lifestyle, or the additional generations have been taking on debt.
So you've got that massive expansion of also the private debt that comes along with it as well.
And then you've got a couple of other significant factors as well.
It wasn't just the boomer generation that were large and expanded.
Then, of course, in the 1990s, we brought China and India into the global economy, and that significantly expanded it.
We have increasingly, well, to the point where it is just absolute commonplace now, women have been brought into the workplace that perhaps they were, weren't in the earlier 70s or 60s. And now, of course, we've got the robots as well. So there's been that big expansion, of workers contributing. The millennial generation was also quite large.
So those wages haven't grown, but asset prices have, debt has and government spending has.
So we've now got ourselves into this completely unviable situation where, say the UK, the UK is spending about £1.30 for every £1 it raises in taxes.
Then you start to think about, okay, how are we going to get out of this?
And that's when you start to discover that actually none of the options for getting out of this work either.

Well, can I, because when you look back, you think of those in charge across the world who are causing these financial issues, the government's in charge there, baby boomers or Gen X, and they lived in a time, just on the edge of Gen X, but lived in a time where you had to use your money wisely.
You had to save.
You shouldn't have a high debt. So they grew up with that understanding of looking at money in a careful manner of balancing your expenditure and your income.
And yet they're the ones who have tried to change the rules, even though they know better.
And when I look at it politically, that kind of intrigues me and confuses me.

Yeah, so if you're looking at generational patterns, it was really the generation above that. It was the silent generation, the greatest generation who had that high saving ethos.
And they would have passed it on to a number of their children in the boomer generation.
But actually the experience of the boomer generation has been that debt is a good thing.
You've always wanted to take out debt over your lifetime. If you, in the 1970s, took out the biggest mortgage you possibly could and bought the biggest house you possibly could and then deferred the payment of that loan for as long as you could, you have done very well.
Because what's been happening is the value of that debt has been shrinking. Because of course, what governments have been needing to do and central banks have been needing to do is, because the sums don't add up, part of the solution has been to effectively print money.
To lower interest rates. Now, lowering interest rates is a significant factor on this. Again, for the last 40 years, interest rates have dwindled down. So, I don't know if anybody's going to remember this, but I'm going to throw it out there anyway. There's this charming little advert from late 80s, something like that. And it was this Arthur Daly character, and he's doing the hustle. He's getting out there. I think he's trying to sell barbecues off the back of a lorry or something like that. And in the end, he realizes it's easier just to go to the Halifax and put it in the liquid gold account and get 9.8% on his money.
Now we look at that today and think, wow, 9.8%. But you could get that by walking into a bank. And what you've noticed is over the last 40 years is the interest rates have just got lower and lower and lower and lower. So what does that do? Well, what it means is that if you have used debt over your lifetime, and the boomer generations were perfectly set to benefit from this, given the time period that we talked about, if you had a large debt, you could always roll that debt over the following year at a low interest rate than you did before.
You add on top of that, the expansion of the money supply and the people who have done the best out of the boomer generations are the ones who have basically abused debt.
So naturally, you know, the people who tend to end up in charge are the people who've performed very well in the system and their entire life experience has been, you don't need to worry about debt, debt is a good thing.
Let's use this. And then of course you've got the political angle of this as well.
It's very difficult to get elected without promising people more. And of course the voters they've gone along with this as well even if they think that they haven't. You know if you go back to say the 80s and you were voting for Reagan or Thatcher thinking that you were voting for the small state option? Well maybe you were voting for the small state option comparatively, but actually both of those politicians grew the size of the state significantly as well.
So the state has expanded, the money supply has expanded, when that money has been created it's been done at the nexus between government and central banks and the finance system, so the finance system has got ever larger. And the real value of your money has shrunk significantly every year. So that's why if you wanted to hold the value of any of your excess earnings, you wanted to put it into stocks, you wanted to put it into property. The worst thing you could have done is in 1975, you've done very well and you've saved up a thousand pounds and kept it in cash under the mattress. That would have been an absolute disaster because the real value of that today compared to what it would have been in the 1970s is ridiculous. So we have a system which has for many years rewarded debt creation, additional government spending, additional all, you know, expenditure and debt on all things, in politics, in business and finance.
And we've now flipped recently, where that is no longer the economic model, it no longer works. And that's why we're coming into this crisis period.

I, before going to some of the possible ways out of it, I watched a, I don't know if you had it on your Twitter, someone else, an interview Jeff Bezos did, founder of Amazon, and he was getting interviewed and they were talking about how Amazon didn't make any money, famously, didn't make any money until quite recently and Jeff Bezos thought well this was the norm this was this was a bit funny and that's how businesses work that you didn't have to make money for 20 odd years you could just keep putting it back and that understanding is completely alien to previous generations where you made sure you made a profit and you set that over you had a buffer zone now it's just actually you can spend way past your limit because know you can borrow from somewhere and the idea you're talking about in government I guess in countries is the same we see in business.

Yeah so certainly with say the government side of that, it has always been the case that you can go and win election by making promises.
Spending basically spending more than you take in on the revenue side on the taxation side and if you didn't do this it was it was kind of a foolish move not to do that because you wouldn't have got elected. And in fact I can't even think of a historical example of somebody who went out and offered to spend within their means and then ended up getting elected. It doesn't work for that.
But the thing is it wasn't even a problem because that debt that you added on, because the interest rates were coming down over that last 40 years, the cost of servicing that debt got lower. But also because you were printing so much money over this time period, the real value of that debt also fell.
You know, my parents, they bought a house in, I don't know when it was, early 80s maybe, and they took out a mortgage of 30 grand. And actually, the way they did it, they did it right, is they did an interest-only mortgage and they didn't pay it off until the end of the term.
But 30 grand in the early 80s was quite a lot of money. And, you know, whenever they came around to paying it off, you know, 2000s or something, because I think they extended it or something, I think the real value of that was significantly decreased.
So this has been the experience.
But now we've got a situation where global debt is about 400% of GDP.
Just the official debt is 100% of GDP for countries like the UK and the US.
And the problem is there isn't really a way out of it.
And people think, well, there must be a way out of it. And people always give certain solutions that they feel must work.
So so let's talk about those. You know, the first one is and this is the one that actually nobody talks about in any official capacity.
But you sometimes hear this is a version of the guy in the pub might say this is OK, you just write it off.
Well, there's a problem for that in the flip side of this debt is that it's somebody else's asset.
So you wipe out all of this debt and you've wiped out pensions.
Wiped out the basis of the financial system because that is all their collateral. All the banks, their collateral is this debt that they're holding. And you might think, okay, well, this financial system deserves to be wiped out and I'd agree with that. The problem is if you haven't got something to replace it with and you knock out the financial system, the farmer no longer has an incentive to supply food to the wholesalers, the wholesalers no longer have an incentive to supply the shops, you won't be able to buy energy, the whole thing stops and it would be a horrendous mess if we were to get into that without having something set up on the other side.
And the people running this system have no incentive to explore alternatives because they are doing extremely well out of this system.
So any alternative system is not even being given any time.
This is the reason why so many of us are starting to like Bitcoin, because it could offer that alternative.
If you want to, later, I'll come into why I say Bitcoin as opposed to gold.

Yeah, we'll end off on that, look at other options. But when you talk about wiping it out by defaulting, which maybe most people will know that from Argentina crisis, whatever that was, 10, 12 years ago, and what happened there.
And that was me the first time in many of our lifetimes that a second world country, I guess, had defaulted. It was normally basket case economies.
But what does, because on, I watched the interview that Trump did on CNN, and a lot of it's bravado, but he was asked about the debt ceiling, and he said, well, we just default. It might be bad for a little bit, we'll just default. And that's playing to his base, and that's bravado, and I get all that. But it was interesting that he said, well, either we do it now or we do it later.
Who cares? We may as well do it now. What are your thoughts on that?

It's difficult to know precisely how it would play out. If it was just that you stopped, if you didn't wipe out the debt, but you stopped paying the interest on top of it, which is more to Trump's comments, it's more the Argentinian situation.
But Argentina have got in a different position because whenever the Argentinian financial system collapses, which it does on a semi-regular basis, you know, they know what to do.
They go to their top drawer, they pull out their dollars, and they get on with life.
It's like, oh, okay, it's collapsed again, let's go and grab the dollars, and they just use dollars for a while.
Because what's been happening is whenever they've defaulted, it's been, you know, they have been an island of chaos in a basically a global sea of stability.
If the Western financial system collapses, it flips the other way.
Now it's gonna be pockets of stability because there are a few countries that have, you know, low debt levels, viable currencies, but not many of them.
And it's gonna be most of the world that's going to be in this sort of chaos situation.
You know, if the dollar defaults, they're not going to go to the top draw and pull out their Argentinian pesos and start using those.
They could attempt to use gold and in time, perhaps Bitcoin will be ready for that.
But the but the financial rails to make that work aren't there.
So default, that's that's why people never talk about it, especially the people in power, because they don't want to, because the system is set up very well for them.
And actually, your audience might think that they want that, but you wouldn't want to be living through that transition when there isn't an alternative already set up ready to go.
So that's default.

Yes, as much as I would like to burn to the ground, I get that.
They also do say that, what, if I owe you 100 pounds, that's my problem, but if I owe you a million, then that's your problem.
And obviously, if the US did not pay, that would cause chaos.
But obviously, the institutions that have lent money and keep lending money, then they're the ones that suffer. but I guess that has a ripple effect throughout the whole world.

Yeah, I mean, it would, once you got to the other side of it, and I don't know how messy it would be and how disruptive and how damaging it would be, but once you got to the other side of it, it'd be very good for younger people who are supplying their labour, people who are productive in the here and now, but people who have been putting away their excess production for many years, thinking that they've got assets that they can get a yield from later in life, those white guys would end up getting wiped out so you can see why the boomer generation doesn't want it.
You can also see why the millennial generation doesn't want it, because they're going to have mum and dad and great-uncle Peter and everybody else coming to live with them.
It would be very much a sort of, you know, the sort of Southeast Asian type family situations, getting back to that. And actually, nobody should want it unless you've got something set up on the other side. So default is very difficult to do. Of course, they are doing a slow default, which is they are devaluing the money. So if you own a whole load of government bonds, you're finding that actually the real value of those is shrinking all the time.
People sort of know that, but because it's like 5% or 10% a year, they would rather lose 5% where they know they're going to lose 5% rather than potentially getting wiped out on alternative.

Well, that's defaulting, walking away from your debt and not paying it. What are your other thoughts that may be on the table as possible ways out or things that governments could consider?

Yeah. So the next one that a lot of people go to, predominantly people on the left, is, okay, let's just tax the rich more. If only there was enough of them. There isn't. And I've done the sums on this, and to make it real, to make it tangible, I just said, okay, let's take the Times rich list. So the Times produce an annual thousand rich list, and they go into lots of detail on the on the top 250, and I said, let's just take all of it from them.
And let's say you did that. You wiped out the top.
Now, bear in mind, I don't think you'd actually be able to do it, because very rich people are not keeping all of their money in the local bank account where you can just turn up and say to the bank manager, hand it over.
It's widely spread all over the world, and they design it in such a way that it is very difficult to do this.
But assuming you could just take all of the money the Times Rich List, you'd be able to run the government for about seven months.
It's not actually that much money. And that's assuming that you could get all of it.
So if you wanted to try, because the debt is just so large, the governmental debt is so large at this point. So you would end up having to go down to people who you would imagine who don't think of themselves as rich.
So basically you, me, everybody else watching this as well, it would be full confiscation of assets all the way down the chain in order to try and pay off this level of debt.
So nice idea, but it doesn't work. Plus, of course, as soon as you've done it, you basically wiped out the profit incentive for everybody everywhere, because they know as soon as they generate something, it's going to be taken from them.
So you're sort of in a Soviet system.
So nice idea, lefties, but it's just not viable when you look at the maths, when you look at the amount of rich people there.
Plus, of course, let's say you were a politician who started advocating that.
You wouldn't get anywhere near the seat of power. You would be suicided into the sun before you got anywhere near that sort of level of power.
So wealth confiscation doesn't work. Okay, let's turn to what the right prefer, which is cutting spending.
Okay, let's say you wanted in the UK context, cause I know the numbers better there.
Let's say you wanted to clear out this debt over the next 20 years.
So a reasonable pace, but you're not gonna go too fast. You're just going to flip it from a deficit every year to a surplus that's sufficient to pay this off over 20 years.
What does that look like?
You would have to cut all government spending by, I think it's about 37%.
But remember that I said before that debt interest is a large element of that.
You're not getting anything for that. And actually, if you look at the budgets of the NHS, of pensions, of schools, and all the rest of it, A lot of that is non-cash items depreciation and so on.
So actually what we're talking about is a 50% reduction to all government spending, and all of it, not just not one, not the top elements, all of it.
So that would mean cutting the NHS in half, cutting the school system in half, pensions in half, military in half, all of it in half.
Now, bear in mind that in my lifetime, I have never seen a government get elected that did not go into an election promising a real terms increase in the NHS, what are the prospects of somebody getting themselves elected saying, oh yeah, I'm going to cut the NHS in half and schools and everything else?
So even though cutting the spending is actually probably the right solution, it's not going to happen until the government is absolutely forced to do it and the nation is forced to do it. So that doesn't get you there either.
So we've knocked out three options. The next option is, okay, well, let's grow the economy then.
And this is where I think Liz Truss had it right.
It didn't help that she was as smart as a chocolate bar. If she had a little bit more brains and was a little bit more political savvy, you know, maybe she could have made a lot more progress. But her instincts were basically right.
Even though her budget didn't actually do that because her budget was increasing spending because she didn't talk about the cuts on the other side.
But let's stick with the theme of we're going to grow our way out of this.
Okay, we've got a problem. I talked earlier about the growth in the debt.
So the debt is growing about 4% or 5% a year at the moment. So if you want to grow yourself out of the situation, it's easy.
You just need to grow the economy larger than about 4% or 5% a year.
In fact, you sort of want it up at sort of 6%, 7%, 8%. The UK manages normally about 1.5% to 2%.
So the level of growth required is well beyond the level that we are capable of.
And add on to that, that the growth that we have achieved in our best years before have not been the level of taxation that we need in order to continue to pay out on NHS and pensions and Social Security and all those other big ticket items that we've got.
So taxes are higher, taxes keep getting higher and taxes are gonna continue to get a lot higher.
In addition to that, regulation, that's gonna be a big factor as well.
Politicians, they don't like to sit still, they like to regulate, they like to make additional rules, which in their minds will add consumer protections.
but what it's really doing is it's giving jobs for a larger army of bureaucrats and it's slowing down that wealth creation process. Yes, it smooths out some fraud and bad actors on the way, but the bigger effect is it really clamps down on economic growth. So the level of growth that we would need to get out of this situation is nowhere near the level that we can actually do. I do have one proviso on that though.
Maybe some of the technologies coming down the track could do that.
And it's really early, I think, to say whether that will be the case, but we have got a technology revolution going on at the moment in things like AI and robotics.
And, you know, possibly there's a couple of interesting scenarios that come out of that.
You know, one is the machines take over and they get rid of us all. That could happen.
The other one is that it unleashes a productivity boon that drastically increases the growth rate.
So maybe it's possible, but that, it starts to feel a bit like fantasy thinking when I'm talking like that, because I'm sort of saying the only Hail Mary that gets us out of this is a potential future situation, which we can sort of imagine in our minds might come true.
And maybe it does, but that seems to be the solution they're going for.
They're just hoping that a productivity miracle comes along.
And even though we can imagine it, it feels pretty risky to be putting all our eggs in that basket.
But that's what we're doing.

Well, at the moment where we are and where the whole economy, world economy, balanced on a knife edge and been hit by headwinds, just in these last 23 years with the crash in 2008 and then with Covid.
Those are two massive hits. And of course, debt, the government can take on debt only because of the rates it borrows it at.
So when interest rates are low, when the ability to borrow money, when money is cheap, then they can keep doing that.
But you talked about parents buying a house in the 80s and whenever interest rates were 15 percent in the 80s, all it takes is a change in the economic circumstances. All it takes is a disaster somewhere.
And then the whole thing tips over. Is that a kind of a fair assessment?

Yeah. So, I did allude to this earlier, basically, the economic model has shifted. So for a long time.
Well, basically forever until the early 2000s, the economic formula, and if I'm gonna really oversimplify it, I will boil it down to more.
Okay, so you want more workers, you want more factories, you want more production lines, you want more shops.
Let me give you a pertinent example of the precise inflection point that I'm talking about.
Blockbuster videos.
So the recipe for success for Blockbuster videos was open another store, get another line of VHS or DVDs, get another employee, more, more, more, more, more.
And then what happened is technology changed that, the digitization of information.
Because Netflix came along, and they reduced the marginal cost of distribution for a video down to zero. And all of a sudden, Blockbusters went from, What was it, maybe 3,000 stores, 80,000 employees, something like that.
All of those stores went from being an asset to being a liability, because all of a sudden you didn't need that anymore.
And that's what's been happening in the digitization process that started in, say early 2000s, and has been accelerating every year ever since.
Where the economic model is no longer more, it's more for less, it's reducing the costs.
And that's what digitization technology does for you.
But we've built a financial system that works on more. So this system that I've been describing over the last 40 years or so, and I talk about this financial system and I'm saying it is fundamentally flawed, it would be very sensible for somebody in their 50s or 60s to turn around to me and say, well, look, it worked over my lifetime. I went out and I got a pay rise every year. I work for a company that did more every year. I took on more debt. So why shouldn't it work anymore? And it is because of that technological change is starting to push massive deflation. So what do I mean by massive deflation? Do you remember going to get photos developed?
You buy a reel of film, put it in your camera, you take your shots, and you pay for for the reel of a film, you pay for the camera, you pay for the processing, you pay for the picture album that goes behind it.
And these days, everybody just uses their phone. The cost of that thing is basically collapsed down to zero for taking pictures because it's just all bundled into your phone.
That's gonna be true for apps on your phone. Like when was the last time you bought a calculator?
Again, it's just on your phone. There are so many things now that we do not pay for anymore.
And from the economic, if you're looking at it as an economist, it looks like the economy's getting smaller.
Because nobody's paying for photos anymore. Nobody's buying calculators anymore.
All of these things are disappearing from an economic model that was set up assuming that next year there will be a need for more of everything.
And actually it's flipped the other way. It's all deflation these days. It's all about getting more for less.
So you try and combine an economic system that must always have more and therefore can accommodate monetary expansion.
So you can print money and you can basically get away with it under the old economic system.
You can't get away with it under the new system.
So what happens if you take the old economic model, which is more printing money, and you apply it to the new economy, which is digitization and deflation?
But what happens is you get the inflation manifests in a cost of living reduction.
So in a quality of living reduction, I should say, sorry. So that's why you're seeing your fuel bill shoot up as much as it is.
You're seeing the costs of the shop going up significantly because that expansion of the money supply is manifesting itself as basically your wages shrinking, what you can buy with them.
But the value of all those real things are just being re-nominated by the amount of currency units that are out there.
So we got us into this situation where the only tools that policy makers are willing to consider, to allow themselves, it's more and more money printing. At the same time, we've got all these different... And you think what's going to happen next with AI and robotics? AI and robotics is already taking over so many things. You may not have noticed it personally, if you're living in in the West, but if you are a Filipino call centre worker, you've noticed the impact of AI already.
And now with the advances that we've seen over the course of the last year, say the image creation, if you've seen some of the image creation that AI is capable of doing now, it looks like photos.
And I'm hearing this all the time now from small businesses, like game studios, for example, they just don't need as many graphic designers as they do.
ChatGPT is fascinating because, you know, there are iterations of that that are coming out.
So for example, I dumped a fairly large set of data into it the other day and said, tell me the most interesting trends from this data.
And within a few seconds, it did what would have taken me at least a day to pass out of that data.
You've got the big accountancy firms, the big consultancy firms, looking at effectively freezing all new hires while they investigate how they can incorporate this.
And this is before robotics really becomes a thing. So a lot of people are working on self-driving cars.
And some people say, oh, no, it's never going to happen. But we used to say that about some of the AI stuff until recently.
But actually, today, it is possible to get into a Tesla and to go from your home to your office without any interventions. Now you do need to be there ready because it's not that technology isn't quite ready yet. You need to be ready to take over but plenty of people do have journeys where they don't need to intervene at all from home to office. It does the entire journey. When that technology is reliable enough it's going to displace drivers. Does that matter? Well yeah because driver is the largest job category for unskilled males across the entire world. So you've got all of these massive deflationary trends coming while governments are panicking and thinking, what do we do? We haven't got enough money, we can't cut spending, because that would mean that we get kicked out of the next election, let's just hit the print button.
So, people are going to have to get use to a lot of inflation and a lot of tax over the coming 10 years until something fundamentally breaks and we are forced to adopt a new system.

Well, I want to ask you about the US or what your thoughts are, because obviously the US has been the engine of the world economy as a superpower.
Now we're seeing their, I guess, dependence on other countries increase and less self-dependent, certainly as they've abandoned under Biden their energy policy.
But then you've got the whole petrodollar with a lot of push for pricing commodities in non-US dollars.
You got the BRICS push for currency, and then you've got the supply chain, I guess, in chaos.
Where we are now, is it because of the US's fall from that position?
Is it a failure of capitalism? Is it globalization failing?
I mean, there are a lot of parts, but what are your thoughts on that?

Well, I think I think it's all of those parts. But certainly the the current U.S.
regime have have been dealt a set of cards that weren't that great and played them extraordinarily badly.
And I am honestly impressed by by what Biden has managed to do over his time.
I think if I was given the job of president and I was committed to destroying the U.S.
In the shortest possible time period, I really doubt that I could have done a better job than what Joe Biden has done. So the first thing he's done is he made domestic energy far more expensive than it needs to be. You really don't want to mess with energy. Let's talk about an economy very quickly. What is an economy? It is energy and agriculture. And then on top of that, you build whatever goods and services that come on top. Now, goods and services, you can swap them around all day long. If you're producing washing machines and nobody wants to buy washing machines, you can pivot over to hair dryers. If you're doing services, if you're doing accountancy and nobody wants accountancy anymore, you can pivot over to haircuts. You know, whatever it is, that layer is malleable. Energy and agriculture are the foundation tier of an economy and we have a political class these days which is dedicated to, and for example, this is Joe Biden's stated policy, he wants to to make energy expensive. He actually says that. Energy is the whole reason why we're doing this, why your audience do whatever they do as opposed to subsistence farming.
It's because we have energy. So it was ludicrous to declare a war on energy, but that is what politicians have decided to do. Now, I'm not necessarily against energy technology long term. Long term, the idea of having energy supplies which have a marginal cost of zero is very attractive.
The problem is you could only make that transition at a speed that is naturally possible.
I'll very quickly explain what I mean on that. For example, I talked about some of the big interesting technology trends that are coming at the moment. AI and robotics are one. Energy technology is another. 3D printing is another. Let's say that we just decided that we were going to artificially shut down all our factories and replace it with all 3D printing. It would be absurd. You can understand how absurd that would be. Now, long term, the possibilities of large-scale 3D printing is remarkable what it could do, but you have to make that transition at the rate that technology is ready. Whereas we picked another one, we picked energy, and we said we're going to make this transition far faster than the technology allows, before the mineral resources allow. The energy storage simply isn't there. If you did it at a natural pace, I wouldn't have a problem with it. If you've got a factory in southern Italy and you produce mainly during the day and you've got a large roof space, it's a simple return on investment calculation. You think, OK, well, what does it cost me to stick solar panels up there? And what does it knock off my energy bill? And it's there when I need it. Fine. I've got a problem with that. But trying to convert these economies at this sort of breakneck speed, that simply doesn't work. OK. So Biden intact energy, he also undermined the dollar. The dollar has been the global reserve since Bretton Woods, since basically the end of the Second World War. The thing with the war is America ended up with all of the gold, partly because people sent it over there for safekeeping and partly because there was still a functional economy. At the end of the war, they quite liked having all of this gold and they said, I tell you what, instead of giving the gold back, why don't we just make
Dollars as good as gold, and you can use dollars instead. They managed that for about 20 years, and then they defaulted on it with Nixon when they broke the link between gold and dollars, but they kind of managed to do it in a way that worked, that people were still happy with the dollars. And they did that through the creation of what you just talked about there, which is a petrodollar. They were a large energy producer, and they went to an even larger energy producer, which is the Saudis, and said, we will give you security guarantees. Basically, we'll make sure that the House of Saud is never overthrown either domestically or by foreign powers, so we will give you military support. In return, you price everything in dollars.
All your energy in dollars. And then the invitation to the rest of the world is, would you like to follow suit or would you like to be invaded? And a few of them chose to be invaded, and they got invaded, and their president ended up dying in a rather messy way on a handheld camera somewhere, and the rest of them went along with it.
And then you get the Biden government that comes in and they escalate a conflict with Russia.
And they did something that we didn't even do during the Second World War, which was seize their foreign reserves. We didn't even do that against the Germans in the Second World War, seize their foreign reserves, but they did it against Russia because they've decided they're going to use the dollar as a weapon. Now that seems very clever to the to the policy wonks in Washington but it sends a signal to the rest of the world and the signal is, what if one day I disagree with the US about something? What if I don't want to go along with whatever their current thing is? And so all of a sudden you've got well basically everybody who who isn't in the, you know who I mean, the, what they call the international community, which is basically Western Europe, the English speaking world, you know, Canada, New Zealand, you know, those countries, those countries that really, that take their political lead from the US.
Everybody else is now thinking, we need to find a way off of this.
You've got the Chinese agreeing a deal with the Saudis to buy oil in, was it Yuan?
You've got India having the same conversations, you've got South American countries having the same conversation. Everybody's thinking, get me out of the dollar because I don't want it to be turned against me as a weapon at some future point.
And if I'm entirely reliant on it, that's a real big problem.
So he did that as well.
Well, I mean, there's so many things with Biden. I mean, I could talk, I'll take up the rest of the time.
So I don't wanna do that. But very quickly, I mentioned Afghanistan as well.
That whole process that I described with the petrodollar, which is you will use dollars or you will get invaded, only works if there is a credible threat behind it.
And when you've got people falling off planes while they're hastily basically getting chased out of Afghanistan by a bunch of guys in sandals, it sends the wrong message.
So I won't take up any more time on Biden, But yeah, he has been spectacularly incompetent on every front.

Oh, yeah. I just want to finish just for a few minutes, just to bring us in just the end.
And I know what you do and what your thoughts are, actually, you look after yourself.
That's a whole topping itself.
But just to touch on for a few minutes, I know you've talked about gold, Bitcoin, property.
Can we just finish off just why those are positives?

Yeah, well basically because we have now got into a global financial system that can only keep itself running on fumes, it needs to print money. So what you want are assets that can't be printed, and there's a fairly short list of them. It's things like commodities, it's, well, certainly industrial commodities like metals and whatever else.
There are agricultural commodities, but they tend to decay over time. And it's not practical to store. You're not going to put all your wealth into copper and have a whole bunch of it delivered to your house, are you, or wheat or whatever. So you tend to want to go for things like property, but property is super easy to tax. And we know that governments are going to be hyper-incentivized to tax everybody as much as they possibly can. Taxes are going to go way higher and property is an easy victim when it comes to that.
So then it turns you to the monetary resources, which is going to be gold. Now I like gold, I hold gold. It's very difficult to run a financial system on gold these days. And the reason is because obviously you're not going to be handing over gold coins and silver coins to people when you pay them in the shop. So it is going to have to be a financial system which is based on gold, which means that somebody else somewhere is holding it for you.
So the whole logic of gold leads you back to centralization.
And typically, the way gold has been done when it's been used as a monetary asset before, is it basically all ends up getting stored in two places, New York and London.
And that's because if you take it anywhere else, because gold is so easy to, say, gold bars, it's so easy to drill into them and put tungsten rods inside, that the moment you take it out of the most high trust environments, you basically then need to do an expensive reassay process on it to check where it is. So the whole logic of gold is centralisation, except it's not going to be New York and London that's holding it in the future because everybody's going to want to hold their own. The Chinese aren't going to want to hold theirs somewhere else, they're going to want hold their own. And then you have to trust everybody.
So, I mean, if would you trust the Americans when they tell you how much gold they have, or the Chinese or the Russians or Brazil? You know, are you going to trust these places when they tell you how much? So, so gold, I love the idea and I think it's going to benefit and I hold it myself. But when you really get into the nuts and bolts of it, it cannot function in an economy like the one we've got today. And then you start to go down the rabbit hole on Bitcoin. And I was very sceptical at first, and I kept on looking at it, and I kept on realizing more and more that actually this could be the solution. Now, it doesn't mean it will be the solution, because governments are heavily incentivized not to use it, because there is no central control. There's no court office that you can send a cease and and assist notice too. It is a protocol. What do I mean by protocol? Very important distinction between a protocol and service. Email is a protocol. Twitter is a service. You can be booted off Twitter. You can't be booted off email because it's a protocol and you can set up your own server in your house if you want to. You can go to another property. It's very easy, but services are centralised and they can't be.
So Bitcoin is now at about 300 million users, and it's growing twice as fast as the previous fastest technological big grow, which was the internet.
So Bitcoin now has about as many users as the internet had in 1997.
And over the next 10 years, the internet went on to revolutionize everything.
And I think Bitcoin has the possibility of doing the same thing.
So I don't know that it's going to be the solution.
All I'm saying is that I am yet, and I have looked at this a very great deal, I'm yet to see a reason why it can't be the solution other than adoption, which governments will try and stop people.
But how successful were the record companies in stopping kids from downloading albums online?
Not in the slightest.
If Bitcoin was gonna be killed, it should have been killed already.
And it's still thriving. So how do you protect yourself? Have stuff that can't be printed.
And I like property, I do like gold, but most of all, I probably like Bitcoin as a solution here.

Well, Dan, thank you so much for joining us.
Obviously, the viewers can find you on Brokenomics on Lotuseaters, which is probably one of the best reasons people should get a subscription to Lotus Eaters.
But thank you so much for coming on.

No, it's been an absolute pleasure, really enjoyed it.

And we'll have you on again. A lot of those things to unpack at the end, We didn't get time, but it'll be great to have you on again to unpack some of those three commodities you ended with.

Yeah, absolutely. Really appreciate it. Thank you.