 mysw Llywodraeth, mysw Llywodraethôl, mysw Leifwyr, mysw Llywodraeth, mysw Education, mysw Llywodraeth a gweithaf. Felly mae'r rhai wneud o b чувствu, ac mae'n arwain i gynnwys yn mysw Llywodraeth, ond byddwyd yn lle sitting gyda hwn. Nw ydych chi'n ei ffordd o adeilistig, ond mynd i'n mynd i ddim yn y ffrifn i gyd i'r byw am y cyd-degwyd. A wedi'i gwneud, y mynd i'n mynd i'n gwybod ymlaen i'ch bod yn gweithio'r rhywbeth. A dyna'n mynd i'n ei wneud yn ymlaen. Mae'r pandemig wedi bod yn y lles charged. Yn rof Johnson, Y Prif Weinidol Yng Nesaf o'r Gweithfyrdd Newydd Ymlaen. Yn y fyddwyd wedi angen, ymwneud yn An Petyffor. Fy enw i'r Unig Brifedig neu oeddwn i'r Afriwyr, sy'n meddwl o ystod o'i ffantafolwyr, a'r ffafodd dda i'r hynny i'r ddiaglau ym 2000. Fy enw i'r cyfrifolwyr gwheithio'r dygnosus o'r hynny i'r ddweud gyffinantau Ym Ysgrifennu. A'r ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud i'r o'r prosiect ar y dyfodol yma, yw'r grŵn yng Nghyrrydd. Yn ymlaen yma, yma ydych chi'n gweld o'r llwyddech chi'n gyffredinol, yn gweithio, yn ymddir yma, yn ymdill yma yma. Yn y llwyddech chi'n gweithio'r bookau, yma, yng Nghyrch Gŵr, yw ymdill yma, ymddir i'r cyffredinol yma, ymdill yma ymdill yma, i'w cysylltu'r llwyffydd i unibyn. Yn gyfnodd ar y bwysig i'w gweinio'r yma? Yn gyfnodd yn ychydig. Rwy'n yma i gweithio ar y cysylltu. Mae amser i ymddangos, yn fawr yn gweithio'r llwyffydd yn y llwyffydd yn ei wneud hynny, rydyn ni'n fawr oedd y gallwch yn ddweud. Felly mae'n gweithio'i llwyffydd, ac mae'n gweithio'r llwyffydd y ddim, yw'r amser yn ddweud. Ond yna'r ysgrifennu cyfnodd. Anybody else? Has that inspired you to write this book in this time window? I think it was that I had seen what had happened. We wrote the original report back in 2007-8. It was a battle to get that written because it was a battle between the environment's in our group and the macroeconomists s ymy groupe to get ourselves to work together to produce the report. Mae'r anithoedd yn gweithio ddod yn ymddangos fel AOC a'r ddwyfnodau ddwyfnodau yn ymddangos. Dydyn nhw'n credu bod yn gallu meddwl. Rwy'n dweud y ddechrau'n meddwl, yn ymddangos i ddweud y technocratig sydd yw'r cyffredinol ymddangos cyfnodau ac yn dweud am y mynd i gyda'r ysgrifennu, ond rwy'n meddwl arall, bod wefyd yn enw'r cyffredinol, ond wefyd yn eich cyffredinol ymddangos cyfredinol, a ydy'r mewn cyfnodau gyda'r ecosystem. A hyd yn y bwysig yn y gallu mynd i gyda'r economau y bydd yn ystod i ddweud alltwyr ymlaen y gwaith geisio y cyfnodau fromynol, ychydig yn ddefnyddio. Y dyfodol y gallwn y bydd yn ddigonio i'r cydnod y cydnod o ffynol iawn o'r mewn economau. Mae'n gwybod nid o'r cydnod o'r cydnod oedd yn ystod i'r hynny. Ond ymlaen o'r cydnod, mae'n gwaith yn ddych chi'n ddau er mwyn i'r mynd i'r ffordd, y ffordd, y mynd i'r ffordd, y ffordd, y ffordd. Dyma'r cychwyn ymlaen i'r hyn o'r ffordd, mae'r cyfnod yw'r hynod yma, mae'r cyffredig yw'r cyffredig yw'r cyffredig a'r gyfnodol, ychydig o'r cyffredig yw'r cyffredig, ac mae'n gweithio'r cyffredig, os ydych chi'n fwylo. I have to say that I have seen that in action before. When we began the campaign Jubilee 2000, which was for the cancellation of the sovereign debts of 30 countries or so, people said to me, well you know, people didn't understand what it was about, didn't understand the relationship between international creditors and sovereign debtors, but we found it wasn't really hard to explain. ond roedd yn anodd i gael gweld i'r broses iawn o'n dyn nhw'n un o'n feddyl. Os fe'i giffaint, mae'r wych wedi newydd, bydd y gallwn ni'n unrhaid bod ynddo i chi'ch gofyn rydych yn yr uniaid hir y peth. Onig, wedi ch pawb yn anodd, yn y gwirionedd y Cymru, ond mae gyda Llywodraeth benthau ar gyfer y tectnologi of climate transformation to finance and the incentive structures and I did sense in your writing and in some of your references related to Carl Poliani and others that you think it's important that the which am I call unbridled free market financial system be channeled in a constructive direction or structurally changed quite significantly can you can you tell us a little bit about why you feel that and what you would do in that ring in that realm. Gosh rub so it takes us back to the nature of money which I think is really really understood and and credit as a kind of spigot which we can turn on and if we turn it on in a way which is unregulated which is unmanaged we can spew out enormous quantities of credit which become debt and if that credit is aimed at consumption if it's aimed at I don't know extraction of fossil fuels or it's aimed at increasing our ability to go shopping then of course there are going to be greenhouse gas emissions come from that and so what I want to do is to draw the line between the spigot of credit creation and the price of that credit which is the rate of interest essentially and the relationship between that and finance and then you know the build up of of debts both sovereign and private and corporate debts but ultimately the build up of emissions and and I always tell the story of you know my my children leaving school and going to university and suddenly having thrust in their hands credit cards before they had any source of income but simply because they were going to university the banks were in there and giving them credit cards and inviting them to borrow and to spend without any income and of course what they wanted to spend it on wasn't on more books for university but on going on you know foreign holidays in the university breaks so so it was this it's this disconnect between the creation of credit and our ability to repay and and there are limits to our ability to repay and there are ecological as well as economic limits to our ability to repay and and I think that's really the important point to make now under today's free market so-called free market it's extraordinarily it's extraordinary how dependent the free market now is on the state and in particular on central banks but the ideology of free markets is that there should be no management of the credit creation process that actually we should trust the the invisible hand to allocate resources efficiently well of course it turns out that the invisible hand can't allocate resources efficiently so there's much about the theory of of money and finance which is really flawed and which results in so for me the challenge is to help ecologists and environmentalists to understand those connections and not to think that you know economics belongs in a separate side and for economists to understand that actually their theories are leading to the kind of unsustainable emissions that we have today well like you mentioned the credit we'll call an acceleration of credit can increase the rate of pollution and carbon burning the other dimension which economists often call externalities or public goods is that when you're financing something and some of the benefit comes from protecting the common good through protecting the environment that may not bear the financial return that a private transaction does so you can do reckless things and be more credit worthy than if you're actually doing wholesome things and it's really dependent upon as you described how you frame what the credit allocation process yeah is looks like you mentioned things like i often called the bailouts of 2008 9 the mother of all moral hazards because it foments believing that you can be too big to fail you can gain market share because nobody thinks you'll default but smaller institutions will and you can lend even more aggressively because somebody will clean it up for you a and so we have that that's just in that container but when we meld this with climate yeah the nature of the social return versus the private return becomes another we might call front row consideration absolutely and um you know i mean it wasn't just the bailout of 2007 8 it was the bailout of march 2020 you know the fed bailed out of a banking system and so you know capitalism has evolved rob it's evolved beyond what we think of it as you know we used to think of it as the the production of commodities in the trade trade in commodities in goods and services well now capitalism has become something quite different because by by allowing you know the credit creation process the financial system to be detached if you like from regulatory oversight in particular democratic regulatory oversight we've allowed capitalism to involve to evolve into this thing which it is now we're actually it is is mainly concerned with and and susam k cell is really good on this uh is it's not concerned with competition within countries it's it's concerned with competitiveness global competitiveness and global competitiveness not in goods and services but in intangibles in things like you know um intellectual property or um you know and financial services and this is and these are all rent seeking activities so and what's striking to me is that economists allow this to happen or agree with this and and indeed are responsible for this particular framework that we have today and and what it's resulting in is the failure of capitalism to create and produce new assets essentially but actually to feed off existing assets so we see you know capital wanting to invest for example in London property or New York property or in an old Victorian buildings in London which have become extraordinarily valuable and extracting rent from those old assets rather than doing what we all thought entrepreneurial capitalism was about which is to create new assets and we need capitalism now to create the kind of assets we need to tackle the climate climate breakdown and biodiversity loss um and capitalism is not fit for that anymore so for the whole financialization and the whole domination of the of the economy by or by a if you like by private authority you know with private players deciding on our futures instead of public authority um you know we're we're in a situation where all that capitalism wants to do is to effortlessly effortlessly extract rent from existing assets and not create new assets so you know you know it's contradicting in it it's contradictory in itself if you like yeah I remember in my reading uh of British economist I ran a gentleman named Fred Hirsh and he talked about positional goods more recently a Dare Turner when he was a senior fellow at Inet wrote a book called Between Debt and the Devil where he underscored exactly the kind of things you're talking about which is you have collateral based lending for real estate yeah exploding and we have central banks and bailouts and everything to support that and the myth was as I think you alluded to what we were really doing was creating capital formation for new assets which we might call enhanced productivity but what we were doing was taking old assets and revaluing them and creating wealth effects in what Fred Hirsh called positional goods and uh so is this system if you will producing the kind of outcomes that warrant the kind of guarantees that have been granted and Dare was saying I think in agreement with you that there's quite a contradiction there absolutely and you know the other contradiction it I mean for me it may not be a contradiction but the other challenge is that it's anti-democratic essentially so so the state has become as others have argued a collateral factory you know the state is creating assets i.e debt sovereign debt and the private sector can't get enough of that you know and that's why we we see you know um the prices of uh of bonds rising the yields falling as dramatically as they happen and yet while the state is a collateral factory you know it's simultaneously attacked for creating the debt which becomes so such vital collateral for the private finance sector you know I mean while the private finance sector might value an asset like London property there is nothing as safe as as as bridge debt a sovereign British debt or or of course US debt um for the uh as for collateral for the purpose as you rightly argue of of obtaining additional wealth and so these these contradictions within capitalism are extraordinary and and it brings me back to you know to the old taxpayer frankly I would if I was to build a movement now or tried to I'm too old but I would want to build a movement of taxpayers and call that call it the taxpayers alliance and say we are demanding to know why you know you are using our assets um you know the the collateral created by the state and backed up by taxpayers and the value of the collateral is entirely dependent on the fact that we pay our taxes every year into the treasury which gives the treasury and the federal reserve the power that it has to create liquidity well then what are the terms and conditions of that and there are no terms and conditions at the moment you know wall street can get bailed out by the federal reserve um every time it messes up or every time there's a shock and and then the reason why wall street has consolidated itself if you like and expanded its borrowing since both 2007 9 and 2020 and you know the the amount of wealth generated through the pandemic is quite extraordinary is because it was able to draw on these these bailouts from the federal reserve from the taxpayer without terms and conditions and and I find that I think that's what I want to wake up um you know people to because really it's it's our taxes and our money and our hard work and the fact that we're employed and able to pay taxes that is actually upholding wall street to put it very crudely and yet wall street treats treats the state with effectively with content in mind yeah well in the united states there's a great deal of concern about the role of money in politics where in essence what what I call the commodification of social design and enforcement becomes essentially where you might say a sector becomes the architect of how it's regulated and how it's subsidized and the politicians need to which you might call heed their demands in order to get the war chest to get reelected and uh so these these are very complicated things unless you naively separate the domain of politics from the economy as though they're mutually exclusive but a political economy doesn't don't look like that and uh I think well let's let's go you started writing a green new deal report I remember uh Jeff Tilly who's a monetary economist that I've admired and I saw referred to in this book was part of your group and but what inspired you at that time was it concern about climate or was it seeing this misallocation that the financial sector fostered what was that first report about well that first report was about the arguments we had with the environmentalists and and the arguments over monetary theory and policy which wasn't understood at all um you know and and I think Jeff Tilly is really is a really important inspiration and mentor for me and what he taught me was about Keynes essentially and Keynes' understanding of the nature of the monetary system and the need to do to the monetary system what had to be done in the 1930s which is to subordinate it to the interests of democracy of your life and to remove it from its role as master of the economy and instead to turn it back into being served to the economy but I think really what transformed my thinking was an understanding of Keynes and an understanding that Keynes is so fearfully misrepresented as being about tax and spend as about being about fiscal policy when really he was deeply uninterested in fiscal policy but he was he was convinced that by managing monetary theory monetary policy it was possible to manage and the prosperity of your economy as a whole and you know Keynes is no lefty I mean he was just a traditional capitalist if you like and he understood that in order for capitalism to be sustainable um and he did have more than a vision than just that of course but but he understood that for that to happen the monetary system had to be managed and that took me I mean took me back to the whole question of the nature of money and the fact that today there's still massive misunderstanding the very fact that the public authorities rob tolerate cryptocurrencies and the fraud and the corruption and around around cryptocurrencies seems to me to be an expression of the fact that there is still confusion around the commodity theory of money as to the credit theory of money and of course Keynes was on the side of the credit theory of money and I mean he himself had to struggle with with those ideas at the beginning and what but once he got it you know he then understood really given that it's a social construct and not a commodity money is something that has to be managed or else we could just magic it out of thin air and we do magic it out of thin air but that's a reason for us not behaving as if we were the sorcerers apprentice you know messing around with sorcerers pale and pale and brush to quote Goethe's famous story and you know it is something that we we have to manage but but Wall Street would rather we weren't managing it and above all would prefer for it not to be demo the system not to be democratically managed so that and you know that's it's that understanding of Keynes that I found has inspired me all the way through and I struggled on a daily basis I see how Keynes is misrepresented and and abused and and in particularly also in terms of the history and I hope you will have read the bit about 1919 and his his ideas for the international system that came out oh yeah expressed at Versailles treaty of Versailles yeah exactly well I the other part of Keynes that that is a building block to awareness is his phd dissertation the treatise on probability was really about what we call ontological uncertainty or someone called radical uncertainty the unknown unknowns and these systems like the monetary system and the value of liquidity was quite integrated with coping with unknown unknowns and how to uh which might call stabilize an anxious system that doesn't have a terminal point that everybody believes in and so I thought he was very very sophisticated in the way in which uh like the whole body of his work yes worked from a different vision of what society was than what we call mechanical Keynesian macroeconomics that my alma mater mit and other places emphasized in the years following yeah Rob I'm very struck by this economist at the fed is it Jeremy B Rudd and his his recent paper that's called such a stir and I have to say who was I said when he was absolutely right when he he talked about the primary role of mainstream economics in our societies to provide an apologetics for a criminally oppressive unsustainable and unjust social order I mean coming out said that was pretty wonderful but in dealing with that Adam Pozen then argued that um that you know we're at the level of macroeconomics is at the level he said of Galileo and Copernicus and we're just still at the stage of finding figuring out the basics of how the universe the the financial universe works well and I and I love Adam Pozen he's an old friend but I think he's wrong on this because we're not at the stage of Galileo and Copernicus Keynes took us to a far more advanced stage in his work but we've you know we've regressed from that and I don't think that's accidental Rob you know I have to say I'm something of a conspiracy theorist when it comes to this because in my view you know Keynes was deliberately and I think he was naive I think there was you know quite a long he was quite he didn't manage this terribly well but I think he was naive in thinking that his friends in the city of London and indeed in the economics profession would eventually be persuaded of his arguments and wouldn't try to subvert and undermine them but they actively did so even before he died so you know they were actively undermining Bretton Woods even as he left New Hampshire so so I um you know I but I what I want to argue is that actually if we if we could restore an understanding of Keynes's monetary theory and policies we go a long way to creating a kind of framework economic framework that we need to tackle the big crises of our day which is of course climate breakdown you know well there are a lot of elements I studied a lot of the students of Keynes and one in particular Laurie Tarsish came to the United States and wrote a book about Keynesian like a textbook of Keynesian theory and was punished by elites particularly uh I think it was William Buckley at the Yale University yeah kind of put out a call to trustees and boards all over that this man was a heretic and this book had to be stopped and after that in what I'm calling in around the McCarthy era people were much more cautious and much more mechanical and abstract in what they would represent in the United States and perhaps in the entire Anglo-Saxon world but this group now that they called the post Keynesians many of whom I believe were educated at Cambridge England and many are in Italy and parts of the United States some of whom have emphasized what we might explore modern monetary theory which I think relates to your proposals uh there's there's a great deal of skepticism that Rudd really put out hard and and without that footnote about why at the beginning he really he issued a very very bold challenge that I think he should all listen to I absolutely agree with that yeah yeah Neil Irwin just wrote this up in the New York Times this last week and I noticed that I noticed they left out his his footnote you know they they yes inflation expectations but they left out the powerful footnote but I think yes um so Robbie was really difficult you know I mean I studied Samuelson at university and I found it even in the South African context really incomprehensible in relation to the real world that I lived in um and I think for many economists they're having to go back to square one and finding that very very difficult really because they've been trained to think so differently but you know I'm hopeful people learn people can change um and we you know the Jeremy be Rudds can turn up so and you know there are an awful lot of people out there that know there's something wrong seriously just take some courage to come out and say it let's talk about your vision of where do we go so that my grandchildren and children feel safe and feel like they're in a coherent world and yours too yeah so in the book I um I I try to um I basically echo the the words of the work of Herman Daley um yes in calling for a steady state economy for a recognition you know of the second law of thermodynamics that every time we burn fossil fuels it doesn't evaporate and go away it just becomes something else um so you know the vision is for a steady state economy and I think that's going to mean uh an economy where we're going to have lower levels of consumption um we're going to probably be less mobile in the sense of you know we're going to have to uh be a more um have much simpler lifestyles but while those lifestyles might be simpler and might be more labour intensive we're going to have to substitute if you like labour for carbon we're going to have to get out of our cars and perhaps cycle around or find other ways of moving around which are not so damaging um while that might feel like might might feel risky in fact it could actually lead to something to a very rich and um abundant a life of abundance in my view and I think we learned some of this through the pandemic I don't know about you Rob but where I live which is a deeply conservative rural part of Britain I was just so overwhelmed by the sense of community the way in which people came together you know the idea of working collectively to manage the situation uh you know we're supposed to be so individuated such individuals carry only for number one it turned out well actually we're not like that you know we have the extraordinarily rare for our species for the world species human qualities of empathy and compassion and of collective action no other species can do those things no other species has that level of empathy or of compassion and of ability to work collectively and the pandemic showed brought out those those tremendous human qualities and I think those will be extraordinary enriching we've seen the the effect of it as well as of course the fact that we've engaged with nature far more you know we stopped and looked around at what's you know the fact that the bees are in decline and and that we need to grow wild flowers or whatever to to help with that and and that was better for our well-being and particularly our mental that is much better for our mental well-being so for me it's that that's what I look forward to is to a world where actually there's a much greater sense of community um we're not shopping endlessly we're not consuming endlessly um we're not as I work with a wonderful economist um sociologist actually who argues that in in in this world we will be satisfying our needs but not our wants not our desires and our desires can rise exponentially can grow exponentially but our needs are limited you know we need you know shelter we need human love if you like we need security we need education we need good health and so on these are these are finite and addressing those needs would keep us very busy but would make us all feel much much better now this might sound um idealistic but I I I think it's what we as human beings want and need and um when we when we get it we feel much better and I think we're gradually learning the pandemic has been a real lesson I think you're not regardless