 Welcome everyone to this event with the Cambridge Union. Thank you so much for tuning in. This is our 11th event of this online only term. And wherever you are, whoever you are, thank you so much for tuning in. Tonight we'll be hearing from Yanis Farafakis. Yanis served as Greek finance minister in 2015 as the author of several books, including to talking to my daughter about the economy. And he's the co-founder of DM25 and the Progressive International. He now serves as a Greek MP. Yanis, the floor is yours. I think you're muted. Oh, okay. You better. Okay. I'm not. You've unmuted me, have you? I can hear you now. Okay, fantastic. So yeah, that's the beauty, the wild beauty of Zoom. Thank you so much for the invitation. Good evening all. Good evening Cambridge. Cambridge at large, I suspect. I'm coming to you tonight from Aguina, a small island, a stone's throw away from the coast of Attica. While the physical splendor of the union is always said to be missed, I'm very glad to be connecting with you from our home, which is sitting on a hill overlooking the Aegean Sea in these very interesting times. It was suggested to me tonight that I address what else are post-pandemic predicament. I decided to do so by alluding to a chronicle of the 20s, of the 2020s, a chronicle which I fear I may have to write or to speak to sometime, let's say in December, 2030. So be warned, a rather bleak account of the next decade is about to hit you. But don't think of it as a prediction, as the chronicle of a waste decade foretold. Think of it as a glimpse into a future that we can avoid as long as we take this bleak possible future quite seriously. So without further ado, here it is. The title of my assessment of this decade, I'm very much fear, is going to be something like our bleak 20s and it would go something like this. Before lockdown, politics seemed like a game between parties resembling football teams, having good days or bad days on the pitch, scoring or conceding points that propel them up and down some football league table. And at the season's end, they get the ultimate prize, or at least one of them does, the opportunity to form government without, of course, big in power. That was a standard view of politics. Was it not as it was coming to us from the mass media? But then all of a sudden, the general feeling that politicians are not really in control gave its place to the realization that governments possess great powers. And upon hitting this realization, many have started salivating at this show of raw state power. Have you noticed how all notions, you know, liberal or let's say neoliberal notions of a minimal state that is mindful of its limits and eager to seek power to individuals? You know, those notions have gone out of the window with the 24 hour curfew, the closure of the local pub, the ban on walking in the park, the suspension of football, the emptying of theaters, the silencing of music venues, you know, all those things that have really changed life over the last few months. At the level of political economy, free marketeers that until a few weeks ago were hell bent on shouting down any suggestion for the most modest of boosts in public spending, the very same people, the very same people a few short weeks later are demanding or demanded a state takeover of the economy. Nothing like that had happened since Leonid Bresnev was ruling the Soviet Union from the Kremlin. Very, very quickly, the state began funding private firms wage bills or in nationalizing their ways and taking shares in airlines, car makers, banks, whatever. What really happened was, and I think that is a good thing. This is a silver lining. From the first week of lockdown, the pandemic stripped away the veneer of politics to reveal its boorish reality underneath. And what is the reality of politics that some people have the power to tell the rest what to do? You know, this thought vindicates Hobbesians who live in fear that others have control over them. And it evokes, remember Lenin's forgotten phrase but very accurate phrase that in essence politics is about who does what to whom. The only thing he did not do this pandemic of ours was that which some naive commerce of mine on the left, some naive leftists had hoped it might do, revive state power as a power for the many. That did not happen. By the end of May, beginning of June, 2020, the lockdown was beginning to ease but the teleconferences that had become essential to surviving physical isolation carried on and leftists in particular, centered left, hard left, doesn't matter. They annoyed me so much with their unfounded optimism that this pandemic was enabling the state to do good things. I would try to remind them that Margaret Thatcher was never really against state power. You know, she left the British state larger, more powerful and more concentrated than she had found it. It was never about the village baker, butcher or brewer. Thatcher is grasped the importance of an authoritarian state to support markets controlled by corporations and large banks. Markets that after Thatcher was out of the picture, eventually the markets themselves were owned by the large companies, think of Amazon or Facebook. They are not competing in somebody else's market or in some market, they own their own markets. So why should those who claims to wish the state wither hesitate for a moment, either in 2020 or before that, in 2008, when we had another implosion of financialized capitalism? Why should they hesitate for a moment to unleash massive government intervention to preserve oligarchic market power? So while in the early 2020s leftist fantasized about the renaissance of the commons of public goods, of the new consensus on the common interest on tackling climate change, I spooked them with the specter of the impending depression, economic depression and psychological depression. Because as far as I was concerned, anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear should be able to see that a great depression was approaching. How could my lefty friends back into 2020 ever imagine that a depression was going to further their socialist dreams, especially after the experience of the 1930s? I recall telling them back in May 2020, you are determined to confuse state power for people power, forgetting that we're entering deflationary times and deflationary times invariably breed monsters, a lesson from the 1930s that you ignore at your peril. Now, while I was saying all this to my lefty friends in 2020, I was hoping deep down that I was wrong, that I was profoundly wrong. Nothing would have made me happier, but it didn't take long before my glam procrastinations were vindicated. Big business always needed the state to impose the property monopoly from which big business draws its energy. By strengthening the state, there was never a serious prospect that the coronavirus would empower the chronically disempowered. Airlines took a while to return to disguise, but money very quickly began to fly across the planet as before at the speed of light. They were never into the pockets of those who actually really needed it. Little gases that had largely subsided for a couple of months filled up the atmosphere again, as soon as production lines were restored, sending truckloads of stuff across the seas and through our fortified land borders. In 2020, the Green Ripper almost claimed the British Prime Minister, the Prince of Wales, from what I hear, even Hollywood's nicest star. However, true to his vile ways, it was the poorer and the browner that the Green Ripper actually did claim. You see, they were easy pickings. Disempowerment rears poverty that ages people faster, makes them biologically older than they should be, and ultimately, readies them for the cult. Amazon, Google, Netflix, Microsoft were not the only beneficiaries of the lockdown days. Thanks to the central bank money pumped into them, through the usual financiers, share markers flourished as economies collapsed. That was a great paradox of 2020. Economies were collapsing, financial markers were doing quite nicely, thank you. Even the guilt of some city and Wall Street bankers, a guilt that was lingering since 2008, diminished as they handed out to middle-class customers a small share of the freshly minted government money. The disconnect between the world of money and the real world, a disconnect that caused millions to struggle and to suffer, that disconnect grew inevitably. With it grew the discontent that fed the monsters I was warning my lefty friends about. The hellish mutual reinforcement cycle between inequality and stagnation, first observed after 2008, was given another spin. The ultra-rich thanked their lucky stars that socialism was alive and well, exclusively for them, of course. But they were not blind to see that the little people condemned to the savage arena of unfettered markets were shedding incomes fast, fearing that the masses would not be able to afford to buy their products, big business invested less and in fewer good quality jobs, spending their money instead on shares, boosting share prices, on yachts, on mansions, on the usual fare. Plans for the green transition that young climate activists had put on the agenda before 2020 were paid lip service afterwards, as governments buckled under tall debt mountains. Mass depression ensued, yielding industrial-scale discontent on a browning planet. Well, ladies and gentlemen, that was the story of our 20s, a decade too close for comfort to the last centuries 1930s. As then, a growing wrath prevailed in the minds of the discontented. In their souls, the grapes of wrath were once again growing heavy for a new bitter vintage. In place of the soapboxes, from which the 1930s demagogues addressed the disgruntled masses, promising to make them proud again, big tech, this time, provided killer apps and social networks perfectly suited for the task. With state power already reached with state power already delegitimized and reconfirmed by the pandemic, cynical agitators took advantage of the dismal performance of Western governments. Instead of strengthening voices calling for international cooperation, we had the spectacular situation where videos of Chinese planes airlifting basic health equipment to Europe and the United States bolstered nationalism. Nationalist leaders harnessed xenophobia to offer demoralized citizens a simple trade. We will give you personal pride and national greatness in exchange for what you give us to the stonkmen in authority, authoritarian powers to protect the people from lethal viruses, from cunning foreigners, and from scheming dissidents. If cathedrals were the middle ages architectural legacy, our 20s contributed tall walls featuring electrified fences and flocks of drones buzzing in their shadow. Finance and nationalism already on the rise before 2020 were the clear winners. For those for whom it was always hard to travel, to make ends meet, to speak their minds, the nation states revival made the world less open, less prosperous, less free. For the functionaries of big tech, big pharma, big business in general, who got on famously with a stonkmen in authority, globalization proceeded at pace. But nevertheless, the myth of the global village gave its place to that of an equilibrium between great power blocks. Each sporting burgeoning militaries, separate supply chains, idiosyncratic autocracies, and class divisions reinforced by new forms of nativism. The new divisions through the prevailing features of each country's politics into sharply relief, like some of us who respond to crisis by becoming caricatures of ourselves, whole countries focused on their collective illusions, therefore exaggerating and cementing preexisting prejudices. Once communities surrendered to the fear of infection, human rights seemed an unaffordable luxury. Big techs, apps developed biometric bracelets to monitor our vital data around the clock. In cooperation with governments, they combined the biological data with geolocation data of where we all were, whom we met, and fed all this information into special algorithms that texted messages to the population with very helpful instructions on what to do and where to go so as to stop new outbreaks in their tracks. But, ladies and gentlemen, a system that can monitor our coughs can also monitor our laughs. It can know how our blood pressure responds to the great leader's speech, to our boss's pep talk, to the police's announcement that some demonstration has been bound, making the KGB and Cambridge Analytica look positively neolithic. The great strength of the new fascists in the 2020s was that unlike their forerunners a century earlier, to gain power they did not have to wear brown shirts and heavy boots, or even to enter government by electoral or other means. You see what happened was panicking establishment parties that had a liberal or social democratic pedigree, or even a conservative old one nation pedigree. Those panicking establishment parties began to fall over each other to steal the fascist thunder by adopting, at first, xenophobia light, then authoritarianism light, then totalitarianism light, until light gave its place to outright darkness. Now, that was my summary of 2020s that I do not want to live to write. In a sense, what I did tonight was to share with you a dystopic prognosis so as to exercise it, to prevent it from coming true, to have you tell me and promise me that we were not going to let this happen. But before we see that promise, one final piece, if you want of advice, a softer warning. Let us please refrain from thinking of this pandemic as more significant than it is. Let us overcome our urge to seek moments of truth, watersheds, milestones. You see, I have a certain tendency to be incensed with all the commentators repeating ad nauseam that 2020 was our moment of truth. I believe that moments of truth are a fiction. Truth grows organically. Epiphanies are an illusion. An illusion that our mind conjures up to explain our failure to realize the obvious a little bit earlier than it did. Now, 2008, I lived through 2008 as an economist as well, as a moment of truth. It was just as much a moment of truth as 2020s. And I could go on as to why I believe that 2008 was a more poignant crisis than this one. But I have to follow my own advice and resist the temptation to elevate 2008 onto a pedestal of significance above that of 2020. You see, like epiphanies, the fork in the road theory of history is a convenient lie. 2008 was a crisis whose wasting paved the ground for nationalists and financiers to prevail after 2020. But the truth is, and this is how I conclude, the truth is we face a fork in the road every day of our lives. Every single day we fail to take advantage of opportunities to change the course of history. And then do you know what we do? To console ourselves? We look into the past, pick out one pivotal moment, and try to lessen our guilt by saying, ah, that was the moment we missed. No, folks. We miss pivotal moments every day, every hour, every freaking instant. So let's not miss today's moment of truth, tomorrow's the day's after. Only by not missing those moments of truth, every instance, can we together make my little account of the 2020s sound morose and inaccurate. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much for that wonderful speech. Just to pick up on something that you said, in your kind of dark vision of the 2020s, you talked about a kind of a new rise, populous, kind of promising national greatness in exchange for loyalty to the nation. One of the interesting features of kind of the pandemic so far is that the country led by populous tend not to be doing as well. So whether it's Trump in America, it's telling kind of encouraging people to inject bleach or Bolsonaro in Brazil, there seems to be a gap in kind of the competence in dealing with the virus and populous leaders. Doing that will affect the success of populism going forward. I think my answer to your pertinent question was already embedded. It's something, as I said, connected to it. I said that, you know, this time, these strongmen don't even need to be in government, unlike in the 1920s and the 1930s. Because, you know, let me give you an example. Take France before Macron, when Francois Hollande was the president, in a bid to stem the rise of the neo-fascist National Front Party of Marine Le Pen, it was the socialist government of Francois Hollande that introduced into the Constitution and the National Assembly a provision for withdrawing from dual nationality citizens of Arab descent. Nationality, nationality rights. So, you know, Le Pen didn't even need to be in government. Now, there's no doubt that the incumbents during a pandemic will always suffer to some extent. But are we sure that Trump is going to lose in November? Are we sure that Bolsonaro is on the roads? Maybe they are not. I hope they lose. Let me be very clear about that. But the problem, the point I'm trying to make is that even if they lose, their poisonous politics has infected the center ground. And the center ground is bending over backwards, you know, to go, okay, not full Trumpian racism, but racist light, xenophobia light, authoritarianism light. So they are already penetrating government, even when they're still in the opposition. And I have no doubt that Trump has changed American politics independently of whether he's going to be reelected or not. So, interestingly though, Michael Gove a few years ago said that kind of public has had enough of experts. One of the interesting features of this crisis, this was the first time I can remember in my lifetime, certainly, every night you have experts, you have epidemiologists, you have medical experts on the television talking about their science. So do you think that we're kind of seeing a revival of experts or is this just a temporary fad for this corona crisis? Well, look, I happen to agree with Michael Gove when it comes to the economy, when it comes to policy, when it comes to education, when it comes to, you know, should we privatize the national health service or not. There are no experts in this. There are experts in medical science and in natural science. There are experts in engineering. There are no experts in the science of society and of politics. So the tragedy with somebody like Trump is that he denies science, the right and the opportunity to tell us what we need to know about climate change, about, you know, the epidemic. But then this is one threat. The other threat is that you have somebody like, you know, the good people in the Treasury, the UK Treasury, prior to the Brexit referendum coming up with predictions down to decimal points of what the loss of GDP will be if the people of Britain dare vote for Brexit. You know, something like 12.36, you know, my goodness, you know, these are not experts. These are complete fools that present themselves as experts. So I'm all for experts where expertise can be proven scientifically, right, when epidemiology, for instance, building bridges, you know, climate change. But I will agree with my goal that those who come to us as technocrats on matters that are pure political decisions, yeah, those are not experts. They are pretend experts and you should get rid of them. Yeah, that's very interesting. So one of the paradoxes of the coronavirus crisis has been that countries are quite rich and powerful, like Britain, like the United States, are leading the world in deaths, while countries are much poorer, much less organized, much less kind of successful in generalist countries like Vietnam, actually doing much better. So there's kind of more deaths per day in America than Vietnam has had over the entire crisis. So what do you think that tells us about how the world is run? Do you think that there's an illusion here that Britain and America are really leading the world in other areas or is something special about coronavirus that makes it different from other kinds of problems? Look, I have to be very, very careful how I thread here because I'm in unfamiliar territory. I'm not an epidemiologist. I don't have the expertise that somebody else would have in my place. The only thing I can tell you is that the United Kingdom and the United States have one thing in common. They have governments that disputed the importance of acting quickly, decisively, locking the country down in order not to go towards the lunacy of the herd immunity story. It seems to me that that is one dimension and the other dimension is interconnections. Countries that are very interconnected with the global economy. Take for instance Belgium, compare Belgium with the Netherlands. Belgium has suffered a massive blow from coronavirus. And what is the fundamental difference between Belgium and the Netherlands? It was not so much policy. Policy was very similar in the two countries. The difference is that Belgium, Brussels because it's the center of the European Union, is the center of NATO. It's effectively the capital of Europe, has a lot more interconnections, flights and so on. So there's a lot more movement and mobility going through that country. You have the city of London, you have the world state. That I think is the second dimension. But the fact that Boris Johnson and Donald Trump were dead against the idea of a lockdown to begin with and took so long to do it may have something to do with it. But again, I'm not the expert to talk about this. Yeah, and I'm definitely not the expert either. So going back to Britain, what do you think kind of in this dark future of the 2020s, what role do you think the Labour Party and Kirsten Sturma will play? In an interview recently, you said he's a very nice guy, but was absolutely in a threat to the establishment. Do you think he'll last in the role? Do you think he'll do well? Oh, goodness gracious me. I have no idea whether he will do well. I'm not very good at predicting how well politicians will do. Look, Kirsten Sturma seems to be like someone who is a bit of a paradox in the sense that he is wonderfully efficient and lethal in the House of Commons, but not so much outside. So the question therefore boils down to the extent to which the systemic media are going to adopt him as a palatable replacement for Boris Johnson. He's not going to have the kind of support that Jeremy Corbyn had from the grassroots. He doesn't have that. It's not in his disposition or in his politics. So is he going to be embraced by Rupert Murdoch or the equivalent Rupert Murdoch of the next couple of years? That is the question, you know, harking back to what Tony Blair managed to do, that is to be the Labour leader that in the end was considered reasonable and not particularly worrisome alternative to the Tory Prime Minister. So what do you think he needs to do to get that? Does he need to pivot to kind of harder forms of nationalism? Does he need to kind of pivot to centre economically? What do you think allowed Tony Blair to get that kind of dominant hold of a centre ground? Well, Tony Blair has sold out completely to Rupert Murdoch. He went cap in hand on his knees and begged for Rupert to anoint him, and that's exactly what happened. Maybe the situation is a bit more complicated now because the Liberal Party is the largest party in Europe in terms of membership as a result of having inducted the momentum crowd, you know, my good friends and comrades from the left of the spectrum. And if he antagonises them too early and too much by doing it only Blair, then it's very unlikely that he will be able to make up the numbers simply by ingratiating himself with the establishment. So he has to, it's clear that he is trying to take a middle road. He accepts most of the manifesto under Jeremy Corbyn, but rejects all those aspects that the establishment would find threatening to its, to the establishment's core. Very interesting. And one thing that kind of stands out from your speech in the beginning is how consistent it largely has been with what you've been saying for a while. You've been warning about kind of rising, kind of rising nationalist populism, kind of transnational capital and so on. Are there any things that the coronavirus crisis has changed your mind about? Is there anything that you used to think is important but no longer do or vice versa? Not really because, you know, look, my thinking is not very complicated or sophisticated. I have a very simple approach to the global political economy. I see what happened in 2008 to be very worryingly similar to what happened in 1929 with big differences. The big difference was that in 2008 central banks created rivers of money in order to reflow banks, something that did not happen in 1929. But the only difference that that really made was that the period between 1929 and 1931, in our case, after 2008, was extended to a dozen years. Effectively, we have stagnation now for a dozen years. The fact that you have so many people in Britain that it only took one week of not working and to go into penury. If you think that 60% of Britons did not have enough money in the bank, savings to last them for more than a week. And why is that? GDP is greater, employment is higher. The reason is because you had the bank of England pumping money into the financial system, creating an immense rise in asset prices because that money was mainly lent to companies to buy back their own shares, not to invest. And to employ people at the lowest level of the service sector, you know, sort of zero hour contract jobs and so on and so forth. So that creates a great increase boost in inequality. But it also means that a very large percentage of the population are going to be discontented, whether they are working or not. Most of them are working poor, were working poor, became unemployed poor as a result of COVID-19. And then what happens? You have the bank of England again pumping huge coins of money. Now, the key regarding the UK and the UK may be slightly different from the Eurozone. It already is quite different. And I'll explain that in a moment. But already, at this stage, all we see is a repetition of 2008. Again, you have the banks getting gigantic quantities of money from the Bank of England. The banks have difficulty passing this money on to the real economy. You already hear all these complaints by small businesses across England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland that they simply do not see where that money is ending up. They're requesting a loan of 80,000 quid and they get a loan of 15,000 three weeks later than they were promised. So there is this bottleneck that effectively what it does, it takes our predicament between 2008 and 2020 and turbocharges it. But I did say, and I need to explain that, that there is a difference between the United Kingdom and the European Union in the sense that the Johnson government, and I'm no great friend of the Tories as you may have gathered, but nevertheless, they have been very good at dismissing austerity as an option. And even before the coronavirus hit, I'm realizing that having stolen all those red belt seats from the Labour Party in the north of England, that they need to put real money into public goods and investment in the north of England. If they do that, then Britain may end up in a much better place than the continent. And that may also tip the balance regarding the costs of Brexit and their relative hit that the Eurozone takes from a hard Brexit vis-à-vis in relation to what the United Kingdom gets. Interesting. I think that's probably enough for questions from me. I have some questions from the audience that were pre-submitted before and I'll go to the chat box in a bit. So Marino from the University of Montreal asks, how could China take advantage of the current Eurozone turmoil? What could the effects be, especially for southern Europe? Oh, the answer already exists because they've done it years ago. The Eurozone crisis began in 2010. And since then, China has been building up its presence in the south and east of Europe. There's nothing sinister in this. There's nothing sinister in this. They're doing what is in their interest. The question is, what allows them to do it? And the answer is the complete and utter lack of investment of European investment in southern and eastern Europe, complete zero investment. All you have, some privatizations in Greece, in Italy and so on, effectively existing wealth has been taken over by northern Europeans without actually putting any real money into creating new productive activities. The Chinese come in and do it. And that money doesn't come with strings attached, with the steady strings attached. So China has been quite brilliant at doing this. When I was from the Finance Minister of Greece, I remember how open they were to anything that I would suggest to them and how generous they seemed. Now, some may say, well, this is the thin edge of the wedge, and this is part of their geopolitical attempt. Well, sure. But if you really want to blame someone for the fact that China is finding it, it's the path of least resistance, the east and the south of Europe, the answer to that, to the cause of that, of course, is the failure of the European Union to shift money from excess liquidity in the financial sector to investment. And as a follow up to that, there's someone named Cameron in chat who asks, what are your thoughts on the Chinese Communist Party imposing national security legislation in the Hong Kong special ministry of region? I am appalled, absolutely appalled. I think the Hong Kong youth have been in paragons of democratic morals and ethos that I salute, the manner in which they remain steadfast in the face of brutality in the Hong Kong polytechnic some months ago, is an example for students all over the world of how we need or you need folks, because I'm an old enough, but you youngsters must be prepared to put your lives on the line to defend democratic freedoms. And this latest, in the last 24 hours, I heard that Beijing is trying to effectively impose one country, one system on Hong Kong. I have to say it called me by surprise, I was expecting to be a bit more wiser than that, unless they think that the coronavirus crisis is blunted opposition and now they can steamroll over the youth of Hong Kong. I hope that the youth of Hong Kong pulled them wrong. So do you think there's still a chance that the Hong Kong activists can fight back against the Communist Party and defend Hong Kong democracy or do you think it's too late? No, I don't think it's too late. I think that they've always, they never cease to amaze me with their bravery and innovative forms of resistance. I hope and trust that they will try it again. We who are outside Hong Kong and China, I'm not a China basher, you heard me before saying good things about China. But when it comes to authoritarianism, especially in Hong Kong, but also other parts of China, we need to stand up China, while at the same time, not buying the Atlanticist NATO-Trumpian attempt to create an environment, an atmosphere of military conflict, confrontation or even economic conflict and trade sanctions between the West and China. So we need on the one hand to be nuanced and on the one hand to understand the great success story that China is and not to look at them ex ante as an enemy of our countries and our peoples, but at the same time defend Democrats everywhere in China, including in Hong Kong. Definitely. Some Christus has asked this twice, but it's a good question. The humanitarian aspect of the pandemic with regards to refugees has been ignored. What is the best way to incorporate the issues in such narratives? This is a fantastic question. I don't have an answer to it. I wish I did. I wish you guys come up with an answer. For instance, I'll give you an example of Greece, because Greece is such a good case study. As you know, we are at a front-line state. We have a common border with Turkey. Turkey has three and a half million refugees or migrants. The president of Turkey is instrumentalizing them, sometimes letting them come to the border, to come into Greece, other times not doing so, depending on his relationship with the German chancellor, what he wants to get out of the geopolitics of the Eastern Mediterranean. So you've got these poor people who are being instrumentalized by the Turkish government, but they are also being instrumentalized by the European Union and the Greek government. They're caught in the middle. And you have a population in Greece, which after 10 years of depression, they say, it's not our problem. Let the Germans, let the Swedes deal with that. They don't want to deal with that. Are we the poorest of Europeans going to deal with it? So it's so difficult. We do it. My political party stands up in parliament and we go around Greece and we do say that we have a duty as humans and as citizens of the world that abide by international conventions and the rights according to international law of the refugees to seek asylum. It's very difficult in a climate of economic collapse, especially in a country that has had a great depression for 10 years, to evoke the sense of solidarity which is necessary towards people who are being instrumentalized both by the Greek government and the Turkish government. Definitely. Yeah. So one question about Brexit. I know it's something you've talked a lot about in last few years, but I think this is a good question. Brian Heath asks, will this pandemic strengthen the EU's position on Brexit trade negotiations, seeing UK crash out without a deal December? No, the opposite. This is a great gift to Boris Johnson. I'm not saying this cynically because I was one of those economists who were, I was not putting figures on it and certainly not decimal points, but I always argued that a no deal Brexit would be detrimental to the interests of the majority of the Brits because of the supply chains, the damage it would do to trade between Britain and its greatest trading partner, which is the European Union. But the coronavirus has really appended all that and he has designed it in two ways that are helping Boris Johnson immensely. The first thing is the supply chains change are broken. They broke. They can't break more than they already have. I mean, there could be no greater disruption of trade than what we've had and we are still having. Even Sweden that didn't have a lockdown, their Volvo factories had to shut down because they ran out of parts and raw materials. So if Boris Johnson was going to use as a credible threat towards Brussels the no deal by the end of the year were out and no extension to to this interregnum, this is the time to do it because the whole thing is already a pair shaped in terms of supply chains, but there's a second dimension that strengthens Boris Johnson. And it does so if he's smart and uses it immensely even at the discursive level. You will recall that the argument of Michel Barnier, which actually made some sense before coronavirus was that look folks speaking to the bridge to you folks, we have a single market. We have a level playing field and there are certain rules to gain access to that single market. You have to play by the rules. And if you don't want to be part of making those rules because you are out of the you have to accept our rules. So if you want to have access then you have to go along with whatever the European Court of Justice says. But that doesn't no longer applies because the single market has already fragmented because of coronavirus. You see that now governments have been given the green light by Brussels. Governments in the European Union have been given the green light by Brussels to bend the rules of competition to help their own industries. And in other words to move beyond the level playing field. So if there's not a level playing field within the single market of the European Union how can Michel Barnier demand of Britain to stick to the rules that no longer apply between let's say Italy and France. And if Boris Johnson is smart enough he should use this argument. I hope he's not listening because I don't want to strengthen him. Well let's hope so real relevance there. So Michael Tierney asks how does the new progressive international contribute to making sure that the dystopia you describe does not come into being? Well it's the key because the dystopia that I'm describing is the result of two international organizations or international networks. One is the finances because you see come to think of it the golden era of capitalism was the 1950s and 60s when we had very low unemployment, very high investment, minuscule inflation, inequality was shrinking. That was a period during which the finances were in a straight jacket. They were not allowed to do anything what they're doing today. They were capital controls, there was a complete separation of investment banking from retail banking. What they have managed to do ever since and especially after 2008 the financial crisis which they caused was to create a financial internationalism in action on behalf of bankers who always made sure that the Bank of England, the European Central Bank, the Federal Reserve, the Bank of Japan, the Bank of Switzerland, the Bank of Sweden always worked together to refloat banks whether they were Greek banks, French banks, German banks, British banks. So this is internationalism in action and also what you call them, you call them populists, I call them fascists because I'm a bit old and I can't be bothered with euphemisms. The Bolsonaro's, Trump's, Le Pen's, Salvini's of the world. They love each other. They work so well together. They never disagree about anything. Unity's strength, the trade unions movement used to say, well now the trade unions movement has gone sadly and you have the Bolsonaro's, the Modi's, the Le Pen's and the Trump's that are united. So the only way of countering this twin pillar of misanthropy, the international of the bankers and the international of the fascists is for Democrats, for progressives to start cooperating along the lines of the progressive international and the idea is very simple. We should have an answer to the question, so what do you want to do at the planetary level? Okay, you talk about, you talk about green transition. How much will it cost? We need to have the same answer whether we're in living in Brazil, Argentina, in the United States, in Brighton or in Cork in Ireland. We must have the same answer, something around, you know, six, seven percent of global GDP and then we must have an answer to the question, where will the money come from? And how will you spend it? We need to have a global plan, a green new deal for the world. It's not enough to have a green new deal for Britain. It's not enough to have a green new deal for France, for the United States. We need to have one for the planet. If this is a planetary problem, and it's not just that the green transition is a planetary problem. The, you know, looking after the vast majority of people who live under precarious conditions is also a planetary problem. So do you think that demands kind of planetary institutions then? Because at the European level, DM-25 can sit together in the European Parliament, they can be left in different countries and they can serve as kind of one party. But if I'm a progressive Democrat and Bernie Sanders in the US, I'm a socialist in Britain, I'm a socialist Argentina, there's no kind of political mechanism for us to unite. So do you think this demands new institutions, the UN, or what do you think is the solution to that? Well, I know that there are certain members of the audience, I hope very few, who are waiting for me to say, yes, we need a global government to attack me for being a globalist who wants a global, unaccountable dictatorial government to tell people what to do. So I'm not going to fall into that trap. But look, you remember when the financial sector came crashing down in 2008? Very soon after that, there was a meeting in London of the G20 that Gordon Brown actually chaired. So they go together and they coordinated. They didn't create one central bank for the world, but all the central banks, the major central bank which I mentioned before, they go together and coordinate it. Well, why can't we do this? Not to refloat the banks, not to save the banks, but to save the planet. Why can't we get together? The level of the G20, even informally and say, okay, we're all going to combine forces at two levels. Our investment banks, the European investment bank, the World Bank, KFW, the German one, Britain should have one, it doesn't have one. Jeremy Corbyn promised to create one. Well, I think you need one. But anyway, so investment banks that issue bonds that soak up liquidity around the world and throw it into the green transition investments that we need, and central banks standing behind those bonds in the international markets in the same way that the Fed, the Bank of England, the European Central Bank purchase bonds anyway in the secondary markets. Well, that's not even a radical agenda, what I'm saying. And you don't need a central government to do that. You just need the political will. To have the political will, you need to elect governments in America, in Britain, in Europe, in Brazil that actually are interested in this international doing you do. That's why we need the political movement to help progressives get elected. I think I might know the answer to this next question. I'll ask it anyway. Theophile asks, do you think the deal Macron and Merkel struck or positive consequences for the real economy? Well, you see, firstly, it's not a deal. It's a common proposal. There is a gigantic difference. And the reason why I'm saying that is because back in June 2018, the same two politicians, President Macron of France and Chancellor Merkel of Germany, go together in a very picturesque castle in Brandenburg. And they made an announcement that was, wow, you know, a real game changer. It seemed what was the announcement that the Eurozone would acquire its own separate budget. A separate budget means it's a Hamiltonian moment. It is, you know, common debt. It's, you know, common treasury. That's what it means to have a common budget. And what happened to that? Zero, nothing. It was forgotten. It didn't disappear completely. It simply diminished and diminished and diminished until it became an obscure line in the budget of the European Commission. Macroeconomically insignificant, just a few pennies. So before I pass judgment on this latest Merkel and Macron proposal, and this is another game changer, we need to see how it turns out after tortures meeting, after tortures meeting, after tortures meeting, because, you know, this is, it's going to, to wither slowly into something far less significant than what it was made out to be. In any case, look, the very fundamental idea is interesting and wrong. It is interesting because on the one hand, it is the first time that a German chancellor has agreed to the idea of some kind of common debt that, and for those who don't know what it is, the idea is this. Germany, France, Italy, Greece, all the EU member states are going to give Brussels a guarantee so that Brussels can go out there in the money markets and borrow. So the commission is going to be borrowing using some guarantees that the member states give, right? Now, of course, those guarantees will have to be repaid. At some point, in other words, the states will have to fork out the money for the money that the European Commission has borrowed. Now that's some federalism and it is not a fiscal union. A fiscal union is what you have in the United Kingdom. In other words, you have a situation whereby, you know, when some people become in some region, let's say in the north of England or in Cornwall or wherever, unemployment rises faster than it does in Surrey, incomes from Surrey are automatically used in order to pay the higher unemployment benefits in Cornwall or Newcastle, okay, without politicians having to make that decision. This is the automatic stabilizers within a fiscal union, right? If Cornwall, Surrey, Sussex, Yorkshire had to guarantee debts of London that London would then give back to Newcastle, Surrey and so on. Firstly, it would be a very silly and perverse system and secondly, it would not be a fiscal union that actually works in a way of stabilizing the United Kingdom. So I'm not that impressed. It was a long-winded play of saying that I'm not impressed. Hi, I can tell. So there's a question from, sorry, I can't say this name, but Mr. Vera Fakis, we've seen during the pandemic the lockdown has helped the climate in many ways. Do you think there's possible that some measure scheme could be permanent in the post-corona era? No, I don't. I don't. Exactly the opposite. The airlines will do anything they can to put as many planes up in the air as possible. States are already announcing that they are going to help them, give them lots of money. I mean, look at what happened in Germany with Lufthansa, a company that was extremely profitable up until recently now has lost a large chunk of its value. The government's going to put a lot of money in it, and it's not even seeking shares. And why is it significant? And why is it pertinent to the question? It is because if you don't have shares, you don't have votes in the general assembly of the owners, and then you can't say, as a state representative of the people, you know what, folks? I'm sorry, but we are now major shareholders and we want to reduce the emissions. And we need to take into consideration the climate change when it comes to the business plan of our airline. So no, I don't see that. Interesting. I mean, you did mention that in your earlier thing about airlines. Yes, so I just want to sum up with any more good questions to chat, I think. But what do you think that the British right will do with this? So the big concern that kind of certain countries are more nationalistic in reaction to this. So countries like Britain, like people that are disproportionately dying of coronavirus are BME people, people in urban areas. Do you think that within countries you'll see a rise of xenophobia as well as kind of between countries? Look, I don't think it's good to do much with the coronavirus. Coronavirus, as I said in my talk as well, discriminates against the poor, against the blacks, against the disempowered. But the greatest fuel of xenophobia and racism is depression, economic and psychological depression that follows usually from the economic depression. In the United States, for instance, one of the reasons why Trump was elected was because people who were not particularly racist, who were just racist light back under Ronald Reagan, blue collar workers who used to not really loathe blacks, but look at black mamas who were unemployed and minded the kids at home and got some kind of benefit from the state. They looked down upon them. They used to call them, you know, welfare mamas. Now these blue collar workers living in the Rust Belt areas of the United States, they've lost their jobs some time ago, not the coronavirus crisis, but a long time ago because their industries went to pieces and they can't even afford their medical bills anymore. So they have to go to the same office where the black mama went to get her benefit and beg to be classified as disabled in order to be able to get Medicare. And the hatred, the feel that they've become, you know, they're queuing up with a black mother. That's what fuels racism. And maybe then they turn against the Mexicans and they call them rapists, you know. But what breeds those monsters is the deflationary forces, the depressive forces of an economy where the world of money has been completely decoupled from the work of labour. Well, on that very optimistic note, I think we'll close this event. Thank you for coming, Janus. Thank you to everyone for tuning in. It's great to have you. Thanks. I enjoyed it. Thank you.