 Welcome, everyone. We will give people a few minutes to enter in and then we will start with today's program. Okay, if my colleagues think it's that people have been admitted, what do we think? Are we good to go? Tobias, what do you think? Yes. All right. Okay, let's start it up then. All right, welcome everyone to the webinar on rebuilding macroeconomics from the margins. It's part of an ongoing so as economics webinar series, which is called intensifying inequalities and the limitations of global capitalism. This series is aimed at bringing together perspectives that extend our understanding of how inequalities take root in our societies and economies, and how these relate to the crises of global capitalism. These include contributions on feminist economics racial inequalities and economic imperialism series is organized by the so as economics department. So as economics department in collaboration with the students in the open economics forum, the so as feminist economics network, and the black economists network. It's being recorded this webinar is being recorded will be live streamed on the so as economics Facebook page. I would note that if you have comments you'd like to make or questions you like to ask, and you are listening on zoom, you may put those into the chat and they'll be picked up. And otherwise, we will, if you're listening on watching on Facebook or other media, you won't be able to participate in that way. Okay, so today, we're, we're going to have two papers that were to research projects presented that have been part of a series of sponsored projects in what's been called the rebuilding macroeconomics project. It's been sponsored by the National Institute for economic and social research and headquartered there. It's been about a two and a half year project. Many people who are members of the so as community, both students and faculty have been able to participate and I should say graduates and so on, have been able to participate. Even while the, the emphasis of this project has been on, in a sense, finding ways to rescue the mainstream economics approaches to macroeconomics in part into some extent by expanding the focus to say behavioral macroeconomics, or some of the social foundations or transactional dimensions of macroeconomics. There have been some projects, however, that have also what we would say would have direct links with the heterodox economics traditions. And two of those will be coming to us today they, they're quite different, and they represent two of the different kind of approaches that we see heterodox economics taking. One is to build a frame of the first one, which I'll introduce in a second is building a framework that introduces sort of exploratory super cycles and exploratory dynamics that often are chaotic or complex that go with agent based models. It's the idea of introducing worlds in which agents are not able to be fully rational, but instead must adapt to changing circumstances to kind of simulate what we think we see when we look outside in the world around us. The second kind of approach is a very different kind of heterodox project, which, which basically proceeds by drilling down into some of the issues that are, you know, underlie the broad macroeconomic aggregates that typically dominate discussion in a very abstract way. When we talk about macro policy. And in particular, you know what we have in this particular project is a drilling down into the nuances and sort of institutional details of infrastructure financing. What, what gives this project a heterodox turn is that there's an investigation of the way in which corporate power operating a global scale, enters into this conversation and into this rather into this policy cycle. Whilst that's really not been the intention of any of the actors involved in local governance, or trying to spur local economic development. We'll start with project number one that will be presented by three of our presenters I'll keep it brief in terms of introducing they're all very well known and esteemed colleagues. This will be Daniela Gabor Professor of Economics and macro finance at the University of the West of England. And Giannis DeFermos, who's a lecturer in economics at so as, and Joe Mitchell, who's an associate professor of economics at so as as well. I will turn it to the three of you they'll take about 25 minutes for presentation. Please do write up your questions and comments, as they go along because we're going to go directly into our second presentation, and then have an extended discussion period at the end. So take it away, folks. Thank you Gary and good afternoon everybody. I'm going to start us off. And then Yanis will take over and Joe will finish. It kind of resembles the dynamics of our of our group in general you'll see Yanis does all the hard work. And just to tell you a little bit about the overarching framework that we've developed for this project. The project looks at institutional super cycles and how we can think about these interactions between institutions and macroeconomic processes in a more structured way that draws on the work of Hyman means key. Yanis please next. So that's basically broadly our motivation we come from and have contributed to various literatures that are relevant to our project, starting with the international political economy varieties of capitalism institutional economics and in particular industrialization. And we argue in a series of papers that two are already well one is out and you can read about the one that sets out the framework has been published as a working paper with the rebuilding macro. There are a couple more that are in under review and a sort of one that is sort of a sideline outcome outcome of this process that has appeared in the Canadian Journal of Development Studies. And what we are doing in this project and in these papers is to try to put together these literatures in a in a sort of coherent framework that tries to integrate institutional change and macro and financial processes. Thanks, please. And it basically draws on Hyman means his idea of institutional super cycles which are long run cycles over you have a pretty stable than institutional architecture and by institutional architecture we mean a set of institutions and policies that are trying to reduce the endogenous instability of capitalism and we think that this is a separate type of cycle literature if you want that draws on and contributes to the existing business cycle and financial cycle. And we argue that it's important because he provides a sort of broader historical overarching framework of how to think about the distribution of political power and the implications of the distribution of political power power for how we organize our the institutions of macroeconomic policy. Thank you. The supersize cycle framework very broadly from that was that was developed by Hyman means he talks about thwarting mechanisms and that's a difficult word to pronounce for a non English native speakers but sorting mechanisms as defined by means key our customs institutions are the most interventions that reduce the endogenous volatility of capitalism or the amplitude of cycles, and they contain this instability by putting ceilings and floors on economic activity. There are two types of thwarting mechanisms, the ones that put a floor on under the level of economic activity and the ones that put a ceiling. And we have several examples of how how to think about these. Next Yanis. What what matters and what is very profoundly means can about the super cycles framework is the insight that whatever institutional architecture you get over a super cycle, it will, it's effectiveness in stabilizing capitalism in general becomes eroded over time and it becomes eroded for two reasons one very clear one has to do with private innovation in the sense that private profit profit seeking institutions and agents, they learn how to adapt to the new environment because you will see as you move through as we have a specific sort of set of steps through which the super cycle goes as we go through the super cycles they be the ability and effectiveness of these institutions and the institutional architecture. And because it is in the interest of profit making institutions to try to circumvent or erode their effectiveness. We also specify some long run instability. It's okay, we also specify some sources of long run instability that change over time and because of that, the institutions are no longer able to stabilize capitalism. We, we provide a sort of for phases approach to the super cycles framework and argue that over time, super cycles move from an expansion phase where sorting mechanisms like fiscal policy or monetary policy or labor market institutions and labor market arrangements or financial regulation. These sorting mechanisms are becoming increasingly effective as they are put in place, and they safeguard stability and create or accommodate high economic activity. And then we face the effectiveness erodes. And then the fact that it becomes very obvious that the sorting mechanisms no longer work in a period of crisis. And what is more interesting in many ways is the period of genesis and Yanis will tell you how why we think that now we live in a period of genesis after the erosion of the institutions of the financial globalization and the super cycle that we've had over the more or less last four years. Yanis your turn I think. Thank you Daniela so let me explain a bit more how exactly we conceptualize these four phases. So here we have a graph where we saw that initially as Daniela said we have the period of expansion. This is when actually the institutions work very well. And this is when economic stability and financial stability is high. But as Daniela said as time passes we have these private innovations that erode the institutions, we also have the relationship between various sorting mechanisms at the end of the day might lead to more instability. So for instance, we might have initially that shadow banking system can provide a source of demand and that this can stabilize a bit economic activity, but as time passes this creates too much debt and at some point this can erode the institutions. And when this happens, a recession can become a great recession or a depression. So we have the crisis. And when this is the period whereby macroeconomic financial stability is high. And this is probably the most interesting period in terms of what is happening in capital is because this is when it is necessary for the system to respond to that and this is the phase through which it can stabilize a financial and economic is what's happening in the financial and economic system. And this is the Genesis period so after the crisis there's a period whereby there might be a distribution of power. There might be an attempt by those who currently have the power to create new institutions that we allow them to be in power, but we have a lot of battles of ideas, and the pace of institutional change is very high. Now, if this results in institutions and it can stabilize overall how the system works, we can have a new period of expansion. In the case, so a Genesis period might not directly lead to a new expansionary period, it might take years or even decades to have something like that, and we might have in the meantime a lot of social and economic instability. So what we have done is that we have tried to capture this by using an analysis of the institutions that we had in the previous super cycles, but we also have a kind of analysis about specific variables that can capture this instability so we have created a kind of index whereby we make a distinction between three different types of financial and macroeconomic factors. So we have what we call the flow of items and the idea is that if we want to have overall if we want to have a kind of stability in capital is we need to have for instance that economic growth does not decline continuously that unemployment rate does not increase continuously and that the financial price is somehow stabilized so it's necessary to avoid this in order to say that we have stability. Second, we have these variables that we call ceiling variables, and we, for instance, we cannot have that card account that is continuously increased, or that the debt to GDP ratios become continuously higher. And finally we have this ceiling variables, which means that at the end of the day it's necessary for these variables to be within specific corridors, otherwise again we can have instability. So what we do is that we look at the past data from around the 1960s, and we use this index in order to understand when instability was high and when it was low, and then we try to understand to what extent our theoretical perspective can be confirmed by the data. So, here I have the US and the UK, and they have more or less the same pattern. And we can see here the cyclical movements season 1960s or so. So if I use the US as an example, we can see that the stability based on our index was increasing in the expansion period was declining in the maturity period since the late 1960s. During the crisis, we had, we continue to have a kind of decline. And then we had the Genesis period where we had the redistribution of power from the state and the Unions to finance, for instance, we had the creation of new institutions that tried to support global finance overall and they also created a kind of environment which was necessary in order to have what we call today financialization. And once this institution started being effective, we had the expansionary period, and this is when the index becomes starts become higher or stabilizes. But since in 1998, when for instance we have the collapse of LTCM, and it became clear that the shadow banking system had started creating a lot of stability, we entered into the maturity period that at the end of the day led to the crisis. And over the last years before the COVID-19 outbreak, we have seen a kind of recovery, but of course we didn't see any improvement in overall instability. So this means that we are currently in a period whereby we have a lot of different conflicts, we haven't seen some institutions that can actually create a new supercype. And that's to say that we have made this distinction between industrial capitalism and financial globalization which more or less follows what we can find in the literature. The innovation that we have is that we try to make clear that we have here a cyclical pattern, and we try to connect what is happening in the financial system, but also in macroeconomy overall with what is happening at the policy level and at the level of institutions. And we have made the classification of various structural structures and its traditional features of these two supercyclists. I'm not going to discuss this in detail, happy to have a chat about that in the Q&A session. Because I would like to talk a bit about another part of our project, which is about the Genesis period. And what we have right now is that since the global financial crisis, we haven't seen actually any distribution of power, so still global finance plays a very key role in the way that capitalism works, which is not what we had in the 1970s or so. But what is more interesting is that now it's not only difficult to have a new supercycle because we haven't seen so far institutions that can stabilize the system, but we also have another big challenge which is the climate crisis. And any kind of institution that is going to be created and has this role that we described before in terms of creating floors and ceilings, it's necessary for this to address the climate crisis. And of course global finance has realized that and this is why over the last maybe two or three years, primarily, we have seen that the global financial institutions have a lot of interest in what is happening right now with climate change. And they have tried to provide the kind of solution and we are trying to explain exactly what is the overall suggestion here. And based on the work that Daniela has done, we call this the Wall Street consensus. And we focus here primarily on the climate perspectives of these Wall Street consensus. So we have seen that global financial institutions now try to say that they can actually support the transition to a local economy. And we have seen a lot of policies that try to promote climate projects in the global south through PPPs. We have this explosion of the interest in environmental social and governance indicators, the ESG that are supposed to be the way through which we can understand whether something is green or not. And all this has created a kind of structural structure that at the end of the day what global finance wants to do with it is to argue that this can create a kind of a green recovery that at the end of the day can lead us to a new cycle. And what is very interesting to note here is that if we look, if we understand exactly what is the proposal from global finance at this stage, you can see that the global finance wants governments to have a role in that process and they want the federal banks to have a role. But their role is primarily to protect the system when there is a problem. So what can happen through these issues and through these new ideas is that at the end of the day, federal banks, we might need to be what has affected climate rescues of last resort. So if we have some climate related events that are going to create instability and are going to affect the profitability of financial investors, then federal banks might need to intervene in order to save the system. So the federal banks have also to play a role, not only in terms of finance but also in terms of supporting the economy and people who might be affected by climate change. So they do not play the role that an active role in designing the log carbon economy, but they have a significant role to play in terms of saving the system. I have to say that there is also a very important role for some climate policies like carbon pricing, which is the most standard policy that has been promoted over the last years in the area of climate change. What is crucial is that this is a policy that is now is being promoted in the global south. And if we combine this with what is happening right now with COVID-19, it seems that it is very likely that carbon pricing will be used not only as a tool that in theory can address climate but also as a way through which public debt can be reduced in these countries because we know that it's very likely that the austerity argument will become again very popular since now public debt has increased in many poor countries. So this is the story behind the Wall Street consensus is that it's not necessary to redistribute power, global finance has a solution to our climate problems, and these are the situations that can actually lead us to the green recovery. On the other hand, we have this set of proposals around the what is often called the Green New Deal. And first of all, I have to say that there's not necessarily consistency across all the proposals about the Green New Deal we're trying to to understand exactly the general framework we think which these proposals have been made, but there are differences between different types of suggestions so what we have done here is to try to classify again the different types of policies and institutions that have been promoted through the Green New Deal proposals. And the first thing that I would like to point out is that all the Green New Deal proposals try to emphasize the role of the state in organizing transition to a low carbon economy distribution, at least within countries is at the core of many of the proposals so we have proposals about the welfare state, we have proposals to support the idea that we need to have more progressive taxation. And we also have recently more proposals within the Green New Deal about the need to penalize what is called dirty finance, because we know that the financial system has supported a lot polluting activities, and the idea is that we need to penalize those penalties about that. And in that sense, the Green New Deal has, at least as an intention to reduce the power of global finance. Now there are two big questions about how the proposal about the Green New Deal will involve. One issue is whether the Green New Deal will take seriously issues of climate change. We have lots of discussions about debt reliefs climate reparations. It's not very clear that the Green New Deal proposals will or have incorporated that or whether they will incorporate this perspective. And there's also a very important debate about the role of the growth and whether we can actually have the same consumption patterns as we had in the past, if we need to address the climate crisis and of course the answer is that we have to think about that very carefully because this is very important. But the main idea here is that we can have a super cycle by changing the distribution of power. So this is a key difference compared to the Wall Street consensus. So we are trying to use our framework to understand what is happening. And the only final thing that I would like to say is that if we think about the climate crisis, the Wall Street consensus tries to say that this can be addressed to climate finance, but in reality these proposals that have been made are very far from making us in line with a two degree scenario. And the Green New Deal is more ambitious, it has a higher potential in theory, but the two degree scenario is still not easy to be achieved, even if we have all these changes that you can see on the slide. So it's not clear that we can have a green super cycle. What we are saying is that this battle of ideas at the end of the day will lead to some new institutions and we are trying to understand this process. So I will hand over to Joe who is going to talk about another part of our project. So I will stop sharing the slides. I wonder if I should check in with the chair on time to see if I have time to come in. Yeah, you're you're at four minutes from the 25. So I would say definitely make some comments for sure. And then we'll move to our second paper. Thank you. Okay, hopefully you see the slides I'm sharing, I will try and use my four minutes as efficiently as I can. So I'll just make some introductory or summary comments on another paper which is part of the project where we try and do something different again to the first two papers, which is that we apply our framework. And we identify some key features that we think are likely to apply in any forthcoming super cycle whether it's the Green New Deal or the Wall Street super cycle. And we take a closer look at certain aspects of the financial global the global financial system, which we think will be one way or another part of both of these two scenarios or any other plausible scenario. And in particular, what we do in this paper is we look at the role of the global dollar footprint. And we are of the view that this is not something which is likely to change in the near future so any forthcoming super cycle is likely to have to contend with the fact that the dollar remains the, the money of the global system, and uneven and access to dollar liquidity will be an ongoing source of potential financial instability and vulnerability, and therefore requires attention and potential policy action. In the, in the paper, I'm going to very quickly summarize what we do we present some history of the use of foreign exchange swaps and we show that in the early days of the post war period. These were used fairly extensive, fairly extensively by official institutions, and this waned in the post 1973 post Bretton Woods period, replaced by the rise of private usage of FX swaps. And of course since 2008 we've seen the return of official FX swaps as a mechanism for getting dollar liquidity to countries that need it in short notice, at short notice. We present some empirical evidence drawn from the Bank of International Settlements of the geography of the dollar footprint and in particular the geography of the global foreign exchange swap market and as I will show briefly, these are substantially interconnected the dollar FX, the FX swap geography is to a substantial extent and increasingly so a geography of the dollar. What we've seen is over the last three or four decades, with the exception of the euro as an international global funding currency. The euro has become ever more dominant there was a period which ended sometime around the global financial crisis, in which the euro looked as if it, at least in some areas might become a contender for a global currency but since then, particularly in what we call the shadow banking system in the claims between banks and non banks and non bank financial institutions, the use of the dollar has increased substantially. What's related with this is a debate about the extent to which cross border financial vulnerability is driven by hidden leverage in the form of FX swaps. So what extent are FX swaps providing cross border to a large extent dollar lending which is hidden from official statistics, and therefore is a source of financial vulnerability at the global scale evidence in favor of this view often presented is the gap between global dollar assets and global dollar liabilities and if we break this down into geographical regions between those countries. In the top row, which are long dollars globally and those which are short at the bottom, there is a small number of countries that account for a large proportion of the cross border positions. And Japan stands out as the single largest short dollar country the country which has large dollar liabilities relative to assets and what is often argued is that at the aggregate global level, the gap between the dollar assets and dollar liabilities is covered by using FX swaps and is therefore a measure of global FX swap usage and has been rising. As we can see here, almost steadily, well fairly steadily since at least 2000. What we argue is I'm going to skip over some of these empirical exhibits because I do actually conclude I understand that I must have used my four minutes already. What we argue is that the claim that FX swaps are hidden leverage is incorrect. And in the paper there's a detailed balance sheet based example where we explain our argument there I don't have time to go into that in detail now. What we argue is although FX swaps do not fulfill the criteria we identified to count as debt contracts. Although they have strong similarities to repo contracts which are short term debt contracts arranged as a swap and subsequent reversal of instruments. We argue that it's incorrect to use this similarity to argue that FX swaps are in fact a form of hidden debt. However, we argue that FX swaps often occur alongside increases in cross border lending activity. And they are effectively used as a hedging instrument to hedge against exchange rate movements and foreign exchange risk, but they are nonetheless an indicator of rising cross border dollar positions. And we give some case studies for the types of situations in which those positions occur and these dollar funding gaps. So highly heterogeneous. For example, dollars supplied by sovereign wealth funds with excess dollar liquidity to Japanese investors who wish to take out positions against dollar denominated assets will have particular cyclical dynamics. And this will be very different to the situation where for example, emerging market economies are issuing dollar denominated debts to cover primary needs, such as energy and so on. But underlying all of this is the fact that the dollar liquidity is inherently pro cyclical and therefore policy interventions will be required over and above. Ideally, the ad hoc arrangements and the hierarchical arrangements that we've seen of the last super cycle by which official swap lines were reintroduced in some cases extended to new countries. But many countries further down the hierarchy are left effectively engaging in private operations to engage to obtain the dollar liquidity that they need. Okay, I have overstepped my four minutes I conclude with the thought that continued uneven hierarchical fed dollar provision of the type we've seen is unlikely to be effective as a thwarting mechanism. Now super cycles framework and then as part of a green super cycle a new green New Deal super cycle we would hope to see a more well thought out system of global dollar liquidity provision. I conclude there. Thank you very much Joe and let's just appreciate as an audience that what we have in this project are some of the elements that must be put together if we're to think comprehensively about the choices facing us right now we've got the question of the macro cycles and how they have been transformed, how they deviate from what might be needed to have a controllable capitalism. We see as well the, the need to link this to the problem of sustainability and of course the Green New Deal versus the degrowth debate is in there. And all of this distorted and run through the lens of financial, both hedging and speculation that accompanies these processes. It's a huge meal to eat. And we can see that our, our authors in this first paper have been very adventurous and throwing out a whole series of ideas and I would urge everybody to check out those, those papers will now turn to our second project. This is a project that basically, instead will focus called is called trajectories and infrastructure, financing in the UK. And whilst it does deal with the UK infrastructure, it puts it through an interdisciplinary lens bringing anthropology perspectives and political economy perspectives, and kind of identifying blind spots in what macroeconomic policy normally often misses. And in particular, the linkage of these processes of infrastructure financing to often poorly regulated, or even rogue private entrepreneurs and financiers. The project would be brought to us today and summarized by Elisa van Weinberg, who's a senior lecturer in economics and co head of the economics department at so as Kate Bayless who's a senior research fellow at so so as, and Benjamin bowls whose lecture and social anthropology at so as as well. So welcome all, and you have 25 minutes. Very much Gary so I'm Elisa and I'm very honored to be here together with Kate and then to talk a little bit about this other project that was funded by the rebuilding network. That is focused specifically as Gary says on trying to understand trajectories of infrastructure financing in the UK. So the original purpose of our project was to examine newly emerging forms or if you want instrumentalities of private finance in UK infrastructure. Our project run between May 2019 and and October 2020. And in essence, we were interested in examining mutations in the way in which infrastructure is financialized in the UK, taking as the starting point of our presentation, the abolition by the British government of the use of what was called the private finance initiative PFI or in its later iteration pf2 in autumn 2018. So tensions that emerged in the British model of involving private finance in infrastructure, and this was most emblematic in its in the abandonment by the government of the private finance initiative. And our question then was, okay, what is to come next in terms of how private finance is going to be involved in infrastructure. Now the private finance initiative PFI or pf2 had played a very important role to draw in private finance into new infrastructure assets, in particular in the health education defense and transport sectors. Now this was an important question, what was to come next, not just for the UK, but also more broadly given the heavy promotion of private finance something that Daniela, Yanis and Joe have already referred to in their project, the heavy promotion of private finance in infrastructure globally, first with the SDGs and now since the pandemic with the agenda around building back better. Now in the context of their building macro funding scheme so we're supposed to make contributions in terms of how we can rethink what macroeconomics should do etc. We were seeking to use our substantive interest in these mutations around the particular ways in which private finance is mobilized in infrastructure to be able to draw attention to the way in which underlying economic financial and political as well as cultural realities affect infrastructure financing policies and practices. So for us, the infrastructure financing policy was to serve as an index for an understanding of the role of the state beyond the capitalism that was traditionally offered by macroeconomics. What that meant more concretely is that we see infrastructure as a means by which political and social relations are articulated that contrary to traditional macroeconomic understandings we see infrastructure and its financing, not as politically neutral or simply technocratic. Importantly, infrastructure policy and practices for us are not just a matter of how much which is infrastructures quantity dimension as an additional source of demand creating employment and output, but also of what which is infrastructures linked to productivity and growth, but crucially of how and that captures then the processes of financing and delivering infrastructure that has that will have particular implications. So in this way, examining the role of private finance in infrastructure allows to reveal a blind spot of macroeconomics in its failure to situate financialization as core to contemporary state economy relations. Now, our research unfolded in most two militarist political and economic circumstances that the UK has witnessed in decades here in one year the year of our research project. We had multiple votes of no confidence in a sitting government stalling Brexit negotiations change of Prime Minister election Brexit three chancellors a pandemic onset of a recession and the deployment of monetary and fiscal tools on scales not seen in the future. And as we concluded our project in October 2020 there was actually very little clarity in terms of how the government would move forward. Concrete I think you can hear some shouting in the background but that's fine. So there was very little clarity in terms of how the government would move forward concretely in terms of replacing the private finance initiative that it had abolished. Now is then suddenly in late 2020 in late November 2020 up till mid December, we had this flurry of government policy documents around infrastructure. So we had the national infrastructure strategy that was published late November 2020 and that was more than a year overdue. So the consultation on how to finance new nuclear power stations to which the government remains committed there was an energy white paper, and there was an interim report by the Treasury on how to finance the transition to net zero. Now, these various policy documents are big on general statements but they're very weak on detail. However, while it does not seem to be the case that new mechanisms of drawing in private financing infrastructure are about to emerge in the UK, the existing mechanisms that have regulation at their heart are likely to be upscaled so regulation will remain very much economic regulation as it's called, will remain very much at the heart of the infrastructure financing landscape, going forward. Across these various policy documents that have now emerged, we have this recurring emphasis on affordability, quote unquote on fairness, quote unquote as important principles to govern decisions around financing and funding of infrastructure. That raises a whole set of issues that Kate will engage with in more detail around the question of regulation to what purpose do we have economic regulation and to whose benefit. So I'm going to hand over to Ben Balls, our social anthropologist in the project, who is first going to say a few things about around our approach and methods. And then Kate is going to take this forward in is to talk about some of the results, if you want, of what we discovered by looking in more detail to what we see as the fundamental inadequacies or impossibilities of a regulatory framework as it exists within which a financially financialized infrastructure takes shape and she's going to do that by focusing on one very important powerful agent that is operating within the British infrastructure financing landscape. So over to you, Ben. Thank you very much, Lisa. I am going to talk about our approach and method, specifically how we engage with interdisciplinarity on the project. Can everybody hear me okay. Right. Fantastic. Okay. So, first of all, the limitations of macroeconomic understandings of infrastructure have been increasingly illustrated illustrated by other disciplines. This includes anthropology my home disciplines approach to infrastructures as assemblages. That means as coming together as coming together with people relationships, technologies, financial flows and ideas. So this implies an interdisciplinarity where we in turn chose to adopt a frame from political economy, the systems of provision approach or SOP approach that I'm going to go into some more detail in a minute. So really this led to, to us focusing on the structures agents and processes of public provision to unpack the ideas pertinent to infrastructure financing and the cultures and norms that they give rise to. So, under infrastructure finance who gets what under what conditions and with what effect. This is agent led and based on relationships, rather than a set of technocratic decisions. And mentally and importantly, I think this research was inductive. So it was an open rather than hypothesis driven inquiry into the ways in which infrastructure financing in the UK is changing and why. And the inductive approach was actually why we ended up going more towards looking at regulation than some of the things that we originally thought that we would be focusing on, because of the importance of this regulated asset base. One thing to say in general about this approach is that we had a specific interest in institutional will real world processes narratives and developments that affect my macroeconomic outcomes and reflect broader economic strategies. So these larger and general trends are reflected in practice and that's what we really wanted to get at. Why did we choose the SOP or systems of provision approach. Well, this is a political economy approach approach that we identified as the best way of examining a complex system, like, for example, the provision of water or power infrastructure. The SOP approach was devised in the 1990s by Ben Fine in response to the failing of consumption studies to adequately explain what leads to particular outcomes in terms of who has what, how and why. It draws on political economy, as well as insights from other disciplines, including anthropology, sociology and psychology, and takes the view that consumption can be only be explained by a contextually specific and systematic approach. Outcomes in SOP are considered to be vertically linked to provisioning systems. Further, it is not just the way in which goods and services are provided that shape outcomes, but the ways in which the end user engages with these. Such cultures of consumption tend to be clustered rather than individual, given rise to social norms of consumption, which are indicative of the propensity of certain groups different, differentially to own or have access to certain types of goods or services. So, Ben Fine developed the SOP approach on the ground that it is only by careful analysis of the contested relations between agents along this chain of provisioning with attention to the features of the commodity and the context, as well as associated cultures, that we can understand the factors that lead to specific consumption outcomes. In contrast to other approaches to consumption, which assume a kind of kind of universality for the SOP approach, understandings of consumption are rooted in the specifics of what is being consumed, where and when. So, the diagram in front of you. The complicated drivers of consumption outlined above have been simply synthesized into five broad traumatic elements. These themes, they're interrelated and the boundaries between them may be blurred. These are agents, structures, processes, relations, and material cultures, and they are, as I say, interrelated and all have effect in the outcome of consumption. So there was these sets of this set of active components that we sent out to identify in the financing of UK infrastructure. So that's the SOP approach and why we used it. I want to talk a little bit more about our particular interdisciplinary approach and the way in which political economy and anthropology in particular answer different parts of this infrastructure financing question. So the study of infrastructure finance benefits from a interdisciplinary engagement. Concepts drawn from economics and political economy can help us to understand not just how meaning emerges and is it attributed to particular economic and interventions, but also how specific infrastructural interventions change relationships between individuals, communities, collectivities, states, corporations, and other private agents with attendant redistributions of power and resources. Anthropology in turn adds depth to political economy to unpack the narratives and meanings associated with infrastructure and how these may differ between actors. In finance, construction companies, the state, end users or taxpayers. And similarly, in, again, economics or political economy provides anthropology with an attention to financial and fiscal flows, sometimes something that anthropologists can often be slightly worse and not quite have the tools at getting at them so that the anthropology can gain an appreciation of the distributional impacts and wider issues that result from infrastructure provision, such as on labor effects and the effects on regional development. This we say will result in a richer understanding of what infrastructure is, what the effects are, and who are the winners and losers in an info in an unfolding set of relationships. And this is a quote that I particularly like that demonstrates what the way that we think about interdisciplinary is from Bath. It is that interdisciplinary work so much discussed these days is not about confronting already constituted disciplines to do something interdisciplinary. It's not enough to just choose a subject, a theme, and gather around it to all three sciences into disciplinary consistent creating a new object that belongs to, to know one. To conclude my section and pass on to Kate, we took this seriously and did not seek to just take infrastructure as an object and approach it separately as an anthropologist and political economists and then to add our accounts together in a kind of this and that fashion. Another, we set out to look at the infrastructure system as one of Bath's new objects and observe using all of the tools at our disposal, and also sharing our methods so we conducted the interviews together. We went into the data data together together and archive and literature to understand sharing our methods how different parts of it fit together to make a whole. So, Kate is going to now tell us how using these methods what we went on to find. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks everyone. Can you hear me. Is it okay. Yeah, great. Okay, so in a very short space of time, I'm going to talk about what we found. So we decided to focus on infrastructure financialization and the role of regulation this because this submerged as important in our, in our meetings, this is our inductive approach. We're showing literature on infrastructure financialization and generally it's associated with innovations in methods by which investors generate returns through financial engineering. Things like securitization of future income streams are high debts and often very complicated corporate structures. So the funds flowing between different companies within the same, same corporate family in the form of the blooms and charges and interest claims of dividend in ways that are very difficult to follow and even more difficult to follow where some of the companies may be located on tax So clearly then this system the systems are associated with a significant social cost. We're seeing regressive transfers from taxpayers and service users that many may struggle to pay to shareholders. We're seeing weakened accountability and transparency with these complex structures and potentially risky highly indebted financial structures, and there's also the risk of maybe these becoming too big to fail which then compromises regulation. So, in the UK, as elsewhere, we're seeing the government's committed to, as we heard earlier as well from first presentation to substantial share of private financing structure. So, at least as mentioned our PVP model of PFI, other models include contracts for difference in renewables. And then we have the regulated asset base which I'm going to talk about in a bit more detail. But essentially these are different mechanisms for ensuring that investors receive a secure revenue stream. This is really important if you're going to have private finance because they're going to commit funds up front they need to be sure they're going to get their money back. So these are sort of different modifications of incentivization companies. So we're going to talk about the, the Rad model in water and energy in Britain and show how this is facilitated financialization. I just want to mention in energy we're talking about transmission and distribution networks and not the retail companies that deal with consumers. So, the next slide. Thank you. So, regulation in water and energy takes a form of a system of price controls, it's known as RPI minus X and independent regulator the different sectors of water off gem for energy. The essence of the system is that the maximum tariffs that can be charged a certain advance every five years following a price review. And the allowed price increase is the inflation level and a factor X which is based on the regulation asset base race based on anticipated costs and performance against targets. So in water in 2019 PR 19 was the price review, which set prices for 2020 to 2025. And one part of the whole regulatory structure is that it's based on the narrative of competition. So these are seen as imperfect markets and interventions are all about replicating competitive processes. So even the price control system is intended to mimic the system where the producer would effectively be a price taker in situation of competition and importantly, because of this understanding this kind of narrative. It doesn't intervene in company debt or dividend payouts or corporate structures. These are seen as market outcomes. So prices are set in advance and outcomes are based on assumptions and these have consistently be biased, being biased in favor of companies. And this is why they acknowledged infrastructure financialization has been going on in water since the financial investors got involved in the mid 2000s and a number of companies, although not all but the companies owned by financial investors in the sort of classic pattern of financialization they've hiked up debts paid out high dividends, working through offshore, some offshore corporations in some cases, and this seemed to be ignored by the regulator for a long time but in 2019. We saw some new measures introduced specifically around financialization. One measure was that companies were required to share any benefits from being highly indebted with their customers, since it's clearly targeted at financialization. And then the PR 19 price review were required a reduction in water bills by an average of 12% over the next five years so this is seen as the regulator being very tough on on water companies, the toughest it's ever been. But unfortunately, since then we've had quite a backlash we've had an outcry from companies and full companies have taken an appeal to the competition and markets authority, and this is unprecedented. And to see that so many companies do this. And also, we've seen a downgrading of the company's credit ratings. On the grounds of what the Moody's the credit ratings agency calls political interference because these measures are seen as departures from long standing regulatory practice. So, so far the CMA seems residing with companies, but they make the final decision in March. But this dispute I think gets to the heart of the tensions of regulating infrastructure finance. On the one hand the CMA is concerned that tighter controls will be a deterrent to investors, but then of what has a greater interest in protecting consumers. So our view was that even if these in just these adjustments proposed by or what could be implemented, we still had a sense that even these measures weren't really fully engaging with the ways in which shareholders maximizing their returns in practice, particularly when it comes to financialization. And this is part of the insights from using this soft approach, you look at a sort of more systemic framework and the agents involved. There's a little detail at the activities of one, one investor operates across water and energy, Macquarie. So Macquarie is an Australian bank, one of the world's largest infrastructure investors and operates a range of funds across the globe. But essentially they hold and invest funds for smaller investors and for pension funds and individuals, and they earn their fees from what they charge to investors. It's very successful, it's highly praised and wins awards and their funds are usually over subscribed and operates across a range of sectors in the UK. In particular, we were interested in its involvement in water and gas networks. So, in water, we, sorry, I just lost my notes a second. So in water, Macquarie first got involved with a small company in 2003, but then they sold this stake in 2006. But during this time, they raised debt finance by a subsidiary in the Cayman Islands and double the borrowing of this utility. But then in 2006, they led a consortium that bought 10s water, which is England's biggest water utility. So the Macquarie stake, they had a 48% stake in the company that bought 10s in 2006. And this was held by six separate funds and some were located in Bermuda and Jersey, so it's a very complex ownership structure. So, Macquarie had its stake for 10 years, it sold its final stake in 2017. And in that time, the financing of 10s water was was revolutionised. So, so this chart shows the level of gearing so the ratio of debt to equity of 10s water and this is a kind of measure of the company's indebtedness. So we have the the notional gearing level, which is in green, which is what kind of assumes companies will be like in terms of gearing. Then we have the industry average and then we see the dark blue line is 10s as gearing. So when 10s took over in 2007, gearing shots up went from 57% to 72%. So at the time of the refinancing, the company paid itself dividends. Substantial dividends around the time that refinancing it went from they paid 500 over 500 million, despite having profits of only 190 million. But also this company refinancing when the part of the debt borrowed by investors was then allocated to the utility. It's kind of acquisition debt. So it's another element of the increasing debt of the utility of 10s. So at the same time as increasing debts, they were also paying themselves dividends. And at the same time that debts and dividends are increasing 10s is also pouring raw sewage into the water and into the river soon. And in 2017 10s received one of the largest fines for pollution caused by negligence. So this isn't a great track record. And this has been documented and led to lots of negative press when Macquarie sold its final state in 10s. Here are some of the headlines. The murky structure of the utility company. So, um, So it's well established that 10s under Macquarie ownership, it hasn't really been beneficial for the for the water utility, but then what's interesting is what happened next. So in the year that it sold its final stake in 10s, Macquarie was part of a consortium consortium consortium that bought Caden, which is the country's largest gas network. They bought it from National Grid. So it supplies gas to half of England. Now, in the four years since taking over Caden, the new owners have set up a parent company in Jersey. They've made dividends of 1.2 billion over the first four years. Now Caden isn't highly geared and the way that 10s was, they haven't had that kind of massive escalation in gearing. But this is in part due to restrictions attached to borrowing. But they have had the credit rating downgraded on account of the debts of the immediate holding parent company. So it looks like there's upward pressure on borrowing within the corporate structure. So it seems that some of the financial financialization has taken place. In waters being replicated in gas. And while it was a criticism of the way Macquarie operate in terms of nothing to stop them in the regulatory process to stop them moving straight onto the biggest gas distributor. So financialized entities are generating a large share of their returns in ways that are outside regulatory jurisdiction. So companies offshore, they refinance, they have loans with shareholders, they sell property, they make capital gains. But we can't quantify this because the information's not in the public domain. But we can learn from the decisions of investors in the in Macquarie's investment funds. So this this chart called a Valley Bridge chart from a presentation to the South Carolina Retirement System Investment Commission in June, advising this pension fund to invest in the Macquarie Supercourt Infrastructure Fund. On the basis of the high returns generated by an early Macquarie fund that had invested in terms of water. So I was able to access the working to the chart, but it shows that the initial equity, which was about 2.8 billion was increased by 2.7 times as a result of their investment in terms of water. And it also mentions in the presentation that this is outside of the allowable return. So from this chart it seems that like nearly five billion pounds reaching shareholders in ways that are outside the control of the regulator. So we found that the governance framework for infrastructure in water. And energy misses that a vast stretch of value captured by investors. And this narrative of markets and competition is actually being very powerful in obscuring the realities of financial extraction and the inequalities generated by this. Financialized funds are allowed to generate substantial returns in ways that are outside the scope of regulation. Now the state is an agent of this the state facilitates financialization it sets the rules and the legal framing of what returns could be secured and how can the gaps be plugged is tempting to think more regulation can sort this out, but regulation raises numerous challenges aside from financialization. I am just even just for things like information asymmetry, let alone mediating contested interest. And there are limits to what you can do with regulation. The process has become increasingly cumbersome. So this is a supposedly market led process but it's now becoming increasingly heavy with state intervention. The process is taking longer. We're starting the next price review PR 24 that's already started. And we still haven't finished PR 19 so this hasn't happened before. So aside from the costs we're losing transparency in the density of regulatory outputs. So it's kind of sinking under its own weight the regulatory structure. And also the regulators inevitably behind the investors a step behind is responding to financial innovation, by which time the investors have moved on. The measures being introduced by your foot now to some extent a result from what Macquarie did but Macquarie is now out of the water so they can be penalizing the wrong people. So it's hard to imagine how regulation can really combat this financialized extraction in a way that's really genuinely socially equitable. So moving forward, we have governments and international agencies like World Bank calling for more private investment, particularly in the wake of COVID as well. But then infrastructure is ultimately funded by end users and taxpayers. We need not to forget that. So it's widely stated that we need fair regulation. It's not easily. You don't often see exactly what that means in practice. And it's difficult to see how this can really work if we're having in context of financialization. So if we're going to look at social equity as an objective to upscale finance, we need to look very carefully at this to avoid creating a more regressive structures. Thank you. Thank you very much. We have a scenario then that as as in the other papers extremely complex. Cross cutting regulations protecting different interests and yet at the same time, exposing different players to extreme amounts of risk and leveraging up costs all the way through without necessarily delivering the goods promised how to move from here. Let's go into the question and answer session and exactly before we we go farther. And what I'd like to do is to pull two questions that have come in immediately for the first presentation. We'll take those out. I'll ask both of those. And then we'll allow that the members of that group to respond. And that will give us time to reflect a little bit more on the second presentation, and perhaps they have a second round of questions on that second presentation. So the first two sets of questions. First, from Sarah. How have have you explored how institutional super cycles apply to context beyond the US and the UK. What's the role of forms of governance that differ by nation, even in the context of globalization so asking that question. So we have a second question from a bra and a bra asks what international institutional mechanism would you suggest for the climate, the global climate issues, given the crisis after the Kyoto protocol so those are two questions put on the table for our first group of presenters. So I'll leave you to decide who might like to give some response. Before I start and the yellow Joe could probably add the thoughts to this. Okay, I mean, great question by Sarah, we have focused for this process on the UK, the US, and a few other countries in the global north like Italy, Canada, Germany, Japan. So in terms of what is happening in other countries around the world. Let me first say that, in theory, it's, it's more difficult to identify super cycles, for instance, the global south, because in many cases is just the last track so that we can find that do not work for a long period and it's difficult to produce the same the same pattern, but we haven't looked into that and would be interesting to look into into this of course. What is our interest in particular is how the super cycles in the global north have impacts on what is happening in the global south. For example, if we think about the current Genesis period, one way through which the the global financial system has responded to the crisis is by having, for instance, this quantitative easy programs, and there have been a lot of quantitative easy programs on what is happening in the market economies. And in many cases this other is this also happens through the the effects to apps that Joe described quickly. We are also interested in the fact that the crisis that we have in the in the super cycles in the global north. We have implications for the global south in what sense in the sense that the returns, for instance, for instance, versus have gone down. And that's a result of that there has been an interest in design policies in the global south, for instance, through PPP is, and we have seen that there has been a high interest from that especially since 2015, during what we call the Genesis period. So our emphasis is on understanding these effects of what is happening in the in the super cycles in the global north, and how this affects the global south. But we'll be very interesting of course to understand also how this can work in in poor countries. Now, the, in terms of the other question. I mean it's very difficult now to discuss the details of an international mechanism, but what I would like to point out is that there's, there is also an issue of feasibility I mean what is feasible and what we would like to talk about. But I think what is crucial is that over the last two or three years there has been more emphasis on issues of climate justice. And there's also the issue that at the end of the day, countries have contributed very little to the problem, are asked to conduct now investments in order to contribute to climate mitigation. And this kind is also have to spend a lot in order to adapt to the reality of climate. So I think what is very crucial about how to address address the climate crisis is how exactly countries that don't have the responsibility for the climate crisis can address the climate issue. And the answer should not be through the worst consensus is through is it should be through mechanisms that acknowledge the problem of climate justice. So we have this address about climate reparations we have this address about dead reliefs. This would be at the core of of of all these debates with respect to how we can address globally the problem of climate change. And this gradually will become a part of these discussions. I mean, I think I don't think we have more time to talk about other details of this but I think this is a very interesting question. Yeah, this and actually this thank you for that Janice. I'll tell you what why don't we bring in the the first question for the second paper because it goes to this question of who bears risk and how that works out. And maybe we can hear an answer to that and then come back to the first group. The question that was asked by far what is about Macquarie funds infrastructure assets across the world have a tendency to invest in monopolies. There's a lot of affinity from limited competition and barriers to entry, as well as deepening them. And this, you know, the, did you did you come across these patterns in the context of off what in the UK. To add to that, the idea that actually what we see in the in the global scale is the idea that we should have we can have blended finance that will de risk the the private sector as it contributes to the, you know, the financing of let's say climate change. And actually it strikes me that the extreme financialization that we're seeing that you recorded in your project, perhaps has to do with the fact that basically the de risking of all the financial players all the way along through ends up adding to these extreme debt that ended up getting handed to the UK users and taxpayers. So let me ask our second team. What do you think about this question of Macquarie funds and their tendency to invest in monopoly projects and so on. Go ahead. Yeah, jump in. Yeah. Yeah, totally Macquarie invests in insecure investments in in monopolies in the UK and they've been very strategic and where they put put their investments. I mean, and so in roads and tall roads but also in like in in railways they invested they invest in the infrastructure that gives them a very secure income rather than like even in gas, the, the networks for gas it's so such secure streams of revenue, they don't deal with customers they only deal with company the retail companies that deal with the people. So, certainly, that's exactly what they do they're also very strategic in investing in companies that they can but they can increase the debt or certainly in the companies that we looked at. So this companies that are described as under leveraged. So, yeah, certainly very strategic in where they put the money with their lowest risks and the highest potential returns. In terms of blended finance as well. Yes, the less risk that the private sector is exposed to the more risk of the ends up lying with the governments. And that just and then inevitably pushes up costs her end users. So actually maybe piggyback right on a question to your group as well your project as well from Tobias, who's, who says well who notes that well that with the coven 19 crisis. What we see is this massive fall in private capital flows to financial infrastructure, but at the same time that limiting that fiscal space policy space that's available for public investments so you know that the idea of limiting all of that that that we see as part of the pre coven discussion. Now we're seeing this squeeze. At the same time, you know there's a rhetoric about build back better. So how's that kind of happened, especially for global South countries. Where do we go from there. So, perhaps, shall I take this one Gary. Sure. I think that, yes, private finance suffered to a certain extent because of COVID but I, it's also clear that international agencies like the World Bank is very keen to get that back on track with their building back better agenda. I think, and we're seeing the start of that in terms of how the World Bank considers, you know, post pandemic reconstruction in the light of these increased debts. So if you're looking for alternatives, if that's the question to be asked is putting to us in terms of what would be alternatives rather than looking for the ways in which the the international financial institutions are going to try to revive their agenda. So a start would be meaningful debt relief to create fiscal space and the second thing would be perhaps that the international community can take internationally visit financial flows seriously. And what's quite striking is that when we had much celebrated financing for development third summit in Addis Ababa in 2015. The document managed to write private public private partnerships into a paragraph, but it wasn't willing to deal with the institution of a global tax body. So I think there are ways in which these things can start to be addressed. And, and, but there is no willingness in the international community to take these particular policies forward. We need to enable countries to have better domestic resource mobilization mechanisms, so that they can make decisions in terms of how they would mobilize their fiscal space with where they to have it. Currently, they are integrated financially in very lopsided ways, etc. And that means that they, their menu of options in terms of how they're going to build continue building. And it's not as if suddenly their infrastructures have been decimated is that their infrastructures to large extent are not existent in terms of our generation hospitals, whatever. And, but so I think there are alternatives they're not so complicated is just that there is no, there doesn't seem to be a willingness to push forward with these and what I think we'll see is and we're starting to see already. Actually, with colleagues with Mario Hasiel Romero from your dad and colleague Orania DiMacco, we have already started exploring initially how the World Bank is responding in terms of how it sees it mandate. And that's, I mean, I know that Yanis Daniela and Joe again have looked at that in the context of the green agenda, in terms of how it wants to make sure that the Wall Street consensus as Daniela has coined it and we are so grateful to her for this is going to come out a life and screaming out of this pandemic, unfortunately, because of the particular debts that would have been racked up in terms of the to deal with what the pandemic imposed on countries. Yeah, you know, you look at the fact that for the much of the global south, it's not build back better it's build. And, and yet there we have to probably think about that forgiveness to get anywhere near that. Now, actually, on regulation, I'm going to, we're going to flip this back to perhaps the other group. Your, your emphasis was on regulation the complexities of that. We have a question from Brian Kim, who's asking, saying, Well, you know, let's think about Hyman Minsky's proposal for stabilizing the banking system. And that, you know, that we ticking off several ideas that kind of going beyond Glass-Steagall, you know, for example, restricting assets and liabilities of subsidiaries in a bank holding company mandated that the banks make, you know, not make loans that excessively implicate the central bank with overdraft liquidity, and basically also breaking up the big banks. I mean, Minsky had numbers of ideas like this. So, you know, that and of course this goes to actually as something I'd like to kind of see us move toward what this all means for macro policy. And insofar as monetary macro policy now clearly involves prudential regulation, as well as, as you know, monetary policy control. You know, the question that's being asked by Brian here is, Well, what do we do if in the context of the supercycle idea that you've put forward, it embraces the entire global system. So what kind of solutions do we need to start thinking about? How do we get there? And I'll leave that for any of the members of the first research group. Okay, thank you. Maybe I'll take that. And to say that, I mean, in a sense, the obvious, we already alluded to the solution when Yanis described these alternatives of the green cycle, which can be this private finance led that we see an incidentally to respond to the question about what kind of international institutions or global spaces we have where we can, where we can see a more reasonable or a more a more substantive solution to the climate crisis what we see that most global spaces now are basically dominated by global finance and you can look at COP26 that is happening this year in the UK you can look at COP26, the UN only UNCTAD has remained a space where one can think about alternatives and UNCTAD has published a report in 2019 on the Green New Deal, which goes some way into thinking about these questions. I think it's a bit more hesitant on dealing with the power political power of global finance but but for us in the discussions that we have about thwarting mechanisms. It could be that basically you need to repress market based finance or the type of the evolutionary changes in finance that we had with the rise of shadow banking as a thwarting mechanisms. They need to be rolled back, and you can roll them back very easily if you if you put a very significant regulatory regime in place that basically penalizes dirty finance because a lot of that now comes from the kind of large asset managers and financial investors that are global in nature, whether there is a political momentum for this or a political context in which this can happen no one has to, I am very skeptical about it, I think it's a, I'm not sure what they would take for that to happen but maybe we are looking at it as interest rates are rising in the United States maybe everything will change very quickly if bankruptcies or rising interest rates in the states in the context of all these decade of quantitative easing could lead to some very surprising bankruptcies. But actually, you know and we would, we would want to move wouldn't we from the realm of soft law at the level of BIS and global regulation towards something harder. We've got just a couple of minutes left and so actually what I'd like to do is to ask perhaps the third members of each of the groups to just reflect a little bit on sort of, how would, what are the implications of this for the way that we would, we would want to see macro policy conducted in particular. And if, if, you know, if, if I can ask our anthropologist, Ben to you were talking about assemblages, and you know we think of people's voices and so on and we know that one of the challenges these days has been of you know, feeling frustrated that their voices are not represented and therefore taking often very radical action against democratically elected governments, elected for better or for worse. So you know what, what steps do you see there, Ben that could that could lead to changes in macro policy. Let me throw that same question to, to Joe and, and Joe if if, if, as you're thinking, you know we saw Daniela sketch out the vision of, you know, global changes, but how about national policy changes. How should macro policy change, in light of some of the research you've developed about the super cycles. Why don't we start with Ben, and then we'll move to Joe. Yeah, thank you Gary. As a social anthropologist and somebody who doesn't know an awful lot about macro policy this answer may seem a little naive so bear with me. If that's the, if that's the case but yeah you pointed out that I sort of started my part of this presentation by talking about assemblages, which is this idea, not just from anthropology but also from science and technology studies, Bernalito, actor network, they're in places like that come in that the, the, actually the social is rather complicated it's not just technologies is also people it's networks it's community communities and its ideas. And those things don't exactly have an equal power but they all have a substantial power and they're actually trying to work out how any system fixed together involves looking, looking across those different types of power. And I think that sometimes people will both sort of inside and outside of economy of economics and political economy. Think of these things as relatively, relatively technocratic and existing on the level of systems and not at the, not at the level of people, and therefore hard to understand. And I think that maybe possibly some of the additions that anthropology but also sociology and some some other interdisciplinary areas can add to this is a sense that actually these, these are easier for people to get their heads around because they involve, they involve power, they involve the, for, for example, they involve political actors they involve, they involve communities they involve regulators whose power limited by things that we can understand networks laws and relationships. So, in terms of people being ending up dissatisfied and acting out I think that possibly actually one of the benefits of interdisciplinary work is making economics more intelligible because it shows the complexity of actors that go into making up economic systems I'm not sure if that made any sense No, it does. And actually my, my partner for much of the project in the research hub that we guided Laura bear records how when the Bank of England has gone around to local areas. They're often telling their experts are telling people the way it is, what they have to accept rather than actually soliciting ideas from their experience as, as some of our research done by Jonah Montgomery and her her partners as shown as important. Let's turn for the final word we're right at that at time in a minute over, but Joe I keep challenging you with limits on your time. But what's your, what's your one page memo look like. If you have a list of things that we should think about for beginning to transform macro policy in ways that would be consistent with the super cycle threats that your your research points out. Thanks Gary. I think that what I would say is that the COVID crisis has changed perceptions of what is possible for macro policy, and that it's very clear now that many of the thwarting mechanisms, which were central to the last super cycle such as an inflation targeting framework systems of flexible exchange rates the assumption that lender of last resort would be a relatively infrequent and limited action. These things I think are increasingly widely accepted as having disintegrated mean that the basic building blocks of aggregate demand against aggregate supply determining in determining inflation the Phillips curve, and so on. We do live in a world now of big fiscal deficits, global dollar liquidity provision, outstanding quantitative easing on a very large scale. I think that it's, it's now widely accepted that things have changed, and the task is really to make sure that change is directed in a progressive way I think it's very possible that this kind of shift to a new fiscal activism, monetary activism, ongoing monetization of deficits ongoing dollar liquidity provision through swaps could be done in a very kind of paternal not paternalistic patronage type way from, you know, Tory MPs standing next to roundabouts and getting some new bypass built because they've got Boris Johnson's ear to globally countries forming hierarchies and access to international financial support and liquidity and so on being used as a way of sort of keeping the good guys on our side and the other people in check and so on. So I think at all these different levels our task is to is to say, look, we can see the world has changed. It's inarguable we're not going back to the way it was, but we have to do this in a progressive way and resist the sort of the divide and rule tendencies that could come with this kind of shift. And so I appreciate that and if I could just draw a line between your thoughts and Ben's, you know, Ben talks about the importance of citizen voice and, and raising that and that will be crucial for offering a counter to the politician who's got the Boris Johnson, so that we can even out those odds. If I could also comment just as, as I hear you this policy debate as you say that the context is changing the institutions and the, and the possibilities are changing. And in both cases both of these research projects really are not only explorations of what is, but they set up benchmarks for where we could be or where we should be relative to where we are. So I would urge in some sense, both teams of researchers to move to that those questions of, what does this tell us about what changes we need to make at both international national and local levels, in order to get closer to a sort of system that functions for and not just for the financialized elites. I think we're at the end of our time or actually four minutes over. I'd like to thank everyone for their, their kind participation, especially for our researchers for their, their great contributions and their amazing and to Kenny and to urge those listening to please, you know, put your, your efforts into the equation as well we need everybody's mind, everybody's heart moving forward as we try to solve these nearly impossible and yet absolutely essential problems facing us on planet Earth. Thanks everybody and have a great night. Do I will we have a final word from our. So as hosts are we are we good to go. Thank you Gary for sharing. All right. Thank you. Good night everybody. Thank you everyone. Bye bye. Bye bye. Thank you.