 Good morning, everyone. Or afternoon, in the case of our speaker, I'm Rob Johnson, the president of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. I'm very excited and pleased to present Yanis Verifakis on the crash of 2008, the pandemic of 2020, and the combination that changed capitalism forever. Just as a matter of ground rules, at the end of the presentation, we'll have time for a Q&A. Please use the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen to send your questions. Yanis is an economist, philosopher, author, politician. He's a member of the Hellenic Parliament, secretary general of Mayrod 25 and the co-founder of DM25. He was the former finance minister of Greece. Together with Bernie Sanders, he co-founded Progressive International to unite progressives around the world. He's taught economics at University of Cambridge, University of Texas at Austin. He's the author of several books, including Adults in the Room, and The Week, Suffer What They Must, and The Global Minitour. My personal experience included a wonderful podcast with he and his wife just a few weeks ago that you can find on The Economics and Beyond series. And I will confess, you can feel my heartfelt affection for this brave and imaginative man. I remember back at our Paris conference, when he and Joe Stiglitz and I had a conversation, how moved I was, both that he chose to support INET when so many things were on his shoulders, but also with the courage and the illumination that he brings to bear throughout his professional and personal life. Yanis, thank you for being with us here today. Rob, it's always a great pleasure to be with you in proximity or through teleconferencing and to support what INET does, because INET supports lots of things that need to be supported in this day and age. Thank you so much for the introduction. And thank you for asking me to talk about something that really touches me, because today there is this tendency by almost everyone, isn't there? Almost every commentator compares and contrasts the current disaster, 2020, the COVID-19 induced pause in economic activity across the world, more or less, to the crash of 2008. And the reason why I am a bit miffed by this comparison is my conviction that it is a mistake. 2020 is not a different crisis. It's an escalation of the crisis that started in 2008. But let's begin at the beginning, as they say. In the era of global capital flows and financialization, which proceeded at a pace after the end of Bretton Woods, to be indulging in the standard economic analysis looking at the American economy, the British economy, the Greek economy, the Japanese economy, all those nation-state based analysis are bound to mislead. If we have learned anything from the last 12 years or so, maybe longer, it is pointless to continue to do macroeconomic analysis the way we used to, focusing on a single country and looking at its weaknesses and strengths. The key to unlocking the mysteries around us is not anymore trade volumes or fiscal data. It is the ebb and flow of financial capital. This is why financialization has changed capitalism and the world we live in so profoundly. And why the crash of 2008, which wounded financialization very significantly, has changed the world in such a way that now a mindless piece of RNA, not even DNA, COVID-19, comes along with such profound impact. An impact which is very profound because financialized capitalism was in such dire straits before COVID-19 hit us. So it is through this prison that I want us to have this conversation today of understanding 2020 as an escalation of something large that started occurring in 2008 and which never left us. The crisis I shall be proposing of financialization in 2008 never went away. Financial markets recovered. Lots of money was made in them. But financialization as the linchpin of globalized capitalism has never managed to heal its wounds from 2008. And in other words, if I'm correct in my hypothesis to understand the post-COVID-19 world that we're all so keen to talk about, we cannot do that independently of understanding the post-2008 world. Now, let's take it right from the start. Once upon a time, money moved between countries. Mostly to finance trade. Much of domestic consumption was satiated by domestic producers, not only in countries large, almost atarctic countries like the United States, but also in my own big squeak of a nation in Greece. We produced a lot more of the stuff that we used to consume than we do now. Back then, therefore, it was possible to assess the strengths and malignancies of a national economy. Not anymore. Since the 1980s, the malignancies of the Chinese and the Germans in the Germans of the world are viciously intertwined with the malignancies of countries like the United States and Greece. Now, why am I lumping your great nation, the hegemon of the world, with bankrupt little Greece? Because we do share one thing. We're deficit countries. Now, the reason why I am referring to the end of Bretton Woods as a pivotal moment in capitalist history is because with the demise of Bretton Woods, we moved away from a system where the financiers were shackled. They were severely circumscribed into what they could. Therefore, allowing for a direct correspondence between the real economy and money flows. But the end of capital controls after the demise of Bretton Woods, especially after the early 1980s, enabled gargantuan trading balances to be funded by even larger rivers of money, mostly created privately through financial engineering. Now, since I mentioned the United States and I'm speaking to you in the United States, what I think is historians of the future are going to mark out as a very weird and profound phenomenon that began to emerge in the 1980s is that American hegemony effectively grew in proportion to the American trade deficit. That has never happened before in the history of the world. Usually, when an empire, a large economy, a hegemon, slips from being a surplus country to a deficit country, that goes hand in hand with the diminution of his hegemony in power. Opposite happened in the United States. Why? Because while the United States was slipping from a surplus to a deficit position vis-a-vis trade, at the same time, Wall Street played a central role in recycling the profits of the foreigners, the non-Americans, the Germans, the Japanese, later the Chinese whose net exports to the United States were creating those profits, but profits that ended up being recycled through Wall Street. It was on the back of this very interesting, unbalanced, dynamic equilibrium with the United States becoming the greatest importer of the world, both of commodities and of other people's profits. On the back of these gigantic flows of money into Wall Street and then from Wall Street to the rest of the world, including the United States, we had the phenomenon of financialization. In 2008, this financialization phenomenon, effectively like a house of cards, came crashing down. Why? Because financialization had created volumes of private money that were simply unsustainable, like house of cards. If you keep doing it, building more and more stories or floors on it, then at some point it will collapse. It collapsed. And even though it was refloated majestically by the Fed, by the G20s central banks that in April 2009 came together and refloated international finance, nevertheless, the capacity of Wall Street and of financialization to recycle the world's surpluses from mere money to productive investments, the investments of the sort that can create on a large scale good quality jobs in the United States, in Britain, in Europe, in India, in Latin America and so on, that capacity never recovered after 2008. That would be my hypothesis. Maybe we need a different session in order to maintain it, to support that hypothesis, to add to it empirical evidence. But I want to go further than that because I want to come to 2020. But before doing this, Rob, you will permit me to say that after the crash of 2008 in Wall Street and in the financial markets of the West, we now look at or we have been observing a very interesting bifurcation of leading economies, of let's say the OECD economies. Deficit countries, the more you look at them, the more they appear very similar, at least in one important sense. They are condemned to generate debt bubbles, debt bubbles, and for their working classes, helplessly to watch as industrial areas move into rust pits, whether these are powerful countries like yours, like the United States, or weaklings like Greece. Because the debt bubbles are the only way that you can keep financing the external deficits. Once those bubbles inevitably burst, workers from the Midwest to the Peloponnese are engulfed by debt bondage and falling living standards. At the other extreme, surplus countries differ a great deal more from one another. Take, for example, China and Germany. Both feature large trade surpluses in relation to the United States and in relation to Europe, for China, and to the rest of Europe, for Germany. Both China and Germany, if you look at it macroeconomically and macro sociologically, you can see clearly that there is repression of the working class income and wealth. In China, the numbers are particularly telling. Consumption is less than 50% of GDP. The working class do not even have rights of residence in the places where they work. They have very little access to welfare state. They have to save, save, save in order to survive. And even when they do save, the actual real interest rates that they receive on their savings traditionally has been negligible. So there is a repression of working class income and wealth in China. But so is the case in Germany. The profound difference, however, between China and Germany, is that in China, overall investment is very high. Whereas in Germany, it's very low. Germany's corporations invest much less. And this is, I think, at least from the Greek perspective, you will appreciate that. This is very important. German corporations rely for their aggregate demand on credit bubbles that are not created in Germany, but which build up in the rest of the Eurozone, in places like Greece, Spain, Ireland, Italy, and so on and so forth. So in other words, anyone who tries to portray the world as an arena where nations clash against one another, the Americans against the Chinese, the Germans against the Greeks, anybody who does that purposely or surreptitiously misleads you. This is not a clash between the Germans and the Greeks, the Americans and the Chinese. The main clash is due to the intensification of class war within Germany, within the United States, within Greece, within our nation states. And until you understand that in the context of the global financial flows that support an insupportable and maintain a non-viable, unbalanced equilibrium between imbalanced trade and imbalanced financial flows, we will never be able to understand finance, economics, or politics. We will never, for instance, be able to understand the rise of what I call the nationalist international. Donald Trump was on air in Brazil. Modi in India, the rise and rise and rise and triumph of the ultra-right and the xenophobes across the European Union. It is in this context that we need to understand it. And I still haven't come to 2020 yet. This is an analysis of where we were. There have been many very smart thinkers like Larry Summers, who tried to explain part of this through his hypothesis of secular stagnation, Joe Stiglitz has thrown an important light on it. My concern is that we should look at this globally. We should look at the delicious contradiction between, on the one hand, a planetary financialized capitalism, which is combining growing imbalances with an equilibrium that is imposed upon the world and those growing imbalances through financialization. This is the planetary level. And what happens within our countries? Now, 2008 was the moment when, and I think Rob, you know this better than anyone, because you were at the cold face, as they say. It was the moment when the bubble of the financial sector burst when we discovered that planet Earth was simply not large enough to contain and to sustain the gigantic mountains of private money that was minted in the form of CDOs and CDO squares and so on and so forth. But what happened next? What happened was that they were inflated by the Fed. And as I said before, the G20 central bankers that go together in a magnificent show of solidarity and socialism for the very few for the finances in order to ensure that whatever wealth was necessary to transfer from the many to the few from the real economy to the financial sector was transferred to save the financial sector. They did that. But it was a little bit like, was it not, giving cortisone to the cancer patient. So financialized capitalism is the patient. It suffered a major, you know, cancerous attack. And we pumped huge amounts of cortisone in it, in the form of liquid. The patient perked up. Financial markets did magnificently, have been doing magnificently ever since. And now we have a situation where, because those bailouts and the refloating of the financial sector was predicated upon a strategy for the many, whether we are talking about, you know, the Midwest in the United States, Britain, the continent of the European Union. Of course, Greece was the champion of austerity under the aegis of the murderous striker. We have austerity that what it does, essentially, it shinks two things, investment and the capacity of people to actually buy the stuff that companies can create. When you have austerity for the many and you've got there for this diminution of aggregate demand through reductions in investment and consumption of the many, of the multitudes, the only way to keep propping up the system is by pumping more and more liquidity into corporations. Once the finances were saved by the capital transfers and liquidity thrown at them by the authorities, then this excess liquidity had to be channeled somewhere. What do you do if you're a financier and you are given free money by the central bank and you have to lend it somewhere, right? Because the worst nightmare of a financier is to have liquidity that they do not pass on to some borrower. Now, you're not going to give it to the little people because you can see that the little people's incomes due to austerity are shrinking and you fear default. So you're going to give it to the large corporations. You're going to give it to the Amazons. You're going to give it to the Volkswagen's, to the Siemens's, and so on. But if you are now in the shoes of the CEO of a car company in Europe, let's say, and you get all this free money from the central bank or central bank money that comes to you through Deutsche Bank, Santander, and so on, from some commercial banker that wants to unload this money onto you, what do you do with this money? Do you invest it in more cars? You see that people out there won't be able to buy them. Won't be able to afford them at prices that are profitable for you. Well, actually, there's something much easier you can do. You can take the doge, right? And you can take it to the financial markets, to the stock exchange, and buy back your own shares because that's what's going to push them through the roof. The company seems to be doing very well and you're doing very, very, very well. Thank you so much, personally, because your bonus as a CEO, member of the board of directors and so on, hinges on the share price. That creates a very interesting situation. Financial markets that are doing extremely well, the real economy doing extremely badly. Never before did capitalism generate this disconnect between huge quantities of savings and liquidity on the one hand and very low by comparison in relative terms, levels of actual investment in fixed capital. This disconnect is the reason why we've been having trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars, dollar-denominated debt in negative yielding territory, negative interest rates. It is why we've had deflationary forces producing the political monsters across the world because deflation, unlike inflation, deflation poisons politics. But that's yet another discussion to have, especially with my German friends, for some reason, misunderstand their own history and keep on believing that it was hyperinflation that gave rise to the Nazis. No, it wasn't. It was deflation after her group meeting introduced in 1930 fears and stringent austerity that started pushing prices downwards, creating deflationary forces that took over effectively. I mentioned two paradoxes that are central to our understanding of how COVID-19 is shaping the future. One is connected to what I was just describing. Now, anybody who has studied economics is taught that equilibrium, a well-functioning capitalism, requires a number, a number, a number corresponding to the real interest rate, such that simultaneously we'll have equilibration between savings and investment and in the banking sector. Allow me just for those who were lucky enough to escape economics when they were young. Just a few words about this. It's not as complicated as it sounds. Savings is the supply of money. And investment demand is a demand for money. So if there is a pile of savings in some bank or under a mattress, it is crying out for somebody to take it at an interest rate and put it to work to produce new incomes, new businesses, whatever, a restaurant, whatever. So saving is the supply of money. The entrepreneur who doesn't have money but has ideas and says to somebody, to a saver, give me your money, I will use it for good purposes and I'm going to produce profits out of it and I'm going to pay you a substantial interest rate or interest, they are those who demand money. The rate of interest is the price of money. The price of investment fund. Now to equilibrate, there must exist an interest rate that equilibrates savings and investment because if savings is greater than investment, we have deflationary forces. If it's lower than investment, we have inflationary forces. So a well-functioning capital requires an interest rate that equilibrates savings and investment. Now, before 2020, between 2008 and today, that interest rate didn't exist. It was, or at least it was not possible to pinpoint a positive number for that interest rate. That's why we had negative interest rates, quantitative easing and so on. At the very same time, it's not enough for capitalism to equilibrate savings and investment because the whole of the financial system, including corporate capital, depends on the interest rate. So if the rate of interest, for instance, falls below zero, then pension funds are destroyed. If pension funds are destroyed, the whole of the financial market circuit goes into a tailspin. And here is my hypothesis, or theory, if you want. From 2008 onwards, after the crash of 2008, a number did not exist such that if it prevailed as a rate of interest, it could simultaneously turn savings into investment and not destroy the financial sector. That's conundrum number one, paradox number one, contradiction number one. And that preceded COVID-19, right? Now, the difference between 2020 and 2008, because there is a difference, of course, is that in 2008, it was not the bubble of the bankers that burst, it was the bubble of the corporate debt that was burst. I mentioned before the ease with which corporations, I mentioned Volkswagen, I'm not targeting Volkswagen, it just popped into my head and I mentioned it, any corporation, the ease with which corporations were addicted to central bank money meant that they could survive and keep rolling over their debts. They could survive long periods of low, even negative profits because of this liquidity. This liquidity allowed them to keep pushing their share price up even to reap some rents as a result of this constant minting of central bank money going their way. So what the last 12 years before COVID-19 hit did was to create a gigantic bubble in the whole of the corporate sector. In 2008, it was just a banking sector that was sitting on a bubble that burst with effects that we all remember. In 2020, this bubble had extended to almost every nook and cranny of corporate capitalism across the world. This is why COVID-19 is so significant because it's like a pin that pricked this much larger bubble, a much larger bubble that existed in 2008, but a bubble that exists due to the bursting of the 2008 bubble and to the attempt of central banks and authorities to refloat that by effectively spreading the bubble of liquidity across the corporate sector. And now we have this second vicious paradox or contradiction. The first one, remember, there exists no real interest rate, which is low enough to turn savings into investment and not too low as not to destroy pension funds in the financial sector. That was the first paradox. Now I'm coming to the second one. And it is this, after 12 years of boosting financial markets, asset prices are just far too high. I mean, look at what has been happening over the last three months. Capitalism is in suspended animation. Somebody first pause, there's no demand and there's no supply. People are locked in, incomes are falling, production is falling. And the financial markets nevertheless are doing remarkably well. Why? Because of all the public money that has been printed and injected into the financial markets. These public monies, quantivising, called whatever you want, are keeping asset prices artificially high. Those high asset prices are the opposite side of the same coin or the other face of the same coin that is inequality. The reason why asset prices are so high is exactly the same as the reason for which a majority of people in a majority of advanced countries are struggling to make ends meet. They work so destroying jobs. They work all hours and there is absolutely no connection anymore. That's the end of the American dream if you want to put it that way. There's no connection anymore between how hard you work and the probability that you will manage to rise up in social mobility stakes for instance. There's no connection. However hard you work, you are never going to make it these days. At least for the median American, for the median Greek or German for that matter. So huge inequality is the other side of the coin of high asset prices. Now any new deal, Rooseveltian new deal, Green New Deal we hope, at a planetary level, will have to steadily shift savings to investment in order to produce the good quality jobs and the green transition that the planet needs and society needs. But Rob, and this is my worry. I hope I'm wrong. Any such Rooseveltian new deal at the planetary level, which is the only thing that can save us as a species, is going to depress asset prices relative to other prices because asset prices are kept artificially high through the current refloating of financial markets independently of the real economy. But it's not as easy as this because most corporations today survive due to the cheapness of their loans. But to get those cheap loans, they need collateral and the high asset prices guaranteed by the central banks are essential for maintaining the value of the collateral which is necessary for maintaining the flow of loans to the corporate sector. So we are, you know, dumbed if we do, dumbed if we don't. If we don't deflate asset prices, we're not going to create a good quality jobs that will reduce inequality and save the planet and society and prevent the poisoning of our politics by the fascists or call them whatever you want, right? And if we do, corporations are going to collapse. So between those two paradoxes, I locate the major contradictions of globalized capitalism. If you add to this the politics and the technological innovations of our era, take for instance, the fact that today, the fear of infection in the era of COVID-19 effectively prepares the human mind for the applications of big tech companies that in cahoots with governments are going to create and spread around for biological data and geolocation data combinations that allow us access to algorithms that can be very useful in the midst of the pandemic. So, you know, they measure our temperature, our blood pressure or whatever they can even do chemical at some point tests on us and alert us to the probability of being infected if we go into this shopping mall as opposed to, you know, going somewhere else to a football match, whatever. Yeah, but this for me is 1984 or it large because the system that monitors our coughs can also monitor our laughs. It can know how our blood pressure responds to the great leader's speech, to a boss's pep talk. You know, this idea just makes the KGB look so pathetically neolithic compared to what we are facing. Moreover, you know, some of my and maybe our colleagues who are progressives and prone to more intense optimism than I am. You know, they celebrate the fact that the lockdown has created a lot more solidarity between people and I celebrate that too. They celebrate the fact that the state now is powerful again or at least people recognize how powerful the state is. They can tell us not to get out of our homes. It can, you know, just nationalize whole swathes of the economy even under neoliberal regimes. But nevertheless, when I see state power increase with corporate capitalism being both in control and in fragmentation and in this crisis and this conundrum that I related a moment ago, I worry, I worry because, you know, state power does not necessarily mean power of the demos of the people. It can be, you know, the power of Donald Trump, of Adolf Hitler, of Benito Mussolini, of Mr. Modi, of Mr. Bolsonaro and so on. To wind it down so that we can shift to the Q&A part that I'm very much looking forward to. My thought for the moment is that capitalism is not what it used to be. Financialization and particularly its demise in 2008 has created new contradictions that even Karl Marx could not have imagined. At the same time, progressives are nowhere near organizing a political movement internationally in order to use state power to rigid and to plan again an economy that works for the many, not a socialism for the very, very, very few, which is what we have today. This lacuna of political organization, the lack of a Franklin Roosevelt today, the lack of a political movement that can actually put the financial genie back into its bottle and rethink property rights over the new technologies that are upending capitalism anyway, separately from its crisis with financialization. This lacuna is putting us on effectively a fork in the road where we as a species must decide which way we're going to go. Are we going to move towards a dystopia in which a stagnant capitalism, 2008, 2020, yields an industrial feudalism with a very few barricaded behind very tall walls and electrified fences in gated communities. And out there, you have scenes like Escape from New York if you remember the John Carpenter movie. Or we're going to move into a post-capitalism that combines rationality with solidarity. Thank you. Very, very powerful, Janus. Very broad-based, very historical. I guess what I'm haunted as you come down the stretch is when you said we are experiencing more activism. The state is more powerful. They can nationalize various industries, formerly private sector entities, but that state power does not mean power of the demists. It does not mean broad-based representation. What reforms do you think we have to look in the eye and demand as people to unlock the constrictions on the representation of the demos? Ah, well, that's the $64,000 question, isn't it? A year ago, I would have answered in a new dealer kind of way, that what we need is to revive the important idea behind Roosevelt's New Deal of mobilizing public finance for public purpose. I still believe in that, except that now the crisis has escalated with COVID-19 to such an extent that I think it's not enough. It's important. It's a necessary condition, but it is not a sufficient condition because even if we manage to do it, think of Bretton Woods. Bretton Woods was, despite its many, many, many malignancies, it was a remarkable experiment in constraining finance and shrinking inequality. Nevertheless, the system that is predicated upon, capital accumulation on the basis of the separation of who works in the company and who owns the company and the ownership of the company through the stock exchange, is turbocharged through financialization. You know, even if we took Franklin Roosevelt, John Maynard Keynes, you know, Jesus Christ, the Buddha, will put them all together. And they and their angels or, you know, minions designed a global system. This process, which combines private finance and stock exchanges, will find a way of subverting it and creating another 15th of August, 1971, which was the end of Bretton Woods, if you remember, when Richard Nixon was forced, effectively, by the system's fragmentation to end Bretton Woods. So I think that this is not just a question of mobilizing existing liquidity for good purpose. We need to do that. Absolutely. It is necessary. But as I said, it's not sufficient. So what would make it sufficient? A redistribution, not just of income, but of property rights. For me, the more I think about it, you know, I go back to an interesting moment in 1599, when in London, at the time when William Shakespeare was finishing off or up Hamlet, we had this remarkable decision to found the East India Company, the first joint stock corporation with shares that were anonymous and liquid, and they could be bought and sold like pieces of silver. You know, that is a pretty remarkable thing to do, right? It's a pretty remarkable thing to decide that we're going to have a huge corporation and ownership is going to be anonymous, liquid and tradable. And independently of what this company does, who works in it, what effect it has on the world, on the environment, on the people that it exploits or it deals with. I'm increasingly drawn to the idea of shares like library cards. How about that? Does it sound very name? You know, you enroll into, you go to school, you go to college, you know, you go to the New York University or Stanford, or whatever, you know, your community college, and you're given a library card. It's yours. You use it. You can't sell it. You cannot even rent it or lease it to someone. It gives you access to knowledge. So how about, you know, corporations where you have one person, one vote, one share, and, you know, you accumulate capital in it on the base of bonuses. I'm not talking about everybody receiving the same amount of money. You can have bonuses that are very different depending on how, you know, esteemed your contribution is amongst your colleagues, and there are voting systems that can generate that. And then when you leave, you take, you know, you trade one library card for another. You go from one college to another. You go from one company to another. That would be, of course, the end of the circle change. I think, and, you know, I've just finished a book about this, Rob. This is why, you know, I dare speak those words because I've put a lot of thought into it and my book is coming out in September, trying to imagine post-capitalism. The more I think of it, the more I come to the conclusion that for markets to work well, we need to end capitalism. We need to, which means what? To end private banking and end stock exchanges. So every corporation is a cooperative, one member, one share, one vote, and there is no private banking. We don't need private banking. You know, the Fed could grant every US resident a bank account. You know, what is the point of having intermediaries? You know, think about the absurdity of quantitative easing. You know, there is a pandemic. The economy goes down the toilet like now, right? And what the Fed does is it lends money to Bank of America or, you know, to Citibank in the hope that Bank of America and Citibank is going to give it, pass it on to the people and to companies to do good things with that. Now, whenever you put a private banker between the central bank and markets out there or society, most of it disappears or ends up being misused because, you know, bankers have, as you know, they have a very clear rule, never lend it to people who actually need it or who will do good things with it. They lend it to people who will speculate with it. That sounds, you know, if we... If extra-terrestrials, rational extra-terrestrials were to visit planet Earth and look at stock exchange, look at all this activity, these brilliant minds that were all day shuffling paper around or it's not even paper anymore. It's, you know, ions in some digital space with financial engineering and all that, creating just, you know, as Paul Volcker said, you know, he was to remember his comment when he was told about all the wonderful financial engineering that was invented. He said, you know, in all my years in this business, all I have seen is new forms of debt being invented, right? So if we had, you know, imagine if every... If each one of us had a digital account at the Fed, maybe two accounts, three accounts, savings account, a checking account, whatever. And whenever there was a crisis like now, the Fed could simply type into our accounts an additional amount of money to spend so as not to allow, you know, demand to crash, like, you know, in the middle of the pandemic now. That would work so well and there would be no point in paying all these huge fees to bankers. And if you end the combination of private banking and share markets, then suddenly, you know, we have corporations where, you know, we make decisions democratically within them on the basis of one share, one vote. Okay? And it's remarkable how sensible people can be when given an opportunity to vote about things in their own outfits, whether it's a corporation or, you know, a town hall meeting. So how about, yeah, the idea of democratizing the economy, which means, doesn't mean the end of markets. It means the end of share markets and private banking. Therefore, I will finish off with this hypothesis of mine because I like hearing it. I'm going to repeat it once more. The only way to have properly functioning markets is to end capitalism. That's a beautiful paradox. One of our audience is watching from Senegal and asked the question, I can see clearly the paradoxes and their impact in the developed countries. Can you say a bit about how this plays out for the developing countries like Senegal? Thank you so much for asking this question to our friend because it's so important. The relationship between developed economies and economies like Senegal has always been hugely important and toxic. Remember that very soon after the collapse of Bretton Woods in 1971, it was the developing countries that suffered the trials and tribulations of the first debt crisis, created by the emerging financialization. Remember the structural adjustment programs of the International Monetary Fund? They started in places like Senegal, in Kenya and so on, before once they had honed them completely, before they brought them into the midst of Europe with a tractor programs in Greece, in Ireland and so on and so forth. So we are all interconnected in this. The connection of the present conundrum that I described in my introduction, in my speech, if you will, with what's happening in Senegal today. I think the linchpin is the ill effects of massive minting of dollars by the Fed to keep corporates alive because of the spillovers of this money that you remember immediately after 2009, 2010, there was a gash of dollars going to developing countries, seeking higher rates of return than they could find in the United States or in Europe. That created bubbles in Senegal and other countries with the local oligarchs making ill use of this increasing debt that was coming into the country from the quantum easing packages of the Bank of Japan, of the Bank of the Fed, of the Bank of England and so on. That creates artificial wealth in countries like Senegal. It empowers the local oligarchs against the majority of the Senegalese. And then once panic sets in the financial markets in Wall Street, the city of London and so on, the money that flooded into Senegal, flood out of Senegal, the bubbles burst in Senegal in the developing countries, and then the IMF comes in and demands the expropriation of your waterworks, your electricity grids, and the closure of your schools and your hospitals. So we're in this together. This is why I made the point that it is a gross error to imagine that we live in a world of the Americans against the Chinese, of the Europeans against the Senegalese. No, this is a class war that is raging in every country and the oligarchy without frontiers are very united in this. So to my friend in Senegal, your oligarchy are on very good terms with our oligarchy here in Greece, with the German oligarchy, with the American oligarchy. They have bonds of solidarity that I only wish the rest of humanity had. There's a question that goes back to your library card analogy. Is there a bibliographical reference regarding your deflation and politically motivated episode regarding Germany that you spoke about early in the conversation? Is there a history of that? There are quite a few sources, but I hope you forgive me if I could refer to my effort. You mentioned it kindly in your introduction. You said that the weak suffer what they must and the weak suffer what they must, but with a question mark that gives hope at the end. This comes from an expression into cities in which the powerful Athenians, just before crashing a weak nation, responded to the weak nations representative who said, this is not appropriate behavior. Just because you are strong does not mean that you are a weak nation. You may end up in a weak position. The Athenian general turned around and said, the strong do what they will, and the weak suffer what they must. This was the title of the book, in which I try to explain the dynamics within the European Union and the role of Germany within the European Union in the broader context of the world. We have questions about the contrast between the United States. The United States, and excuse me, on one hand, and Europe on the other. When there was a Bretton Woods system and a gold standard, there was a constraint or an anchor that when that collapsed, things opened wide. The phenomena, things like stock buy backs are much more prevalent in the United States and Europe. Do you see Europe's current structure as more healthy than the United States? Or does the United States dysfunction essentially swamp the whole boat of the world economy? Yes, it has. Remember in 2008 how self-confident the Europeans were that, ah, this is an American crisis. It's an Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Sphere, a crisis of the Anglo-Sphere they used to call it. Because we Germans, Greeks, French people, Italians, I don't want conservative. We never put all our eggs in the basket of financialization and so on. We were so smug the Europeans in 2008 until they discovered what was inside the books of Societe Generale, Ben Pepparibas, Finance Bank, Commerce Bank, Deutsche Bank. They realized that the German and the French banks, together with some Italian and Spanish banks, were far, far worse than anything that was going on in Wall Street. I think the same thing applies here. You'll find that corporations in Europe are not that different to Apple and other companies in the United States that combine on the one hand, they have large savings, which is absurd. Why should the corporation have savings? When I was a young man, I used to be taught by pro-capitalist free marketeers that capitalism is fantastic because households save and companies borrow to invest. What is the point of Apple having stashed away in Ireland $250 billion of savings? That is a waste. It is a waste. It's irrationality in action. At the same time, they borrow money from the Fed because it's free and they buy back their own shares and they have trillion-dollar valuations. But Europe is not different. The only thing that is different in Europe is because Europe has been so much more in name and incompetent in managing the crisis of 2008 and continues to be there in the United States because of the lack of institutions. We don't have a US Treasury. We don't have a US Treasury bill. We don't have a Eurobond and we're still insisting that we shouldn't have one. I mean, this is just complete madness, but it's not exactly madness. It's class war again, but I don't want to go into this now. Because of this inanity and terrible management of the crisis vis-à-vis the United States management. Now, I know that most Americans are so disheartened today in the United States that you find it very hard to believe that Europe can be even more incompetent than the United States. Believe me, it is and it can. Because of this incompetence, there's been a reversal. Effectively, European corporations have fallen behind the United States. I was looking at some data recently. In 2007, a year before the crash, European corporates had earnings about $100 billion more than American corporations, net earnings. Today, the situation is exactly the reverse. So, European corporations are falling behind, but what they do is not very different to what happens in the United States. I've got a couple of questions that feel to me like they were designed to help the President of INET with his agenda. So, I'm very happy to ask. He said, could Yanis share his thoughts on the subject of economics. Are there any theories or areas in the current state that can accommodate his vision and analysis? And if not, what would be appropriate in the medium term? And so, I'll let you go. And then the other that comes forward is, you mentioned the lack of strong progressive political movement. Is there a room for conversation on post-capitalism? And if so, what can economists and their political aids do to make it palatable to the average citizen to embrace? In other words, breaking through the ideologies that have been our false consciousness up to this time? I'll start with the politics and then go to the economics, Rob, if I may. The answer is that, you know, this is a good moment to make inroads into the global political scene and to come up with what some of us are putting together in the form of a progressive international, a global political movement that thinks globally and acts like activists locally. I'll give you a small example, right? Remember, sometime when it was in March, the story of Chris Smalls, the Amazon employee that was vilified as a result of having dared to strike or to organize a strike in New Jersey in one of the warehouses of Amazon, complaining about protesting against unhygienic conditions in the warehouse. He was fired. And from what we now know, there was quite a long discussion in the board of directors of the richest corporation in the world on how to vilify him or to portray him in the media as inarticulate. Imagine if we had a global movement that's called the Progressive International because some of us are creating one. We first inaugurated in November 2018 in Vermont between the Sanders Institute and our Democracy in Europe movement. In September, we are moving to Reykjavik in Iceland under the aegis of the Prime Minister of Iceland to give it another boost to give the Progressive International another boost. So imagine if this Progressive International existed and was functioning back in March, and we could organize a worldwide strike against Amazon. Just one day do not even visit their site. Just one day, it's not a big deal. It's not a great cost to people not to visit the Amazon site just for one day. If it was successful at an international level Christmas would not have been fired and we were to combine solidarity with one worker one warehouse in New Jersey with global action and imagine we could do this every day one day in Nigeria, another day in India another day in China, another day in Hong Kong, in Greece and so on. This to me is what is necessary. We don't need another system of economic thinking because I used to believe in creating a system of economic thinking that could contradict the dominant paradigm I no longer believe in that. I believe in studying every system of thinking and being eclectic and learning bits and pieces from each one of them. So I've learned a lot from Marx I would not understand capitalism without his labor theory of value and his business cycle theory which was the first business cycle theory which combines the class struggle with the ups and downs of the business cycle profitability and employment and so on. I learned things from of course John Maynard Keynes without whom it would be impossible to understand financialization today and Minsky. I've learned things from my political opponents Hagek his understanding and insights on prices as signals that play a coordinating role of course this is a Smith story but Hagek was very good at developing that idea so I believe in dipping here and there in different systems of economic thought I don't believe that capitalism can be understood by a single system of thought. Why? Because capitalism is unruly capitalism contradicts itself therefore no system of equations to put it mathematically that can be solved can never capture the dynamics the joys and the horrors of capitalism this is why we need to be eclectic and to be you know like philosophers you know I don't believe you can be a decent philosopher if you only follow Emmanuel Kant or if you only follow you know David Hume you need to you know like the bee in the valley to collect juices from different flowers to create your own honey. We're coming to the end of our time but I want to ask you one last question and it relates to green energy given this austerity prong recession given the deficiency of aggregate demand is it possible to create what I'll call a green Keynesianism a green fiscal policy to transform the economy and make it more resilient and the question was addressed by the author to Europe but I think it's a global question as well well we run in the last European Parliament election under the Green New Deal so the answer is absolutely yes because you see remember I mentioned before that since 2008 we had this disconnect huge savings very little investment all we need to do we need to take the savings and invest that's all we need to do the idea of FDR that was the original idea of the New Deal you use public finance instruments in order to shift idle liquidity, idle cash into investments so that's what we need to do we can do it it's not difficult at all imagine a situation where in the same way that the central banks go together to save finance imagine that we had the treasuries getting together with the World Bank to create public financial instruments green bonds that are issued collectively and the central banks agree to make one statement they need to make one statement that we will buy them in the secondary markets if needs be to keep the interest rates low suddenly you have a huge amount of money that you can spend on green energy the qualities are straightforward of how to create to use existing we're not talking about creating money we're talking about using existing money existing savings and putting it into good use so yes we can do it but who's going to do it you know, Roosevelt is dead and we didn't do very well in the European Parliament elections last year when we had this this program one of the reasons why we didn't do well was because we did not have the money to compete with campaign financing with the juggernauts who were supported by the banking sector who really don't want any of this because they're doing really very well without green energy this financialization constantly rolling over debts and constantly being refloated by central banks is fantastic for them and we have well Janis, we've covered a lot of ground a lot of how do I say, deep and painful things to explore and I told you before that my virtual background had jumping dolphins because the dolphins were excited for me this morning that I had its audience thank you for what you do for the world and issue the challenge you stir the drink and we certainly need to be stirred and to become more active and create a healthy vision for the future and you are a contributor to that path thank you so much Rob thank you