Financial Repression: How Inflation Is Used To Shrink Debt

Felix Nikolas Prehn's Podcast · Oct 8, 2026 · 22m · transcript

Financial repression is the mechanism by which governments keep interest rates below the rate of inflation, quietly transferring wealth from savers to the state. In this episode Felix Nikolas Prehn traces the policy from a recent presidential admission that inflation will pay off the national debt very rapidly to a Bank for International Settlements study showing the same method erased 2 to 3 per cent of GDP in debt each year after the Second World War. He sets out why the four conventional options for addressing 40 trillion dollars of US debt, raising taxes, cutting spending, defaulting or…