Latest / Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs / Season 2, Episode 14: Francisco Rodriguez, The Human Consequences of Economic Sanctions

Transcript

Season 2, Episode 14: Francisco Rodriguez, The Human Consequences of Economic Sanctions · Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, I'm Jeffrey Sachs.
• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Book Club, a monthly conversation with world-leading authors who have written scintillating, inspiring, and remarkably important books about history, social justices, and the challenges of building a decent world.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome, Francisco Rodriguez, to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs, and to all the listeners, I'm absolutely thrilled to be speaking with a good friend and a wonderful and wise economist, Francisco Rodriguez.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: We go back, I think about 25 years now, maybe even a little bit longer.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: You showed up as a star graduate student at Harvard University, and I got to watch your stardom rise because you've been a very wise political economist.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: Even before we and the faculty got to you, you were making links between politics and economics from way back.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: And for the listeners, Francisco is the Rice family professor of the practice at the Joseph Corbell School of International Studies at the University of Denver.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: But Francisco, you've been all over the international scene, which is also quite special in the private sector, in capital markets firms, at Bank of America, in the public sector, at the International Monetary Fund, at several university posts, at the United Nations, at the Council on Foreign Relations.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: So you've really seen international affairs and international economics from all the different perspectives.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: And you've been focused for as long as I've known you on the interrelations of politics and economics.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe that's because you come from a very, well, interesting country, let's put it that way, Venezuela, where politics and economics have been so deeply intertwined throughout the history of the country and where in the last 20 years geopolitics, that is the relationship of Venezuela to the United States, has been the determining factor of Venezuela's ups, but mostly its downs during this period.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: So it's great to be with you.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I ask you to join the book club because you've written uh not a book per se, but a book-length manuscript, which is downloadable by everybody and a very important study, I think a uniquely important study, the human consequences of economic sanctions.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: So that's where I'd love to start with you.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_01: Hi, Jeff.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks so much for this invitation.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_01: It's really a pleasure to speak with you once again and to have some time to talk about some of the research that I've been doing on both sanctions and on the Venezuelan economy.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_01: And part of it was prompted by my interest in Venezuela.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_01: As you know, I've written dozens of papers and two books on Venezuela.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_01: And Venezuela has experienced the largest peacetime growth collapse documented in world economic history, at least since 1950.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_01: We're talking about a decline of 72% in per capita income.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_01: That's the equivalent of three Great Depressions.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_01: Even wars don't produce collapses like that.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_01: Even worse.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_01: This is much larger than the average decline associated with a war.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_01: So I started looking at the Venezuelan economy, and as you know, I've been a growth economist since my training at Harvard, and this struck me as a particularly anomalous phenomenon because even though there's been a lot of things that were wrong with Venezuelan economic policy over the past two decades, we've seen policy failures all around.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_01: We've seen populist economic policies in Latin America.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes these policies end up in large economic crises, but these crises are, you know, contractions of 15, 20, maybe 30% of GDP, but not 70% of GDP.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: To get a collapse of 15% of GDP is extraordinary.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: Most bad economic policy means you don't have economic growth, or maybe there's a decline of a few percent of GDP.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: What you're talking about is a upper middle income country, I guess, or maybe upper income, high income country at the beginning of this, and just a complete collapse to destitution for a significant part of the country.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: Just to put it in the context for listeners, because we are trained to have some idea of what it means to have a 70% decline of per capita income.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: You never see it.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: Like you say, this is the one case.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: But to convey that, it's a catastrophe.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: I think Ukraine, the estimate, would be in the middle of this brutal war, down 50%.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: And Venezuela in peace, relatively speaking, though, because of the instruments of war that we're going to talk about, down even more than that.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_01: That is correct.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_01: And we've seen an exodus of 7 million persons.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_01: That's equivalent to a fourth of the population.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_01: Again, this is something that you don't see outside of wartime.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_01: Venezuela's malnourishment rate, for example, was less than 2.5% of the population back in 2012, which is typically what's considered kind of normal for a developed country.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_01: Now it's up to a third of the population.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_01: Poverty rates have skyrocketed to 95%.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_01: So it's in all dimensions of living standards.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_01: This is really an unprecedented collapse in Venezuelan living standards.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_01: Now, when you look in more detail, I mean, at first this looks like a puzzle, but when you know that Venezuela was an oil exporting economy, and it's been an oil exporting economy for the past hundred years, that 96% of its exports were oil back in 2012, and that oil exports declined by 93%.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_01: So basically the only thing that it sold to the rest of the world essentially evaporated.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_01: Then it's not that surprising that the country suffered a collapse.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: And by the way, am I correct in remembering that in the data, Venezuela has the world's largest reserves of petroleum, either number one or number two?
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: Not proved reserves, but I mean just to say this should be a completely rich country beyond the scale of the Gulf countries.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_01: It's unbelievable.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_01: It's number one.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_01: Venezuela has more oil than Saudi Arabia, more oil resources.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_01: You know, there's a discussion as to how much of that you can call reserves, because the economic concept of reserves also has to do with production costs and investment in technology, but certainly it's the country with most oil under the ground that we know of.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_01: And by far, by far, yes, that's correct.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_01: So, yes, this is a country that had kind of everything to be a rich country.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_01: And the discussion on Venezuela and what's happened in Venezuela in the popular press, for example, is really misleading in many senses because it's not unusual for one to find press articles that completely fail to mention economic sanctions.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_01: And sometimes the articles will make some mention in passing as a secondary contributing factor.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_01: But the reality is that when you start looking at the data, and this is something that I've been doing for the past several years, it's very clear that there's a very strong impact of sanctions on the country's oil production.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_01: Now, I'm not claiming that it's the only contributor to its poor living standards, and I've been a critic of the economic policies of Chavez and Maduro for the past 20 years.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: So let's just take a step back for everybody.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: Of Chavez is Hugo Chavez.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: He was president of Venezuela from 1999 to 2012, I believe, and was a leftist president.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: And for that reason, I would say for that reason, uh especially uh rather despised by the U.S.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: administrations.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: And then he died of cancer and was followed by his vice president, Nicholas Maduro, who has been president from 2012 to today, and even more despised in a way than Chavez, or more attacked by the U.S.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: for continuing in the so-called Chavista line or the pro-leftist line and in the United States, the big trigger is uh friends of the Castro regime in Cuba.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: But basically, these are the two presidents, and what you're saying, and I can also chime in here, that if you pick up a typical news story, you say Venezuela's in crisis because it's had left-wing governments and uh they're following a left-wing line and it's destroying the economy.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: And that's pretty much what you get out of uh a mainstream media account.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: Now, you're saying that's not quite so.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: There's something uh rather big in the background, and that is sanctions.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: And before we get to the specifics of the sanctions, can you define for listeners what does it mean, sanctions?
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: What does the term even mean?
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: What does it mean in the Venezuelan context?
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: Then how could it have an effect worse than a war?
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_01: And we can think of sanctions as impediments to international trade and financial transactions that are imposed for foreign policy purposes.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_01: Now, sometimes governments impose trade restrictions for other reasons, but when it's to achieve a foreign policy end, we call that generally economic statecraft.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_01: And we talk about sanctions as being these very concrete restrictions on trade with countries or trade with governments or trade with entities that are located in particular countries.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_01: Now, in the case of Venezuela, Venezuela, as I was describing, is very strongly dependent on oil, and its oil is produced uh exclusively by a state-owned company.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_01: So that state-owned company, which is Petroleos de Venezuela, by Venezuelan law, by the Venezuelan constitution, it has a monopoly of oil production.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_01: It can form joint ventures with other foreign companies, and it has done so in the past, but it has to be the majority owner of all of those associations.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_01: And what sanctions have meant in practice are impediments issued by the US government through executive orders that bar US companies, US banks from carrying out any type of transaction with the country's oil industry and with the country's government.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_01: And the US, prior to these sanctions, was the main market, the main destination for Venezuelan oil, but it was also the source of a lot of supplies of intermediate inputs and capital goods for the Venezuelan oil industry.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: So the equipment to produce the oil came from the U.S.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: The market in which the oil was sold was the US to a large extent.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: This was a mutual relationship, a trade relationship.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: The U.S.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: helped to support the industry, but it was a state-owned company, Pitavesa.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: And in return, Venezuela earned a lot of income with its oil, used the oil to import a lot, to import medical goods, to import other machinery, to import consumer goods, and so forth.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: And that's all, in a way, pretty natural if you happen to be a country with lots of oil reserves.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: So what happened?
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: It sounds like a working relationship.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_01: And not only the country with a lot of oil resources, but also in the Western Hemisphere.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_01: So this country was a natural supplier to the US.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_01: Now, something else that's important to understand is that the US is about one-fifth of the world economy, it's about one-tenth of world trade, but 90% of international financial transactions evolve the US dollar.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_01: And all of those transactions, at least all of them, which are of a certain magnitude, go through US financial institutions.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_01: And what that means is that if the US decides to block you out of financial markets and it decides to stop you from using its financial institutions, you can't use banks.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_01: And if you're a large oil company that's trying to sell oil to the rest of the world, not being able to use banks is quite damaging.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_01: However, the US pressure, which became known during the Trump administration, the Trump administration was the one that first imposed economic sanctions on Venezuela and was part of what they characterized as the maximum pressure strategy.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_01: And the idea of maximum pressure was that the US was going to use all means at its disposal to get Venezuela to change what the US wanted to change, which essentially meant regime change.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_01: The US wanted Maduro out of office and it was trying to use all of this economic pressure in order to drive Maduro from office and in order to try to drive the military to rebel against Maduro.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_01: So when it started doing this, the US didn't just forbid its own companies or its own banks from doing business with Venezuela.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_01: It actually said to other countries if you do business with Venezuela, if you buy Venezuelan oil, we will sanction you.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_01: It said this to European companies, it said this to Indian companies, it actually sanctioned a Russian company, Rostnev, that tried to help Venezuela sell its oil internationally.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_01: So effectively, Venezuela ended up with very few partners willing to buy its oil.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_01: And this was a significant driver, and I think by far the largest driver, of the collapse in Venezuelan production.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_01: Venezuelan production collapsed because the country had nobody willing to buy its oil and because it wasn't able to import the inputs that it needed to keep its oil uh sector working.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: So just to add to uh the sanctions vocabulary, these would be unilateral sanctions by the United States.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: The Trump administration decided to try to crush the Venezuelan economy.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: And uh it did it unilaterally as opposed to going to the UN Security Council, for example, and having UN-backed sanctions, which is part of the UN system if it's approved by the Security Council.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: So sanctions can be used as a means to try to keep the peace, but this was a case of unilateral sanctions where the US administration decided we're going after this regime.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: This is a regime change operation or a regime change attempt.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: Is that correct?
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: And and then a second term that I think is useful here is secondary sanctions, if I'm using the term correctly, is not sanctions directly on Venezuela, but sanctions anywhere in the world for those who might think about trading with Venezuela.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: So basically, as you said, this is a net that extends or aims to extend over the whole world.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: And basically, it shut off Venezuela's main export company, which was the source of more than 90% of Venezuela's export earnings.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: So all the dollars that Venezuela needs for running daily life for importing the things that Venezuela doesn't produce itself, like medicines, suddenly is shut off.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: But in addition to that, if I recall, the U.S.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_00: also even sanctioned the access to the government's own foreign exchange reserves.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe that came later.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: Is that correct?
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_01: It did so in different ways.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and here's where it gets really interesting and to a certain extent complicated, because uh what the US government also did in January of 2019, pretty much at the same time at which it was sanctioning the country's oil industry, is that it recognized a legislator from the Venezuelan National Assembly, Juan Guaidó, as the president of Venezuela.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_01: So the Venezuelan opposition argued that Maduro's 2018 election had not been legitimate, and that therefore Venezuela's presidency was vacant and it should be occupied by Guaidó, who was the president of the National Assembly, and the National Assembly was under control of the opposition, which had won control of that assembly in the 2015 parliamentary elections.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_00: I'd like to pause here for one moment because I regard this as one of the most astounding.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's if it were in theater, it would be hilarious.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_00: But this was real life of grown-ups.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: The US declared, okay, you're not the president.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_00: The president is the one we designate.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: That's uh this guy in the National Assembly, not the president of the country.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_01: Right, right.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_01: There's a very long tradition in international affairs in which the recognition of a government is distinct from assigning its legitimacy.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_01: There are a lot of governments in the world that we don't like, there are a lot of governments in the world that have come into power in many different ways that we don't consider legitimate, but yet the choice to interact with a country, with a state, goes on with the government that has de facto control over the territory of that country for many quite simple and basic reasons.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_01: If you're going to defend, for example, your citizens in that country, if you're going to defend the interests of, for example, your firms that are located in that country, uh, if you want to have some type of communication, if you want to deal, for example, with influxes of migrants, you have to communicate with the government that actually controls the territory.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_01: So what the Trump administration did, which was then followed by the Biden administration, which maintained that policy, was to say, no, we don't think that Maduro is legitimate, and therefore we're going to ignore that that's the government that has control over the territory, and we're going to recognize a government that has no control over even a fraction of its territory.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_01: But not only are we going to recognize it, we are going to give it control over all of the country's international assets.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_01: So that includes the country's international reserves, but that also includes the bank accounts of Pedeveza.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, so all of the money that Pedevesa had, all of the money that the central bank had was transferred to the Guaido uh government.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_01: This includes Citco's.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so one of the largest US refining companies is totally owned by the government of Venezuela.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_01: So what the US government did was that it handed over control to Guaido appointees of Citgo, and therefore Citgo could not function in any way directed by the government of Venezuela, that actually was producing the oil that Citgo was supposed to refine.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_01: And there's actually a quite interesting development in this because last month a judge in Delaware ordered the sale of Citgo, which is going to be sold in order to repay creditors.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_01: Those creditors have not been paid by the Guaidó government, which is the one that was supposed to represent Venezuela, because it has no money, because it doesn't produce oil exports.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_01: So all of the debts that are being dealt with in this Delaware case were debts that were being paid by the Maduro government prior to sanctions.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_01: So as a result of this, Citco, Venezuela's most important asset, and the one that allows it to sell its oil to the US and to have it refined for US consumption, is going to end up in the hands of creditors, whereas it could be in the hands of the Venezuelan state and producing revenues for the Venezuelan people.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_00: So this amazing sequence took place where first the Trump administration said nobody can do business with almost the exclusive exporter of Venezuela.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_00: Second, we don't recognize the president of Venezuela anymore.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_00: We have chosen another person.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_00: Third, we're going to give the financial resources of the government to the control of the person we have designated to be president.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: Rather extraordinary.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_00: Now, what happened?
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_00: And that is the gist of your study.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_00: This is one of the case studies, and then part of a broader look at what these sanctions systems actually produce.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_00: But what you found is that the results of this were absolutely devastating, as if the United States had gone and bombed the Venezuelan people, but perhaps even more devastating than that would have been.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_01: Completely.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_01: It was a surgical strike directed at the country's oil industry.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_01: Venezuela's oil production was stable at 2.4 million barrels a day between 2008 and 2015.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_01: It declined in early 2016 prior to the sanctions, at a moment at which oil prices were collapsing, oil prices had declined by two-thirds, and oil production was declining in a lot of countries in 2016, because, well, if whatever you're selling to the rest of the world is suddenly worth one-third of what it was just a couple of years ago, it's not unusual for you to cut production.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_01: But what I identified looking at the data is that after August 2017, which was when the US first imposed financial sanctions, you see several inflection points in Venezuela's oil production.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_01: So there's one when oil prices were starting to recover, and everybody, including international markets, including international forecasts, by uh some of the most prestigious uh forecasters in the world, were expecting Venezuelan GDP to pick up, and we're expecting Venezuelan oil production to pick up.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_01: Venezuelan oil production went on a nosedive, and that nosedive starts exactly in August 2017 when financial sanctions were imposed.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_01: These financial sanctions, and it's really important to understand what they did, these were the first Trump sanctions, and they barred Venezuela and its state-owned oil company from borrowing.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_01: So you take any large multinational oil corporation and you bar it from borrowing, that means that you bar it from refinancing its debt.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_01: That means that you forced it into default.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_01: And in fact, Venezuela had to default two months after the imposition of these sanctions.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_01: But it's even worse than a default because when a company defaults on its debt, what typically follows is what we call a research.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: Restructuring of that debt.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_01: It sits down with creditors and it says, well, let's reach a payment agreement so that we can restore credit access.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_01: Venezuela was unable to do that because it was barred from restructuring its debt by US sanctions.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_01: I've looked in particular at data from the Venezuelan oil industry, distinguishing joint ventures between multinational companies and the state-owned oil monopoly.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_01: And I've distinguished between the firms that had access to finance prior to the sanctions and the firms that didn't have access to finance prior to the sanctions.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_01: And what I find is a much stronger deterioration in production in those that had access to finance and therefore lost it as a result of the sanctions.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, in those firms, production was growing.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_01: After the sanctions, when financial access was closed, what you find is that they're undistinguishable from the firms that had never had financial access.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_01: So all of the evidence here points to a very significant effect that forced that nosedive in Venezuelan oil production.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_01: And Venezuelan oil production fell from the 2.4 million barrels at which it had been stable between 2008 and 2015.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_01: It fell to around 400,000 barrels in 2020.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_01: One-sixth the level.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_01: And that's the period of the collapse.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_01: That's the period of the intensification of the collapse.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_01: And in fact, from 2020 on, we see that the Venezuelan economy has begun to recover somewhat.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_01: And it's because it slowly regained access to oil markets.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_01: And it's regained access because some of the international actors that were at the beginning dissuaded by US sanctions, and particularly China, has started buying a significant amount more of Venezuelan oil.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_01: And also because oil prices recovered, particularly in the wake of the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_01: So that's the reason that the Venezuelan economy has grown somewhat in the past few years.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_01: But all of this just basically reinforces the story that what happened to this economy was that it was an economy that was completely specialized in oil, highly dependent on oil revenues.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_01: You cut off the access to finance, to trade, to inputs of that oil industry from international trade, from the rest of the world.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_01: You're going to force a collapse in that oil production.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_01: So if we go back to this military analogy, it's almost as if the U.S.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_01: had decided that it was going to bomb Venezuelan oil installations.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_01: It had the same exact effect on the Venezuelan economy.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_00: Did uh the US Congress vote for all of this?
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_00: Was this debated in the American public?
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_00: How is this done?
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_00: Because the consequences for tens of millions of people are remarkable.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_00: The U.S.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_00: Constitution says in principle that declaring war is an act of Congress.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_00: This is tantamount to war and its economic effects.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_00: So what is the even within the US context, not to mention the international context, what's the legal basis for this?
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_00: Who decides on something like this?
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_00: And given the incredible humanitarian consequences, what's the implication of the process by which actions like this can be made?
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_01: Even restricting international trade is something that corresponds to the US Congress in the Constitution.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_01: Now, the US Congress delegated some of that authority to the executive branch back in World War I in what was initially known as the Trading with the Enemy Act, which then became the International Economic Emergency Powers Act.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_01: And that's a law that allows the US president to restrict international trade with countries that pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to US national security.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_01: And the presidency has to declare a national emergency.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_01: And in fact, that national emergency was declared in the case of Venezuela.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_01: Now, this is something that the US, it was actually done by the Obama administration.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_01: It's something that the US has started doing.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_01: Whenever it wants to declare sanctions, it issues these national emergency declarations.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_00: I hadn't noticed that Venezuela was creating an emergency for the United States.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I mean, you'd be surprised at the number of countries that the U.S.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_01: claims are generating a national emergency.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_01: And all of this is essentially a legal pretext in order to impose sanctions.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_01: And something that is actually quite remarkable, a US representative from Illinois, Chewy Garcia, has introduced legislation that would require the US to study, just to study the effect, the humanitarian effect and the effects of mortality of its sanctions regimes before implementing it.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_01: What's really remarkable is that the US doesn't do this.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_01: There is absolutely no report, internal or external, issued by the Treasury Department or by any of the entities that are involved in applying sanctions that tells us that the US has even considered what the humanitarian effects are of these sanctions, despite the fact that we know, not just in the Venezuelan case, but as surveyed in my study, we have evidence from dozens of peer-reviewed studies identifying very large effects of sanctions on economic growth, on health conditions, on mortality, on human rights, adverse effects on human rights.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_01: And these are the human rights that these sanctions are sometimes presented as trying to protect.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the evidence is that the human rights situation deteriorates in many dimensions after sanctions are imposed on countries.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_01: So the imposition of sanctions is generally a disaster and a catastrophe for the populations living in these countries.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_01: But the US, when it imposes these sanctions, pays absolutely no attention to these effects, doesn't make any attempt to quantify them, it makes no attempt to monitor them.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_01: It basically acts as if they didn't exist, despite the fact that we have very strong evidence that sanctions are as destructive as wars.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_00: And there is, as far as I know, no congressional oversight or review of extraordinary threat or emergency.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_00: Not only did Congress supposedly delegate this to pure executive discretion, it shows no interest after the fact of asking, is this a proper use of this delegation of power?
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_00: Are we still under extraordinary threat?
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_00: I suppose, by the way, that by law, Venezuela still is an extraordinary threat to the United States.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think that was lifted to this moment.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_01: Does anybody review this?
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_01: No, absolutely not.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely not.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_01: And in fact, it's it's actually quite interesting because a similar motivation, a similar argument or pretext was used by the Trump administration in order to direct resources to building the border wall that Trump wanted to build.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_01: And there it was challenged legally.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_01: And these declarations can be challenged legally.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_01: But the thing is that who's going to challenge a sanctions declaration?
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_01: It would have to be challenged by the country that is sanctioned, but that country actually can't even hire a lawyer in the US without OFAC authorization.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, the Maduro government cannot hire a lawyer even with OFAC authorization because it's not the government of Venezuela.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_01: Any legal representation of it would have been carried out by the Venezuelan opposition representatives.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_01: So even access to the legal recourse that there is in principle in the US legal system, even access to judicial review, is not possible for most sanctions cases.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_00: Can you speculate why this incredible animus towards Venezuela took hold?
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_00: Obama started it actually, in the sense of fairly broad sanctions, but nothing like what Trump put in.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_00: Then when Trump came into office, I know from speaking to a president in Central America, in the first dinner that Trump had, I think at the UN, in his first year of office, he met with Latin American presidents and he openly opined maybe we should just invade Venezuela.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_00: So it was already a rather extraordinary, unbelievable idea.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_00: And then the other presidents said, Mr.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_00: President, that might not be a very good idea.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_00: And so Trump destroyed the economy through signing of this extraordinary threat claim.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_00: But what is the underlying animus?
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_00: Because, frankly speaking, there are lots of countries where the US doesn't see eye to eye.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_00: It does often go out of its way to try to do damage.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_00: But this is rather extraordinary campaign of damage.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_01: I think that there are several factors.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_01: One of them is the foreign policy team that Trump appointed.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_01: John Bolton, who was the national security advisor and was very influential in crafting Venezuela's sanctions policy, he writes in his memoirs, he recounts the discussion of imposing sanctions on Venezuela.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_01: And he writes, and I quote, I thought it was time to turn the screws and asked, why don't we go for a win here?
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_01: So basically, there were people in the Trump administration who believed that if they imposed these sanctions, these sanctions were going to be so harmful, they were going to cause so much economic damage that Maduro was just going to be forced to leave office, that the military was going to overthrow him.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that they convinced Trump that this would be a big foreign policy win.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_01: And here we get into another factor, which is the role of diasporas, and particularly diasporas that are very well organized in key US jurisdictions and what are known as swing states.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_01: Now, there's very interesting research by Tyler Castra that shows that the fraction of diaspora populations in swing states, in US swing states, is a key determinant of US sanctions policy.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_01: And we definitely, yes, yes, it's very nice paper, and we definitely have seen that in the Venezuelan case.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_01: So Venezuela was key in terms of garnering support for the Trump administration in Florida, which was a very important swing state.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_01: It was one of the few states in which Trump actually increased his vote share between 2016 and 2020.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_01: And this has to do with a very radicalized both Venezuelan and Cuban diaspora, which understandably, because this is the way in which many diasporas react, they want more pressure on the government.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_01: They believe that if more pressure is put on the government, that is somehow going to lead to change.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_01: Even though all of the evidence and all of the work that's been done on the effectiveness of sanctions shows that sanctions are particularly ineffective a lot of times, but particularly in terms of generating regime change, is something that they don't really work at, among other things, because you can't really tell a government, well, you know, I'm going to impose sanctions and I'm going to lift them if you leave office.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_01: And that government is going to say, Well, what good is it to me if you're conditioning it on my leaving office?
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, uh, quite obviously, you also give the government the very clear explanation to the public.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_00: We're being attacked from outside.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_00: This is not my mishandling of the economy.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_00: This is absolute imperialist behavior from outside.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_01: That's correct.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and in fact, about three-quarters of Venezuelans, according to several opinion surveys, opposed U.S.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_01: sanctions.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_01: There's a large fraction of Venezuelans who say that they will not vote for candidates that have supported sanctions.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_01: In the last regional elections that were held in December of 2021, the traditional opposition, which is the opposition aligned with Guaidó, the interim government that supported sanctions, got just 42% of the opposition vote.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_01: The other 58% of the non-Maduro vote went to other political movements that did not support sanctions.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_01: So it actually ends up being a complete political disaster for the country as a whole and for those who want to see political change in Venezuela.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_00: Tell me what's the international context and reaction.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_00: When this started, as I said, I happened to be in Central America for a visit when uh the U.S.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_00: named Guido, so I was meeting with the president of a Central American country.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_00: He explained to me this rather bizarre behavior of the White House.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_00: I said, how could grown-ups do this?
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_00: Just announce a different president, and he kind of shrugged, but his country went along with it, as did dozens of other countries, actually.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_00: I know he didn't believe it for a moment, but it showed the U.S.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_00: power in this.
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_00: On the other hand, there's a huge amount of formal unhappiness about these unilateral sanctions regimes.
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_00: So where does this whole debate stand right now?
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_01: So at the time at which sanctions were imposed by the Trump administration, the majority of Latin American countries and of large Latin American countries were governed by center-right to right-wing governments.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_01: And they were able to forge a coalition that very strongly supported US policy.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_01: Partly it's just the political dynamics in these countries.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_01: You're seeing the same polarization that you see in Venezuela.
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_01: You see it in many other countries between the left and the right, and it just turned out that the right was in power.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_01: Right now, the left is in power in most Latin American governments, and that's why most of them oppose and are very critical of US policy.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_01: Now, the other thing that happened was that the US was able to convince a lot of the international community of what they themselves or the US foreign policy team had convinced Trump, which is that these sanctions would be effective so rapidly that they would drive Maduro from power.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_01: So when a lot of European countries jumped on the bandwagon and said, oh, we'll recognize Guaidó too, they were expecting that this was just going to be a matter of weeks.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, there's a pretty interesting contrast between Europe and the US, in that the US and some Latin American countries actually not only said that they were recognizing Guaidou, but they recognized Guaidou-appointed ambassadors.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas no European country did that.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_01: European countries actually, when the Guaidou ambassadors started turning up in these countries several weeks later, they said, wait, let's think about this more carefully.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_01: And they maintained the Maduro ambassadors.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_01: So they were saying that they were recognizing Guaido, but they weren't really doing it in practice because recognition is the government that you engage with.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_01: So in the end, this ended up being actually more a policy that was implemented by the US, but it was implemented by the US and several very important countries for Venezuela, its two largest neighbors, Brazil and Colombia, that were at the time also under the control of right-wing governments.
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_01: And therefore, it basically closed off Venezuela's relations with its neighbors and its most important relations to the government that had control over the country.
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, when the Ukraine war broke out, suddenly the White House was running to Venezuela to pump more oil.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_00: Where do things stand now in this rather bizarre six years of attack?
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_00: Because some of these sanctions, or most of them, remain on the books.
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_00: And yet the Biden administration, while it has maintained the Trump policies in a way, it seems like it's trying to have it both ways somehow regarding Venezuela.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_01: Well, there's a sense in which it's become even worse.
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_01: There has been some easing of sanctions, but that easing of sanctions has occurred in such a biased way so as to make transparent that the only US reason and rationale here is to protect US interests.
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_01: The US issued a specific license for Chevron, the only American company that is involved in oil production in Venezuela to sell Venezuelan oil in the US.
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_01: It has not given a similar authorization, even though it's been requested by European companies.
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_01: It has not granted that authorization to European companies.
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_01: Venezuela used to have a monopoly over its international oil trade that was mandated by the Venezuelan Constitution, which was approved by Venezuelan voters.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_01: Now that's become turned on its head, and now there's a monopoly of a sale of Venezuelan oil in the US that is held by a single company, which is Chevron, that has been allocated by the U.S.
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_01: administration.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_00: Bizarre.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_00: It really twists the policies in knots or what poses for foreign policy.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_00: In your wonderful study, Francisco, you reviewed all of the technical literature you could find.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's 32 studies, I believe.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_00: So you reviewed the entire literature about the effects of such sanctions.
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_00: And if you could summarize what you found, I really hope that listeners will go to the website of the Center for Economic Policy Research, we'll make that available for people to find your excellent paper, which can be downloaded.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_00: But what is the summary of the gist of this, not only in Venezuela, but across all of these multiple and still burgeoning cases in number?
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_01: So of the 32 studies, most of which were peer-reviewed, 30 studies found unambiguous negative effects of sanctions on living conditions in target countries.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_01: Now we're talking about effects on economic growth, on GDP, on growth collapses, effects on public health, effects on life expectancy, on mortality, on child mortality.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_01: These 30 studies found negative effects.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_01: The remaining two studies, one of them had ambiguous effects, and the other one actually was a non-peer-reviewed study that had a lot of coding errors.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_01: So the reality is that, I mean, basically everybody who's looked at this seriously has found large significant effects.
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_01: And the effects are very large.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_01: One study by Matthias Neewen, Kircher, Gudman, and Florian Neumeyer found that the cumulative effects of sanctions was to cause a decline of 26% in per capita GDP.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_01: So that is the size of the Great Depression.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_01: So sanctions cause a Great Depression.
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_01: Another study found that they led to declines in life expectancy of 1.2 years for men and 1.4 years for women.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_01: That is similar to the estimates of the effects on life expectancy of the COVID pandemic.
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's basically the pandemic.
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly, exactly.
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_01: Extraordinary.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_01: Others find an increase in the poverty gap, which is a comprehensive measure of poverty that can rise by up to 14%.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_01: So generally, the pattern is actually quite clear here.
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_01: There is very decisive and consistent evidence.
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_01: I've studied a lot of fields of macroeconomics, a lot of fields of economic growth.
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_01: I have rarely found this level of consensus about the effects of a policy on a variable of interest.
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_01: Typically, there are arguments on both sides of different hypotheses here.
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody who's looked at it, or everybody who's looked at it seriously, has found very large, significant adverse effects that basically tell us that when sanctions are imposed on a country, they cause an economic and they cause a human catastrophe.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_01: It's war by other means.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_00: Indeed.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_00: And the consequences are huge.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_00: And war by other means is not even governed in the US case, which I think is the number one applier of these unilateral sanctions.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_00: No other country does as much sanctioning as the US, but it's not even reviewed by our own institutions, much less by the international institutions.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I know you and I have been on some calls with the Special Rapporteur for human rights related to these unilateral coercive measures.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_00: And there is a case that this is such a stark violation of human rights that it really runs against the UN Charter.
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_01: Clearly, the UN Charter establishes mechanisms through which sanctions can be imposed by the UN Security Council.
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_01: And the UN also has a set of guidelines through which it provides an overview of the humanitarian effect of these sanctions, and it has a robust system of humanitarian exceptions, and it also has mechanisms for review of the effects of these sanctions for independent review through its ombudsperson.
• 41:53
  SPEAKER_01: None of that exists at the level of unilateral sanctions.
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_01: So it's not surprising that these unilateral sanctions appear to be particularly damaging in terms of the effect that they generate on living conditions in target countries.
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_00: It would seem that the UN Security Council should take this subject up, at least as a general subject, the burgeoning rise of unilateral measures.
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_00: Is there any move towards that?
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, the US, as the major proponent of such sanctions, will oppose it, but still getting the Security Council to review your study, for example, would seem to be a quite urgent matter.
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_01: I think it should.
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, obviously the US will oppose it, and quite possibly the UK, which is also a Permanent Security Council member, will oppose it.
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_01: But there's a reality here, which is that these sanctions, which are highly damaging to the people in the countries that they're imposed on, have now become a standard foreign policy tool for countries like the US.
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_01: According to my estimates, 27% of all countries and 29% of the world economy is now subject to sanctions.
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_01: Now, in the 1990s, this was 5% of the world economy.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a dramatic change.
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_01: And this has implications for everybody, for all countries that are involved in international trade, among other things, because of the way in which countries like the US are using these sanctions extraterritorially so as to affect trade between other countries.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_01: So it's not just in the US jurisdiction, but the US is targeting places where it should have no jurisdiction and where it has no jurisdiction according to international law.
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_01: So it's definitely a matter that should be subject to some type of review.
• 43:31
  SPEAKER_00: I know this is early days and still very speculative, but are you discerning in this massive uh sanctioning of Russia in the context of the Ukraine-Russia war?
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_00: Some evidence that countries are learning to find their way around the U.S.
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_00: sanctions by going to non-dollar transactions or other workarounds that maybe really are one of the ways that a response will come in the coming years, which is that maybe these sanctions will be weakened or basically.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: Nullified by even technical workarounds now that there's a sufficient block of countries that says we don't want the US by itself to be doing these things.
• 44:09
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_01: And in fact, it's one thing to try to sanction, as we're discussing, 5% of the world economy, because sanctions work by isolating countries.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's another thing to say we're going to isolate one third of the world economy.
• 44:23
  SPEAKER_01: Once you start doing that, then that third of the world economy is going to say, well, you know, we're going to trade between ourselves.
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_01: So last year in 2022, the share of global reserves held in US dollars fell to 59%.
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_01: This used to be higher than 70% in the 1990s.
• 44:41
  SPEAKER_01: So definitely countries are shifting away.
• 44:43
  SPEAKER_01: They're thinking of ways of shifting away from dollar transactions.
• 44:47
  SPEAKER_01: It's not easy because it's not only a government decision.
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, part of the problem is that the reason that say firms in China want to use dollars is because they want to be paid in dollars so that they can have dollars in a bank account where they can use that to pay other firms that also invoice in dollars.
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_01: And dollars are around 90% of international export invoicing outside of Europe.
• 45:11
  SPEAKER_01: In Europe, of course, the euro is prevalent, but outside of Europe, the dollar still continues to dominate.
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_01: So it's one of these what we economists call multiple equilibria effects, in which everybody uses the dollar because everybody else uses the dollar.
• 45:23
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that what we know can happen in that type of dynamics is that when people actually stop wanting to generally use the dollar, it's almost like when people stop wanting to have their money in a bank.
• 45:35
  SPEAKER_01: It becomes very sensitive to bank runs.
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_01: Much more so with the type of macroeconomic and political problems that the US economy has.
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's possible that we could in the future see a scenario where there's a massive loss of confidence in the dollar, and that precipitates the shift.
• 45:51
  SPEAKER_01: And if that happens, then the US power to impose policies through sanctions is also going to decline dramatically and maybe even overnight.
• 46:00
  SPEAKER_00: Francisco, your work is uh extraordinarily insightful, and you called the importance of this many, many years ago before others were looking at it.
• 46:09
  SPEAKER_00: This survey on the human consequences of economic sanctions, the CEPR paper, May 2023, is really a must-read, I would say, for everybody interested in international politics.
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_00: We don't think about it as war, but this is economic war, and the consequences, as you say, are even bigger than wars.
• 46:29
  SPEAKER_00: And what you were just discussing about the future, I'm sure we're going to get a good paper from you out of that issue very soon.
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm looking forward to that.
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_00: Let me thank you for the wonderful work.
• 46:41
  SPEAKER_00: Let me thank you for joining Book Club and to urge all listeners to read Francisco Rodriguez's paper, The Human Consequences of Economic Sanctions, and to urge that the United Nations in the Security Council and the General Assembly take up the implications of this so that we bring peace back to the global multilateral setting and war is restrained, including the economic wars.
• 47:07
  SPEAKER_00: So thank you so much for joining today.
• 47:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's been great to be with you.
• 47:11
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks very much, Jeff, for the invitation, and thanks for opening up this space for raising awareness about this issue.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_01: Wonderful.
• 47:17
  SPEAKER_01: We'll talk soon.
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks a lot.
• 47:22
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for joining in the conversation.
• 47:24
  SPEAKER_00: Please subscribe, rate, and write a review on whatever platform you listen for your podcast.