Latest / Trumponomics / Trump Isn’t the Only Reason the Price of Money Is Rising
Transcript
- 0:00Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
- 0:17Speaker 2: I'm Stephanie Flanders, head of Government and Economics at Bloomberg,
- 0:20Speaker 2: and this is trump Anomics, the podcast that looks at
- 0:23Speaker 2: the economic world of Donald Trump, how he's already shaped
- 0:26Speaker 2: the global economy, what on earth is going to happen next?
- 0:29Speaker 2: And this week we're talking about the price of money,
- 0:33Speaker 2: why it's going up, and why that matters to all
- 0:36Speaker 2: of us, and especially to governments with big debts like France,
- 0:39Speaker 2: where it's part of why the government just collapsed. Who
- 0:42Speaker 2: also want to explain why this big shift in the
- 0:44Speaker 2: most important price in the global economy is not entirely
- 0:49Speaker 2: caused by Donald Trump, though he might be speeding the
- 0:51Speaker 2: process up. Now, when I say the price of money,
- 0:54Speaker 2: I mean the interest rate. So just like anything you
- 0:57Speaker 2: buy phones, fruit, money also has a price, but instead
- 1:01Speaker 2: of paying for money with other goods, we pay for
- 1:03Speaker 2: it with interest. And that price of money, that interest
- 1:06Speaker 2: rate matters because it touches everything. What you pay for
- 1:09Speaker 2: a home, how much companies invest, where the prices rise
- 1:12Speaker 2: too fast, even how strong a country's currency is, Who
- 1:16Speaker 2: or what sets the price of money? Well, short term, yes,
- 1:20Speaker 2: central banks play their part. We all write a lot
- 1:23Speaker 2: about that piece, but long term, that price is set
- 1:27Speaker 2: by a wide range of structural factors that we're going
- 1:30Speaker 2: to get into in this show, and I thought we
- 1:32Speaker 2: should talk about it this week. Well, for a few reasons. First,
- 1:36Speaker 2: it's a reminder that this would have been a challenging
- 1:39Speaker 2: time for governments anyway, even without Donald Trump turning the
- 1:42Speaker 2: world upside down. The second reason is we're seeing the
- 1:44Speaker 2: consequences of a higher cost of borrowing play out in
- 1:47Speaker 2: real time this month, as bond yields the government interest
- 1:50Speaker 2: rates go up in many countries. France I've already mentioned,
- 1:54Speaker 2: now pays more than Italy to borrow from the market.
- 1:57Speaker 2: It's also arguably rising bond year that is the one
- 2:01Speaker 2: factor more than any other, putting serious financial pressure on
- 2:05Speaker 2: the labor government in the UK. But yes, I'll admit
- 2:10Speaker 2: the final reason is because we at Bloomberg Economics have
- 2:12Speaker 2: written a book that explains it all, The Price of Money,
- 2:16Speaker 2: A Guide to the past, present and Future of the
- 2:19Speaker 2: natural Rate of Interest. It's published a few weeks ago
- 2:22Speaker 2: by Oxford University Press, and it is available I'm told
- 2:25Speaker 2: at all fine bookstores, and my two lead co authors
- 2:30Speaker 2: who face it did most of the work pulling that
- 2:32Speaker 2: book together. Are here with me now. Jamie Rush, the
- 2:35Speaker 2: director of Global Economics at Bloomberg, who's here in London
- 2:38Speaker 2: and joining again from the Washington studio, Tom Orlick, who's
- 2:41Speaker 2: chief economist for Bloomberg Economics. Jamie, Tom, thanks very much
- 2:45Speaker 2: for being here to hawk card book. We don't usually
- 2:47Speaker 2: get to say that.
- 2:49Speaker 1: Thank you for having me.
- 2:50Speaker 3: Great to be here, Stephanie.
- 3:01Speaker 2: Tom, let me start with you. You know, I've said a
- 3:03Speaker 2: little bit about it, but why is it important now
- 3:05Speaker 2: to think about the long term cost of money? Because
- 3:07Speaker 2: for many people that will seem pretty abstract.
- 3:09Speaker 3: So I think there's a few factors at work, Stephanie.
- 3:12Speaker 3: So the first is, this is a moment for the
- 3:15Speaker 3: global markets. This is a moment where across Europe, across Japan,
- 3:21Speaker 3: in the United States, long term interest rates are high,
- 3:25Speaker 3: and in many of those places they're rising, with far
- 3:28Speaker 3: reaching consequences for governments, for businesses, for households, for investors.
- 3:35Speaker 3: I think the second reason is, well, there are some
- 3:39Speaker 3: really long term factors that drive the rate of interest,
- 3:43Speaker 3: things like demographics, for example, but there's also some important
- 3:48Speaker 3: factors that are playing out right now. So think about
- 3:51Speaker 3: Donald Trump and the end of the Pax Americana, the
- 3:55Speaker 3: US security guarantee. That's forcing everyone from European NATO allies
- 4:02Speaker 3: to Japan and Korea and Taiwan to significantly increase their
- 4:08Speaker 3: defense spending. And when they do that, when governments borrow
- 4:12Speaker 3: to increase defense spending, that puts upward pressure on interest rates.
- 4:17Speaker 3: So it's a market moment, but it's also a kind
- 4:20Speaker 3: of paradigm shift moment for the global economy, and I
- 4:24Speaker 3: think that's one reason that makes this new book timely.
- 4:28Speaker 2: You can see how many book references the book we
- 4:30Speaker 2: can get in now, Jamie, looking at quite a lot
- 4:32Speaker 2: of examples now where this is playing out. Tell us,
- 4:35Speaker 2: just as example of France, how some of these forces
- 4:38Speaker 2: are pushing up the cost of borrow and indeed helping
- 4:41Speaker 2: to cause you know, yet another government to collapse this week.
- 4:44Speaker 1: Well, there are certainly a handful of economies globally which
- 4:47Speaker 1: are sort of in the cross hairs of markets, and
- 4:50Speaker 1: they've seen interest rates go up by the most. So
- 4:53Speaker 1: you mentioned France. Largely that's because the parliament is very
- 4:58Speaker 1: fractured and it's going to be very very difficult for
- 5:01Speaker 1: them to pass any legislation which gets the budget under control.
- 5:04Speaker 1: We saw in Japan the interest rates at the long
- 5:06Speaker 1: end of the curve moved up. Why because the central
- 5:09Speaker 1: bankers ditched your curve control. And if you ditch your
- 5:12Speaker 1: co control, you no longer have control of your curve.
- 5:14Speaker 1: And in the UK, where there's a significant amount of
- 5:17Speaker 1: gloom and pessimism about the government's ability to rain in debt,
- 5:21Speaker 1: all of these things are serving to push up interest rates.
- 5:23Speaker 1: But actually these idiosyncratic things are not the main source
- 5:27Speaker 1: of the movement up in interest rates. If you look
- 5:29Speaker 1: at which part is local and which part is global,
- 5:33Speaker 1: you see that there's a huge global element to rising
- 5:36Speaker 1: borrowing costs around the world, and it's that part that
- 5:39Speaker 1: we were trying to think about when we did our analysis.
- 5:41Speaker 2: I guess this is partly just the supply of money
- 5:47Speaker 2: and the demand for money. We think of the demand
- 5:49Speaker 2: for money being things that you need to invest in
- 5:52Speaker 2: or governments might be wanting to borrow. And the supply
- 5:57Speaker 2: of money is the savings and other sources of cash
- 6:00Speaker 2: that are sitting around the economy. Over the previous decade,
- 6:02Speaker 2: people whused to talk about the savings glut. There was
- 6:04Speaker 2: a lot of money sloshing around and potentially fewer places
- 6:08Speaker 2: for it to go. So governments were able to borrow
- 6:11Speaker 2: very cheaply because there was a lot of money. But
- 6:13Speaker 2: now that shift is churning. Talk us through that sort
- 6:16Speaker 2: of demand and supply forces, because obviously it relates to
- 6:18Speaker 2: what you just said.
- 6:19Speaker 3: Yes, exactly it.
- 6:20Speaker 1: So it's the balance of saving an investment in the
- 6:24Speaker 1: global economy that matters for global interest rates, and they're
- 6:27Speaker 1: all determined with that global factory in mind. And for
- 6:30Speaker 1: many years, the global cost of borrowing was falling, and
- 6:34Speaker 1: the reason for that was because investment was getting cheaper.
- 6:38Speaker 1: We had all this these cheap goods coming from China.
- 6:42Speaker 1: Much cheaper to upgrade your technology, for example, you don't
- 6:44Speaker 1: have to spend so much on investment. That was one
- 6:47Speaker 1: of the by products of globalization. On the saving side,
- 6:51Speaker 1: you have the baby boomers socking away their paychecks into
- 6:54Speaker 1: their savings accounts, preparing for retirement. That also helped push
- 6:58Speaker 1: down the cost money and defense spending. For example, well
- 7:03Speaker 1: after the Cold War, we thought the world seemed relatively safe,
- 7:07Speaker 1: and so governments saved. They didn't They reduce their military
- 7:10Speaker 1: budgets and they save the money all of these things
- 7:13Speaker 1: are now starting to spin into reverse. So globalization, which
- 7:16Speaker 1: helped keep investment goods cheap and actually inflation down, well
- 7:20Speaker 1: that's not going to be proceeding at the same pace
- 7:22Speaker 1: as it was. Defense spending where we don't live in
- 7:25Speaker 1: a safe world. It's becoming much more dangerous. We need
- 7:27Speaker 1: to ramp up defense spending like Tom was describing. And
- 7:30Speaker 1: the demographics side of things, well, yes, the baby boomers
- 7:33Speaker 1: are now retiring, and so they're going to be drawing
- 7:35Speaker 1: down their savings rather than pushing money into them, and
- 7:38Speaker 1: so all of these factors are shifting that fundamental balance
- 7:40Speaker 1: between saving and investment in the global economy, and that
- 7:44Speaker 1: is going to help push interest rates up.
- 7:46Speaker 2: Tom, we've said it's not all down to Donald Trump,
- 7:49Speaker 2: and you could just hear from that list it's clearly
- 7:51Speaker 2: not all down to Donald Trump, much though he might
- 7:53Speaker 2: like to make the political and economic weather while he's
- 7:56Speaker 2: in office. But you can also hear in that list
- 8:00Speaker 2: number of things which are at least are being given
- 8:02Speaker 2: the kind of extra impetus by his policies. And I
- 8:05Speaker 2: guess we also have the possibility for sort of supply
- 8:08Speaker 2: chain issues or reversing globalization, which you would think, given
- 8:14Speaker 2: that it was contributing to falling prices in previous decades,
- 8:18Speaker 2: if that's contributing to rising prices and potentially come of
- 8:22Speaker 2: more variability in prices, more kind of shocks for central
- 8:25Speaker 2: banks to manage, well, that too might be a way
- 8:28Speaker 2: in which he's contributing to higher rates overall. Is that right? Yeah?
- 8:32Speaker 3: I think there's a multiple dimensions on which the Trump
- 8:35Speaker 3: administration is driving interest rates higher, Stephanie. Perhaps the first
- 8:39Speaker 3: of them, as you mentioned, is the shock to the
- 8:42Speaker 3: global system. It was the integration of a billion low
- 8:47Speaker 3: cost Chinese workers into the global trade system, which helped
- 8:51Speaker 3: keep a lid on inflation in the US through the
- 8:54Speaker 3: Great Moderation. I think many people expected the addition of
- 8:58Speaker 3: a billion Indian local cost workers to extend that trend
- 9:02Speaker 3: in the decades ahead. Donald Trump, with his tariffs is
- 9:06Speaker 3: signaling well, that's just not going to happen. Borrowing in
- 9:09Speaker 3: the United States is really high. Trump's Big Beautiful Bill
- 9:13Speaker 3: adds very significantly to the fiscal deficit over the next decade.
- 9:18Speaker 3: Some three trillion added to US debt according to the
- 9:22Speaker 3: Congressional Budget Office, And when the US Treasury is issuing
- 9:26Speaker 3: more debt well, they're going to have to pay more
- 9:29Speaker 3: to borrow, and that means interest rates go up as well. Lastly,
- 9:32Speaker 3: of course, there are the attacks on FED independence. Now,
- 9:37Speaker 3: the impact on interest rates there is a little bit complicated.
- 9:40Speaker 3: If Trump gets his way and gets a more pliant
- 9:43Speaker 3: FED chair and a more pliant FED board, well he
- 9:46Speaker 3: could get short term interest rates down, and the impact
- 9:49Speaker 3: of that ripples through the yield curve, so it also
- 9:52Speaker 3: has an impact on long term rates as well. The
- 9:55Speaker 3: bigger impact, though, would likely be a blow to the
- 9:58Speaker 3: Fed's credibility as an inflation fighter, and that would mean
- 10:02Speaker 3: that investors would demand a premium to lend to the
- 10:06Speaker 3: US government, to the US Treasury, and that too is
- 10:09Speaker 3: a force pushing up longer term borrowing costs.
- 10:20Speaker 2: We've mentioned the UK, We've mentioned France, and we know
- 10:23Speaker 2: from previous episodes that the borrowing in the US has
- 10:27Speaker 2: been continued to be very high. And then the government
- 10:30Speaker 2: deficit is very high for a country that is actually
- 10:33Speaker 2: not in the middle of a recession. It's been running
- 10:35Speaker 2: this kind of four or five six percent of GDP
- 10:37Speaker 2: budget deficits. And we've just had that big beautiful bill,
- 10:41Speaker 2: as he called it, pasted in Congress, which added enormously
- 10:46Speaker 2: to future debt. And yet I was amazed to see
- 10:49Speaker 2: the other day that of one of the few developed
- 10:51Speaker 2: countries that has seen its sort of ten year borrowing
- 10:55Speaker 2: rate go down slightly since the beginning of the year
- 10:58Speaker 2: is actually the US. So, Tom, how is the US
- 11:01Speaker 2: getting away with that? I mean, yields are obviously higher,
- 11:04Speaker 2: and they're higher than when Donald Trump took office or
- 11:06Speaker 2: when he was elected, but not as much high. We
- 11:09Speaker 2: haven't seen the kind of impact that you might have expected.
- 11:12Speaker 3: Yeah, So a few thoughts on that. The first one
- 11:15Speaker 3: is if we sort of extend the span of history
- 11:17Speaker 3: a little bit longer, the big picture is very much,
- 11:21Speaker 3: very low ten year borrowing costs before the COVID shock,
- 11:25Speaker 3: very low ten yure borrowing costs at the end of
- 11:28Speaker 3: the twenty tens, and significantly higher borrowing costs today. So yes, absolutely,
- 11:34Speaker 3: the US has been one of the countries that has
- 11:36Speaker 3: had that ten year rate nudge down since the start
- 11:39Speaker 3: of the year. But if we pull the historical frame
- 11:41Speaker 3: back a bit, the US is still very much in
- 11:44Speaker 3: the group of countries which had very low borrowing costs
- 11:48Speaker 3: a few years ago, a much higher borrowing costs today. Now,
- 11:52Speaker 3: why haven't US borrowing costs gone up so far this year?
- 11:56Speaker 3: Maybe it's useful to think about kind of three different
- 11:58Speaker 3: groups of countries. You've got your fragile emerging markets that
- 12:03Speaker 3: are very dependent on portfolio capital flows, and there's big
- 12:07Speaker 3: questions about the quality of their institutions, places like Turkey
- 12:11Speaker 3: or Argentina. If they make a policy error, all the
- 12:14Speaker 3: money flows out straight away, interest rates spike higher, currencies
- 12:20Speaker 3: plunge lower, and the impact are very real and very rapid.
- 12:24Speaker 3: Then you've got advanced economies where the quality of institutions
- 12:27Speaker 3: is stronger and investors have a higher degree of confidence.
- 12:30Speaker 3: But they're still small relative to the size of the
- 12:32Speaker 3: global economy, and so when they make policy missteps they
- 12:36Speaker 3: face some pretty rapid and severe consequences as well. Think
- 12:39Speaker 3: about the UK under the Trust administration. The US perhaps
- 12:43Speaker 3: is in a category of its own right, the world's
- 12:45Speaker 3: biggest economy, the world's deepest financial markets, the world's most
- 12:50Speaker 3: powerful military, a history of good governance, even if there
- 12:55Speaker 3: are growing concerns about erosion of institutions right now, and
- 13:00Speaker 3: for a country like the United States, the issue of
- 13:02Speaker 3: the world's reserve currency. I think what you have is
- 13:06Speaker 3: just much more capacity to play fast and loose with
- 13:10Speaker 3: the rules before facing the real consequences. Perhaps this is
- 13:14Speaker 3: an opportunity for me to surface my favorite quote from
- 13:17Speaker 3: The Great Gatsby, how did you go bankrupt? First slowly,
- 13:21Speaker 3: then all at once?
- 13:24Speaker 2: Well, we've been pointing to some ways in which that
- 13:26Speaker 2: might happen on this show, Jamie, I want to take
- 13:28Speaker 2: off a couple of things, because we've gone through a
- 13:30Speaker 2: lot of factors. But there'll be some people listening who
- 13:33Speaker 2: will think of other ways in which the world's changing
- 13:35Speaker 2: and will be interested to know how this affects the
- 13:36Speaker 2: cost of money. One thing we do talk about in
- 13:38Speaker 2: the book is inequality, and one thing that seems destined
- 13:42Speaker 2: to continue, although individual countries have had different experiences, but
- 13:47Speaker 2: the sort of emergence of the sort of super wealthy
- 13:50Speaker 2: and apparently much more unequal division of wealth. You wealth
- 13:56Speaker 2: obviously plays a big part in savings and investment. How
- 13:59Speaker 2: is that going to affect to the cost of money.
- 14:01Speaker 1: The mechanism at play here is that people at the
- 14:03Speaker 1: top end of the income distribution saved more, their earnings
- 14:07Speaker 1: have gone up faster than their capacity to buy cpots,
- 14:10Speaker 1: and then so they're putting that in their bank accounts,
- 14:12Speaker 1: and so over the past few decades or so, as
- 14:15Speaker 1: income inequality has moved upwards, perhaps contributed more to savings
- 14:20Speaker 1: and it helped to contain borrowing costs or push them down.
- 14:23Speaker 1: Looking ahead, our view is that income inequality is not
- 14:26Speaker 1: likely to rise by as much as it has over
- 14:29Speaker 1: the previous few decades, largely because it has risen so
- 14:32Speaker 1: much already and it would require significant policy change. But
- 14:35Speaker 1: clearly with the direction of travel in US, policy is
- 14:38Speaker 1: likely to climb a little further, and again that will
- 14:40Speaker 1: continue to exert some downward pressure on interest rates going ahead.
- 14:44Speaker 2: And if we move more slowly or faster towards a
- 14:48Speaker 2: net zero goal when it comes to the carbon transition,
- 14:53Speaker 2: how does that affect things, Because that's obviously one of
- 14:56Speaker 2: those areas where we've had in the book, we've had
- 14:57Speaker 2: to have a pretty big range of uncertainty.
- 15:00Speaker 1: Yeah, So I think that the impacts of climate change
- 15:02Speaker 1: on rates, or at least the research into it, still
- 15:04Speaker 1: in its infancy, So you have so many unknown It's
- 15:07Speaker 1: not just about economics, but the impact of global heating
- 15:10Speaker 1: on the economy, and so I think you need to
- 15:13Speaker 1: think about it through two lenses. One is what are
- 15:16Speaker 1: the physical damages that climate change does the global economy,
- 15:19Speaker 1: Because the more damage it does, the slower growth will be,
- 15:23Speaker 1: the lower the inherent rate of return in the economy
- 15:26Speaker 1: will be, and that will push down on interest rates.
- 15:28Speaker 1: But going in the opposite direction, if the world gets
- 15:31Speaker 1: serious about tackling climate change, it's going to take huge
- 15:33Speaker 1: investments in energy infrastructure to green the economy. And if
- 15:37Speaker 1: you look at what new economy finance being there for
- 15:40Speaker 1: saying at Bloomberg, we're talking about trillion dollar investments here,
- 15:44Speaker 1: and so that extra spending that's required, that extra investment
- 15:49Speaker 1: would push interest rates up, and we think that if
- 15:51Speaker 1: there is a significant push, then the net effect is
- 15:55Speaker 1: more likely to be upwards on borrowing costs than downwards.
- 15:59Speaker 2: That rais is interesting point, and that actually it was
- 16:01Speaker 2: one of the things I think a bit about in
- 16:03Speaker 2: the final chapter of the book, when you sort of
- 16:04Speaker 2: think about what are the implications of this change for governments,
- 16:07Speaker 2: for businesses and others. I mean, we've tended to describe
- 16:11Speaker 2: the cost of money going up as like a negative thing,
- 16:13Speaker 2: a challenge, a headwind, and it certainly is for governments.
- 16:17Speaker 2: If you have a lot of debt. It could also happen,
- 16:21Speaker 2: as we describe, for reasons that we could be quite
- 16:24Speaker 2: happy about. It could be a world of higher interest rates,
- 16:26Speaker 2: could be a world in which we all might prefer
- 16:29Speaker 2: to live in. I mean, we obviously savers it's better
- 16:32Speaker 2: for them if they have higher interest rates. We've already
- 16:34Speaker 2: seen in a kind of small way, companies find it
- 16:37Speaker 2: all be easier to cover their pension obligations because that
- 16:40Speaker 2: higher interest rate means that future money that their promise
- 16:44Speaker 2: to pensioners is worth a bit less in today's money
- 16:47Speaker 2: than it was in the period where rates were extremely
- 16:49Speaker 2: low and we had all those big holes in pension funds.
- 16:52Speaker 2: But what else could be better about a higher rate world?
- 16:56Speaker 1: Think about AI as an example here specifically, So what
- 16:59Speaker 1: will AI due to the natural rate? Well, to realize
- 17:02Speaker 1: that the promise of this technology, you have to pile
- 17:04Speaker 1: a huge amount of money into it, and that will
- 17:07Speaker 1: tend to push interest rates up. But at the same time,
- 17:09Speaker 1: the benefits could be huge and growth could be faster.
- 17:12Speaker 1: Income growth could be faster, people could be better off.
- 17:15Speaker 1: So it's in spite of the higher interest rate environment,
- 17:18Speaker 1: people will be on the whole quite significantly better off.
- 17:20Speaker 1: So I think that's kind of a good example of
- 17:22Speaker 1: how interest rates can move for good reasons, they can
- 17:25Speaker 1: move for bad reasons, and it's not always clear which
- 17:28Speaker 1: is which.
- 17:28Speaker 2: I guess. If there's lots of demand for money, that
- 17:30Speaker 2: could be, as you say, people desperately wanting to use
- 17:33Speaker 2: it to build green energy and to have a much faster,
- 17:37Speaker 2: more dramatic approach to prevent climate change. It could be
- 17:40Speaker 2: that they want to use it for all these exciting investments,
- 17:42Speaker 2: and this is what we seem to be seeing. If
- 17:44Speaker 2: it's for governments to desperately cover their rising bills from
- 17:49Speaker 2: aging populations and creaking health services, then that's less of
- 17:53Speaker 2: a positive.
- 17:54Speaker 1: Yeah, And I think that's the big risk, isn't it.
- 17:56Speaker 1: So if you look at aging populations, you should expect
- 17:59Speaker 1: probably that the tax to GDP ratio and move in
- 18:02Speaker 1: line with the dependency ratio. Such the older population more
- 18:06Speaker 1: outlays higher taxes. But if you look at how divided
- 18:10Speaker 1: parliaments are across advanced economies, the actual ability of governance
- 18:14Speaker 1: to raise taxes in line with those liabilities is extremely low.
- 18:17Speaker 1: So if they can't. If they can't do that, then
- 18:20Speaker 1: you're just going to borrow more interest rates will therefore
- 18:23Speaker 1: rise and you end up in this bad equilibrium.
- 18:26Speaker 2: And that's what sounds a little bit similar to what
- 18:29Speaker 2: the finances of the Chancellor in the UK is grappling
- 18:32Speaker 2: with as we head towards this budget, which as always
- 18:35Speaker 2: is being billed as sort of a make or break budget.
- 18:37Speaker 2: But the fundamental thing she's trying to avoid really is
- 18:41Speaker 2: people noticing that the tax rate, tax share of GDP's
- 18:44Speaker 2: gone up, but it seems almost inevitable that it will.
- 18:47Speaker 2: Tom Jamie's already said individual countries can't change the global
- 18:52Speaker 2: supply and demand for money, and maybe even the US
- 18:55Speaker 2: is going to to some extent be a taker of
- 18:58Speaker 2: these forces, not a maker, although Donald Trump's doing his
- 19:00Speaker 2: best to change that. What do you think about, just
- 19:04Speaker 2: as a final thought about how to prepare, you know,
- 19:07Speaker 2: or do better or worse in this world where money
- 19:11Speaker 2: becomes more expensive, I guess I'm thinking a little bit
- 19:14Speaker 2: as household but also as a government.
- 19:16Speaker 3: So, first of all, Stephanie, for any of the rich
- 19:19Speaker 3: people out there who heard Jamie's comments about inadequate demand
- 19:24Speaker 3: as a kind of blight on the broader economy and
- 19:26Speaker 3: wants to do their bits to address the problem, they
- 19:28Speaker 3: could buy copy of our book. It won't fundamentally solve
- 19:32Speaker 3: the problem, but every little bit helps. So coming back
- 19:35Speaker 3: to your question, one of the things which I find
- 19:38Speaker 3: really fun about working on this book with the Bloomberg
- 19:40Speaker 3: Economics team is that it just touches such a rich
- 19:43Speaker 3: variety of subjects. Right, So, what drives the natural rate
- 19:48Speaker 3: of interest? Well, it's about climate change, it's about artificial intelligence,
- 19:53Speaker 3: it's about demographics, it's about deglobalization. And one of the
- 19:57Speaker 3: interesting things about writing the book was the we had
- 20:00Speaker 3: to get to grips with all of these subjects, but
- 20:02Speaker 3: we had to get to grips with them in a
- 20:04Speaker 3: very specific way, right, with a very specific angle. It's
- 20:08Speaker 3: not what does climate change mean for everybody's life in
- 20:12Speaker 3: the future of the planet, It's what does climate change
- 20:15Speaker 3: mean for the balance between saving an investment? Right. So,
- 20:19Speaker 3: in a sense, if some of the predictions which we
- 20:22Speaker 3: have in the book play out, people are going to
- 20:24Speaker 3: have other stuff to worry about. Right. They're going to
- 20:27Speaker 3: be living in a much hotter planet, or they're going
- 20:30Speaker 3: to be living in a world where robots are thinking
- 20:32Speaker 3: for themselves, or they're going to be thinking of living
- 20:35Speaker 3: in a world where there's much more, much more conflict,
- 20:37Speaker 3: and much more defense spending. But in terms of the
- 20:39Speaker 3: focus of the book on interest rates, from the early
- 20:42Speaker 3: nineteen eighties to the mid twenty tens, we were living
- 20:44Speaker 3: in a world a US, a Europe where interest rates
- 20:47Speaker 3: were on a structural declining trend. Right, it was getting
- 20:50Speaker 3: cheaper and cheaper to borrow, and that had far reaching
- 20:53Speaker 3: consequences for everybody. If you're an investor in equity markets
- 20:57Speaker 3: or property, you made a lot of money because were
- 21:00Speaker 3: coming down and money was piling into those markets. If
- 21:03Speaker 3: you were a minister of finance, you could borrow more
- 21:07Speaker 3: cheaply and not really face a bill for piling on debt. Now,
- 21:13Speaker 3: with rates rising, all of those trends swinging into reverse, right,
- 21:17Speaker 3: and so we don't have low interest rates as a
- 21:20Speaker 3: upward driver of equity and property markets. We have rising
- 21:23Speaker 3: interest rates as a drag on equity and property markets.
- 21:27Speaker 3: We don't have low interest rates giving ministers of finance
- 21:30Speaker 3: a free lunch. We've got higher interest rates, which means
- 21:34Speaker 3: the bill is about to arrive.
- 21:36Speaker 2: But typically upbeat economists answer, well, I guess money doesn't
- 21:40Speaker 2: make the world go around, but maybe it does make
- 21:42Speaker 2: economics more interesting for all of us. And I guess
- 21:46Speaker 2: the moral of what you just said, Thomas. If the
- 21:47Speaker 2: price is money is going up, it's going to be
- 21:49Speaker 2: even more important to spend it and borrow it wisely.
- 21:53Speaker 2: Tom Warlick, Jamie Rush, thank you so much.
- 21:56Speaker 3: Thank you. Thanks definitely great to be here.
- 22:01Speaker 2: Thanks for listening to Trumponomics from Bloomberg. It was hosted
- 22:04Speaker 2: by me Stephanie Flanders. I was joined by Bloomberg's Tom
- 22:07Speaker 2: Orlick and Jamie Rush. Trumponomics was produced by Samasadi and
- 22:10Speaker 2: Moses Dam with help from a Keen and special thanks
- 22:14Speaker 2: this week to Rachel Lewis Kriskey. Sound design is by
- 22:19Speaker 2: Blake Maples and Kelly Gary and Sage Bowman is Bloomberg's
- 22:23Speaker 2: head of podcast And please help others find this show
- 22:26Speaker 2: and enjoy it by rating and reviewing it highly wherever
- 22:30Speaker 2: you listen