In this episode, the ReSolve team engages in a thought-provoking discussion with Viktor Shvets, a renowned global strategist and author. They delve into the complexities of the current global economic landscape, exploring topics like societal polarization, monetary policy, and the role of demographics in shaping the future.

Topics Discussed

• A deep dive into the societal polarization occurring on a local level across various countries and its implications on economic policies

• The comparison of current times to the 1930s, rather than the 1970s, and the reasons behind this perspective

• A discussion on the changing perception of China's role in the global economy and its shift in government policy post the global financial crisis

• An exploration of the role of demographics in Europe's economic scenario and the challenges posed by the aging population

• Insights into the shift from labor-driven productivity to intangible capital-driven productivity

• A detailed analysis of the parallels between the current period and the 1930s, with a focus on the increasing role of the government

• The exploration of the potential models to replace the current capitalist system

• A discussion on the future of China's economy, the challenges it faces, and the potential policies it could introduce to absorb excess capacity

• An examination of the potential reshuffling of the global order due to the ambiguity of the right kinds of economic policies

• Advice for investors on how to navigate the uncertain financial landscape and build resilience considering the potential economic whiplashes

This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in understanding the complexities of the global economy, the potential future of capitalism, and the role of demographics and government policies in shaping our future. Viktor Shvets provides invaluable insights and predictions, making this a compelling conversation for investors and anyone interested in global economic trends.

Victor, I have to say you definitely take the cake for exciting titles, so this, I think I actually liked this book even better than the first book. As we'll probably come to see, it hits on a few of my own personal biases and frameworks as well. So I'm sure that's part of it, but I really enjoyed it and, I'm looking forward to getting into it before we do. I mean, obviously you spent a lot of time researching and writing and then talking through the concepts in The Great Rupture. What motivated you to write this new book so soon after the grand tour of your first book?

I also felt that everybody was comparing our times to 1970s, and to me, that's a wrong comparison. I think 1930s is far more appropriate. So those were the major reasons why I sort of wrote it as quickly, or as frequently, I guess, after the first book. Just too many things have changed, and I think people are focusing on the wrong parallels.

Changing Perspectives

[00:04:07] Viktor Shvets: Well, the fantastic thing from my perspective was that the major thrust of my first book, actually has not changed. The major thrust was really Fujiwhara Effect, or a merger of highly disruptive information age, and deeply disruptive financialization. That's something that started all the way back into 1980s-90s, but really accelerated all the way to my first book, and even more so over the last four years. So the major reason why we are experiencing polarization, why geopolitical pressures are greater, why we have economic volatility, why the role of the state is continuing to increase, are still the same. It is a Fujiwhara Effect.

So the thrust is the same, but there is more urgency, I think, in this book, compared to my previous publications, and that's very much colored by the experience of COVID and our response through fiscal and monetary means to what happened to us.

End miniriff here

[00:05:33] Adam Butler: Sorry Richard, go ahead.

The Fujiwhara Effect

[00:06:03] Viktor Shvets: Yeah, sure. Well, the essence of Fujiwhara Effect, which is self-reinforcing information age and financialization, is that it disrupts the functioning of capital, it disrupts the functioning of labor, it also disrupts social relations. So in other words within the countries, people start moving in different direction at different speeds. That applies to the population as a whole, but also applies to different racial groups or ethnic groups of people of different backgrounds.

Now that’s basically a recipe for polarization rising within societies. But what is also happening is that countries start moving in different directions, different speeds, depending on their position, geographic position, structure of the economies, the importance of tangible versus intangible capital in those countries, the importance of know-how, the importance of financialization and how much of that they experienced.

Countries that moving in different direction, different speed. When that happens, what actually occurs is that it flares up historical grievances, and all the other things that people were hoping are in the past. Yeah. But they still sort of continue to exist and linger in our memory and what we do. And so that's really the areas.

And the hymn book was neoliberalism. In other words, the government is an efficient, inefficient, quite often is unjust, does not have enough market signals in order to make appropriate decisions, private sectors, on the other hand, offer a much more efficient solution. At the same time, this neoliberalism was basically highlighting desire to be free. I want to be free to marry or divorce anybody I like. I want to be free to move the countries. I want to be free to change my jobs. Now, all of these freedoms have the price, and sort of, the check arrived around 2010. And so what started to happen around the global financial crisis is that people stop agreeing what is the right political, social, and economic model.

And as they start to disagree, what you end up is alternative proliferating. There are, there's Chinese alternative. There is Russian alternative. Europe is looking for the right model. U.S. is trying to figure out what's the right model. Whenever there is this disagreement on the basic concept, what is the right business model, what is the right economic model? What is the right social model that aggravates massively post polarization and geopolitical issues? And my argument is that COVID aggravated it even more. So the last four or five years have become much more extreme compared what it used to be, back in 2019, 2020.

End miniriff here

China and the WTO

[00:10:41] Viktor Shvets: Yeah, absolutely. You're totally right. The whole idea of integrating China, and remember, that was a consistent philosophy of at least five or six U.S. administrations, all the way from George Bush Sr. to the very end of the Obama administration in 2015, 2016, and so it was a very consistent policy.

And the view was exactly what you've just described. As we grow, as we integrate, as income levels increase, what's going to happen, that gradually you'll become a stakeholder in the Western design, economic, and political system, and we'll welcome you to be one of those stakeholders. One of the things Chinese seem to misunderstand, they seem to believe that Americans are preoccupied, that they want to be number one.

The reality is, as Coolidge once said, the business of America is business, and so this sort of view that Americans are so preoccupied with being number one, is incorrect. So long as there are opportunities to grow, so long as there is a fair playing field between the countries, so long as there is opportunity to enter your country and benefit from that growth, the business lobby in the United States, as you know, is so strong that, irrespective of anything, politics could not overrule the business considerations. It was really the change, the way China perceived itself.

At that point in time, it stopped declining, and in fact, several years, at least three, four years before Xi Jinping was elevated to become a General Secretary of the Communist Party, China already started to recombine state owned enterprises. They already largely extinguished local democratic initiatives at the local level. They already started to broaden the mandate of what state owned enterprises were responsible for, not just for delivering goods, not just for delivering efficiency. but also a variety of social and political outcomes. And of course, Xi Jinping took it to the next level.

So, for example, back in the pre global financial crisis, party cells in China were really social clubs and retirement clubs. Today they are not, and the head of the party cell is, actually has the highest standing. They're the CEOs of the companies that they run, and so this perception that liberalism is not the way forward, it creates too much volatility. It undermines the power of the states. It potentially could create unimaginable problems.

So I said that decision actually predates Xi Jinping and predates the current leadership, and to me, we can debate exactly where change occurred, but it's really become visible at least in the way the government treated state and state owned enterprises and the importance of state owned enterprises. That's really started around 2010.

End miniriff here

Tangible and Intangible Capital

We've seen a retrenchment in China for a variety of reasons, including the ones that you mentioned, but as a function of that retrenchment in China, because of the previous potentially more hardwired integration of Europe with the Chinese trade engine. And for other reasons, Europe has really slowed down in its growth, right? You can, you can observe that in GDP, in debt levels, and in terms of the performance of European equity markets, for example, right? How has this economic desynchronization impacted the frictions that we're now seeing emerge around the world?

When a lot of people were suggesting after COVID that we over-invested in intangible and under-invested in tangible capital, I've disagreed, and if you think of what ChatGPT alone has done for the world and as quickly, you appreciate the value and importance of intangibles. And so what started to happen is that Europe started to lag in intangible capital. Most of their patents, most of their goodwill are very much industrial age. They have a lot of niches, which are very interesting, things like luxury, for example, they have one or two niches in technology, in capital goods, but essentially, initially it's industrial age. It goes back to middle of 20th century to 1950s, 80s, 90s. They've missed a lot of the other intangible assets relating to software and how you use software. Now the question is whether it's possible to catch up. Right now, going forward, the answer is, it's going to be very, very hard.

And that's the problem facing Europe. That on the one hand you're a mercantilist bloc and therefore you rely on the global cyclicality. You're relying on China. You're relying on demand to come to you and that demand is no longer there. China will never again support global growth rates. China will never again support global commodity complex.

And globally generally we're stuck at a much lower GDP trajectory. You know, closer to two and a half percent in market terms rather than three or three and a half. So number one, Europe doesn't give the same degree of cyclicality. And number two, they haven't really built the future. Now the only thing to argue against that is that, is to say that, look, an average European only works 1,300 hours a year.

Average American works 1,900 hours a year. So if you just, for the strength of U.S. dollar, in other words, look at a PPP basis, and if you just per hour work, Europeans are not actually less productive than Americans are per hour basis. It's just, they make a different decision how to lead their life, what lifestyle to have.

So for example, U.S., average American lives five, six years less than an average European. If you think of, if you think of deaths in maternity wards, or infant deaths, they have two, Americans have three to four times higher deaths occurring, than it is in Europe. If you think of healthcare expenditure, they're spending only 10 percent of GDP compared to 19 percent in Europe.

If you think of inequalities in European Monetary Union, the bottom 50 percent of households own about 6, 7 percent of national wealth in Europe. In the U.S., it's like 2 percent. If you think of the top 10, in the U.S., it's 70. In Europe, it's more like 50. So, in other words, it's more egalitarian society. If you think of violence and incarceration rates, in the U.S., it's 5-10 times the level that's what you're experiencing in Europe.

End miniriff here

Demographics

[00:22:10] Viktor Shvets: Well, demographics, not just in Europe, but globally, have kind of two sides to it right now. Number one, humans are becoming less important, and humans are far less important driver of productivity than they used to be, and as we progress forward, we already have gone through the first stage of information revolution. That was 1980s, 90s.

That's your changes in logistics. How you deliver products or services, and so the question is in that world I've just described, do you really want to have a lot of people? Do you really want to have a lot of young people? Well, the answer is no. So in an industrial age, the whole idea was progressively train younger people to a high and high level of productivity so they can look after the older people, the country as a whole, and drive the productivity forward.

Increasingly productivity is not driven out of labor. It's driven out of intangible capital and how that intangible capital actually changes the functioning of money, capital and labour. So that's the first point. So yes, you're right. They have a terrible demographic. But it's actually not a bad time to have terrible demographics. It's actually much worse to have a lot of younger people. And that's my second issue. that Europe is facing because Europe is really a cauldron of all geopolitical and immigration and social tensions that you can possibly envisage.

So you're going to have 3 billion, half of them are younger generation. So in other words, a lot of youngsters are coming through. And if you don't find a job, if you don't find attractive lifestyle, and if climate change is going to accelerate, in other words, the drying up of Sahel, much more unpredictable monsoons and monsoon rains, if you're going to have that, a lot of those people will be on the move.

And as I have described in the book, if just 10 to 20 percent of this younger generation decides to move, you're going to have hundreds of millions of people on the move and Europe is completely exposed to that. Now that explains anti-immigration feeling in Europe, because one of the things I described in the book is that look, Romans couldn't keep the Barbarians out, you know, Greeks and Russians could never do it. Walls never work. People always find a way around it. Because what drives people is not the desire to leave home. Nobody wants to leave home. It's just, I have to. And that was true of the Turks and Mongols. That was true of Franks and Burgundians and Vandals. That was true of all of them. And it is true today.

And so the question is, how would Europe in particular, handle it, and there is really only three answers. Either you open your borders, and you change racial, ethnic, religious composition of your societies - ultimately, that's what Romans, had to do, but that's where they settled the Barbarians on the border. The second alternative is that you somehow recolonize those countries and keep people there, but that involves armed forces and all sorts of terrible choices that you need to make. The third alternative is much better and that's enlightened Marshall Plan. So in other words, you dedicate 10 to 20 percent of your GDP to developing those countries.

So people actually don't move, and, and decide to stay at home. Now, again, if you mentioned that to Europeans, they will say, well, number one, we don't want to open borders. Okay. Number two, we don't want recolonization, and number three, we don't want to spend the money. We have poverty at home. Why should we spend trillions of dollars somewhere else? But there is no other choices that they have. So when people discuss European impact, by the way, that will impact U.S. as well, but all I'm saying it's surrounded by the oceans, just like Australia is. And so there is some impact, but it's nothing like what Europe is likely to face.

Say, if you think of demographics, two things to say. Number one, I think as we progress forward, humans are not as relevant as productivity drivers, and therefore you can actually grow productivity with much more limited number of humans and even older humans rather than younger people. And number two, I think Europe is really facing a very different, difficult dilemma, over the next decade or two. What do you do with Africa, Middle East, Central Asia, and even South Asia?

End miniriff here

Burn Down the House

[00:29:32] Viktor Shvets: In 1930s was the last time when all sorts of ideologies and competing systems were directly competing against each other. If you think of 1970s, for example, Communism was already discredited largely. There was really no other alternatives. All we were doing is fine tuning our own system, rather than doing anything else. 1930s was the last time when you had that. One of the books I keep referring to is a 1937 book that was called Planned Societies and Economies: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow. The book never been republished again, so you can't actually get a digital copy. I actually had to call it physical copy.

And that book had a contribution from Benito Mussolini and one of his ministers, from Joseph Stalin and one of his ministers as well, who was shot by the way, in 1938, 12 months later. It has contribution from Nazi Germany. It had a contribution from New Deal economists in the U.S., from sociologists, anthropologists across from Europe, as well as the U.S., and all of them agreed that liberal free market ideology is defunct. It caused major problems. We can't go back to that. And therefore, how far should we go forward?

And there were three answers. Answer number one provided by Joseph Stalin and communists was to say, you're absolutely right. We always said capitalism will lead to this. What we can promise you is a brighter, equal future. But you lose your property rights and we're going to put professional people to run the economy as a vanguard of the proletariat. How are we going to build our societies and economies?

Somebody like Benito Mussolini would have said, I said something like, we also agree that free market democratic liberalism is defunct. We will allow you to have your property, but your property is really your steward of national wealth. You're a steward of what we try to do as a country. And by the way, we also get rid of all this democratic nonsense. There will be professional people making professional judgment, what needs to be done. And then of course there were people on the New Deal who were basically saying, well actually what we need is Security and Exchange Commissions. Actually what we need is a bit of social welfare and infrastructure. And so the way my book describes it, we're in a pretty similar position today.

Industrial policies, monetary policies, educational policies, R&D policies, they're proliferating. If you think of it five years ago, when I wrote my first book, we were discussing it, but very little of it actually was around. Today, there is plenty of examples of those policies. So that's one similarity.

Environment of extreme inequalities, it was almost like Gilded Age. Now today we have something similar, we have extreme financialization, we have a technological progression, we have extreme inequalities. If you look at 1970s, it was actually one of the most equal eras in terms of wealth and income inequality ever in the Western world.

So this was a time of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler and Franco and Mao with his long march. This was a period of Stalin. This was a period in the U.S. of Upton Sinclair and Father Coughlin and Hugh Long. This was a time when KKK really become an invisible government of the United States. This was the time of the first reported, or recorded attempt of fascist takeover in the United States. This was a time the time when the Communist Party was growing rapidly in the U.S. So it's not just what was happening in Germany or Italy. France was almost completely ungovernable. So today we're not quite as extreme, but people again want alternatives.

And there are times when people say, look, I don't agree with this anymore. And if I don't agree with this anymore, I'm looking for alternatives. Some of those alternatives are an extreme right, some of those alternatives are an extreme left. The question is, I keep coming back to in my book, is to say, at this stage it looks like populace is not yet mad enough to burn down the house.

So for Republicans, it's agenda 2025, it's not a Project 2025. They're trying to disclaim it's not part of what they try to do. If you think of Obamacare, nobody talks about healthcare. If you think of entitlements, nobody talks about it. If you think of Kamala Harris, she is apparently for fracking. Who would have thought so, that she actually likes oil and gas industry. The same applies to Italy. If you think of Brussels, of Italy, they no longer want to exit Europe. They no longer want to tax the banks, they no longer want to cut welfare payments. If you think of R.N. in France and the journey that R.N. has done over the last 10 or 15 years, even A.F.D. in Germany is becoming more normalized than what it was previously to that. So in other words, increasingly, they emerging as a social conservatives, but from an economic perspective, economic policy, they're gravitating towards the center, and the reason they're gravitating towards the center is because the electorate is not yet mad enough to burn, as I said, to burn down the house.

End miniriff here

Replacing Capitalism

I think a lot of people would point to maybe China as being this example potentially of capitalist with Chinese characteristics, or this idea of state led capitalism, but they are really, by all accounts, trying to write a generational wrong., right, that this grievance that they have with the West, where they have the center of humiliation subjugation.

So it seems like they have been adapting to tactics in order to emerge as they would want their role in the world. But we are now seeing a real issue with their bubble bursting and property prices making new lows. So, we might say that they have started to show the real consequences of state led intervention and misallocation of resources.

So, I guess my question to you is, what are the models or what systems are going to, how do you envision these systems? Capitalism may really be, as we know, it may be coming to an end because of too much debt, because of demographics, because of the, the information and digital age, as you put it, but what’s going to take its place? What do you think are the likeliest models to replace it?

Unaffordable housing, unaffordable education, healthcare, role of the digital media, extreme wealth and income inequalities, inequities. So a lot of problems China and Chinese leadership is facing, not dissimilar what U.S. is facing in many other countries. The question is, as you decide on the solutions to those problems, how far down this curve do you go? Remember I said 1937, so you had Stalin on one side, you had your Benito Mussolini and the fascists somewhere here, and you have FDR somewhere on this side. And so the question is, do you want to go towards Benito Mussolini angle? Do you want to go to Stalin angle? Do you want to go to FDR? And I personally think FDR was absolute genius, finding this middle ground that actually reduced the tensions, defined the extremes, kept as much freedom as you could, and created a new consensus that then really took hold in late 1940s, and continued all the way for two decades, all the way to the end of 1960s, early 1970s.

And so China is facing, as I said, the same 2,000 year history, by a century of shame, by other sayings that other countries don't have to deal with, and also China is confronted with a history just like Russia, that you don't really have a history of civil rights. You don't really have a history of democratic rights. You don't, you always had a strong central government and whenever central government falling apart, it was always disaster. It was always civil wars. And out of those civil wars come out another centrist government.

And so, and so the way Russians are looking at it and the way Chinese are looking at. There are times we live under good emperors, there are times we live under bad emperors, there are times we live under good Czars, and there are times we live under bad Czars, but nobody questioning the underlying system. That's why neither Russia nor China ever had military coups, because nobody would even think of that that will be the answer.

And similarly, elites in those countries believe the country belongs to them, and therefore they are the leading force, or they're leading what's going to happen in the country rather than building institutions of state, institutional bureaucracy, rather than building impartial judgments within the countries.

And so in China, it's complicated by all of those other things, and to me, China was moving in the right direction all the way to global financial crisis. One could argue that the first two stimuli that China would put in, in 08, 09, 10, were appropriately done, and in fact, capitalism might not have even survived if China didn't do what they did back, back in those years. And so that was appropriately done, but eventually it become very excessive. And if you think, one of the numbers I really like is the IMF numbers of depreciated assets. So in other words, it's your gross fixed capital formation minus assumed amortization and depreciation. And if you think of China, according to IMF, pre global financial crisis, depreciated assets were like 4 trillion.

India had like 1 trillion, U.S. had like almost 30 trillion. Today, China is knocking on 100 trillion. India gone from one to six, so China from four to over a hundred, India from one to six, U.S. gone from 30 to like 70. And so China absorbed in less than two decades, something like 100 percent of global GDP in depreciated form in capital.

When you absorb so much capital so quickly, almost inevitably inefficiency of capital utilization arise. Now, do you see those inefficiencies? The answer is yes. One of the easiest way to look at it is to look at the leverage. If you don't utilize the capital efficiently, what happens? You never generate high enough return to repay back the debt.

So your leverage tend to rise. So if you go back pre global financial crisis, China had leverage of about one and a half times GDP. Today, they're knocking up four times. Think of Japan through 70s, 80s and into 90s. They used to have one and a half. By early 90s it was four. Exactly the same process. If you think of other areas you can look at, you can look at a return on equity for a broader sample of corporates in China, pre global financial crisis, return on equity was quite high.

You can look at nominal GDP gross rates. Again, Japan used to grow at 10 percent, then suddenly by early 90s it was zero. And they never nominally grew again, until fairly recently. China's gone from double digit nominal GDP to around 4 percent. Everybody focusing on real GDP, but the important is nominal GDP, because disinflation gets stronger the more you put capacity.

So China's problem, as the book discusses, is a very high national saving rates, maintained for too long, for well over two decades. And China never put policies in place to consume those savings and therefore reduce the saving rates. So if you don't have the policies to consume, then you're, the only answer is you must invest and you must export.

Now, remember China is investing nine, ten trillion dollars every year. That's a double of GDP, of the entire GDP of Japan invested every single year. So if you're forced to invest in export, you immediately create excess capacity almost in everything you do. And so China has multiple problems, but if one were to distill it to one thing, and that is keeping national saving rates too high for too long and embarking on a very aggressive stimulus, four stimulus waves that they have done since the global financial crisis.

So even if China puts the right policies in place today, you would still need to absorb or digest about a hundred trillion dollars of capital. But if you put policies in place to tackle excess capacity, you've mentioned real estate, but that's only one area of the economy that actually has excess capacities. It's the most important one, but the only one of several. If you put policies in place to absorb or shut down some of that excess capacity, reduce the credit risk, if you put policies in place to increase universal basic income, which China already has, universal basic income, you just need to level it across the entire country at a high level.

And that's why I've argued that don't think China will ever again, support global growth. I don't think they will ever support the global commodity complex. There is no other country, currently, or even 10 years from now with, that can step into China's shoes.

End miniriff here

Tariffs and China

[00:52:07] Viktor Shvets: Yeah, I mean, the best outcome is ability to gradually introduce consumption related policies while continuing to export excess capacity to other countries. The problem is I just mentioned you the size of the investment is so large. So the only places you can realistically export meaningful amount is U.S., Japan, Europe, and U.K. maybe, but that's about it.

China, unfortunately, is not facing it because I say the world will have a circular stagnation for years, for decades to come. Global growth rates will be hanging around two and a half percent, maybe less as we go forward. So like Japan, 1990s, 2000, China is not facing that sort of climate. When you have such a rapidly growing world, you find tariff protection or protectionary measures are not as critical because everybody's growing. Everybody's doing things. Whenever you start growing at only two and a half percent, which is only a hundred basis points above global recession, if you actually start growing at that level, then almost inevitably protectionism becomes incredibly, incredibly important.

Today, both people and politicians fully recognize that that is a price you pay. Now, theoretically, if we live in a global community, then it doesn't matter because one benefits, the other transfer the benefit. But we don't, we live in tribes, we live in nation states, we don't live in the world, and so even though everybody as a world benefits, individuals in those countries are not. And that's why Danni Rodrik called it political trilemma of a global economy, that you can't maintain local politics and democracy and globalization at the same time. You have to choose two out of the three, but you can't choose all three at the same time, because it's incompatible with the interest of citizens of a specific country. And so again, Japan was lucky in that respect. China is not.

And a final point, Japan did not try to change the global world, the world. They didn't try to change internet rules, communication rules, human rights, trade rules. They didn't try to build spheres of influence.

And so for China, The most obvious and the best thing to do is to say we're going to continue to export whilst we gradually rebuild our economy. But as you correctly said, that's going to be hard. They will not be able to export to the U.S. I think Japan is going to be a no-go area. That's why they're spending so much time in Europe as the only bloc which is not coherent or speaking with one voice, that you might be able to do that.

And so you do need to introduce other policies, other than just export oriented policies. But most of them are hard. Things like agricultural productivity, for example. There is over 200 million people in China producing about the same output as 10 million farmers in the U.S..

So if you were to change the rules of engagement on land, what do you do with land? Can you create bigger farms? Should you invest in farms? What's going to happen to 200 million people? And at the same time, you would need to change the taxation policies because local government rely on land speculation and sale of land in order to fund themselves. Now that no longer will be possible. So you need to introduce some kind of property taxation, value added taxes, or something else to finance the local governments as you go forward.

You can also try to allow greater freedom for households and private businesses to make decisions. But then, if you do that, then the degree of control that the state and the party exercises over economy and society will almost inevitably diminish, and that also conflicts with a more global agenda that is not just stabilizing China itself, but its neighborhood. So in other words, the perception that the Sinosphere is a protective blanket around China, and again, a lot of countries would not agree with that, either definitions of spheres of influence or how you do this.

So it becomes incredibly difficult economic, social and geopolitical I guess, triangle that you need to somehow square for China to go forward. Are there policies? Yes. Uh, I just mentioned some, the UBI policy, changes taxation policy, reshuffling the debt from local to central government, things like real estate.

Remember, so far China has spent less than 1 percent of GDP in support of real estate. If you think of TARP and ARR in the United States, that was 5 to 10 percent of GDP, so it's just a fraction of what needs to be done. So there are policies. There are policies on specific industries. There are policies on consumption. There are policies on geopolitics, on politics. But all of them are hard, and all of them involve compromises.

End miniriff here

China Hesitates

[00:59:52] Viktor Shvets: We've just discussed, whatever you do is in conflict with whatever else you're trying to do. So, if you think of China, China has a lot of problems. They cannot add labor anymore. They've added too much capital as we discussed over the last two decades and a multi factor productivity is not growing. So they say, okay, we need to grow multi-factor productivity. Very true. How do you grow multi-factor productivity? Well, you grow through technology. And so whether it's a EVs, whether it's batteries, whether it's solar panels, whether it's robotics, a lot of investment goes into this area and that's appropriate.

But because it's a relatively small areas, when you invest trillions of dollars, you create three, four, five times global demand almost overnight, in all of those industries, remembering the size of China. So you need to pull back. But if you pull back, you don't grow multi-factor productivity, or at least it takes you longer to actually reposition your economy much more towards higher productivity end.

Also, when you build your higher productivity end, you have to remember that bulk of manufacturing in China is still very primitive. It's still toys, it's still plastics, it's still bulk chemicals, it's still steel. It's all of that stuff. So you have to be careful how much you actually withdraw from those areas and how quickly. Because, again, you have to have the labor force moving from one side to the other. And then you have state control, or in other words, directives, that come out from Beijing, what to do. Now those directives are not always consistent in what they're trying to do. And so it's really trying to square this box, that you have, on the one hand, you have political objectives, you have social objectives, you have economic objectives, and you have geopolitical objectives.

And you try to fulfill all of them as much as you possibly can. The other thing is, and that's quite interesting, is that I think China is probably one of the last truly capitalist societies in a sense that they, nobody in the West any longer believes there is such thing as a sound money. Nobody believes that. Nobody believes that you can bring down this cloud of finance to anything meaningful without at the same time undermining property prices, pensions and everything else that people rely on, and therefore we gave up on any meaning of liquidations, clearing of excesses, recessions, and everything else.

China in some ways have not fully given up on that, uh, and therefore there is an undertone that we can't just bail out the companies, even though in the U.S., or most other countries, it's done incredibly frequently, or we have to be careful, moral hazards and what degree of moral hazard we introduced. So in some ways, China is also, in my view, sort of a throwback to more conventional, interestingly enough, to more conventional capitalism, the way it's supposed to function, but in the modern world, that is not possible. That's why the ultimate destination that you were asking me, the ultimate destination my book discusses is that it's clearly not a conventional capitalism.

Even China recognizes, gradually, that is not the case. So you're not going to liberal capitalism, you're not doing that. So the question is, through the combination of technology and finance, changing the functioning of labor market, capital markets, money, central banks, what the government does, are we going to end up with a system that a few technocratic guys control everything and everybody else has no rights and just do side hustles and gig jobs?

How other people look at you will be different. And so to me, I hope that's the right answer, which by the way, not that far away from what John Maynard Keynes used to say back in 1930s, when he was saying within four or five generations, we need to figure out how are we going to live a good life, when the productivity is going to be so high.

It's not that the similar to Peter Drucker or Ray Kurzweil or any of those other guys, they've been discussing it for decades, centuries, in the case of Karl Marx, what it ultimately would look like. And so to me, that's the answer. And that's why the positive note in the book is to say that ultimately, and I think it's maybe two decades from now, but ultimately, productivity will jump from 1 percent to maybe 5 percent or more. But the reason it's going to jump because most of us will not be working, but nevertheless, productivity will be incredibly high. And then society will find a way of sharing the benefits of it. So in other words, who owns a technology? Who owns means of production, as Karl Marx used to say? Who owns it?

How is it distributed? And to me that is likely to be the future, rather than a more conventional liberal capitalism, or rather than more traditional industrial capitalism, as we have been describing. As I said, most people will get petrified. Oh my God, he's talking about communism, but it is not the communism of North Korea. It's not a communism of Cuba. It's not a communism of a Soviet Union. It's designed in its original sense as a society of very high productivity. And the book asks the question, I think that's going to be the future. But that's several decades from now. So what happens between now and then, because that's a problem.

That's going to be an incredibly violent decade or two. And so the question is not between, the choice is not between freedom or slavery. The choice is how much of our freedom needs to be sacrificed in some form in order to reduce the tensions in societies and defund the extremes as much as possible.

And that's where you start thinking of policies like universal basic income. How do you fund the government? What is the role of MMT or central banks? What is the role of industrial policies? How we should change educational and scaling institutions. Who should be owning what assets and how they should be owned? Who benefits from the flow of that higher productivity.

And that's not to forget, as I said, my pet project, which is a Marshall Plan for less and least developed countries in order to contain as much as possible immigration waves, but also healthcare waves, because if another pandemic is going to come, more likely than not, it's going to come from those places. And so think of it as a survival, cost of survival, rather than a DCF. So instead of saying, if I pay, I need to get a return. Well, your return could be in lower immigration, lower pressures, and less pandemics. Maybe that going to be the return.

End miniriff here

Embracing the Changes

The fact is that there is an arms race, right? And in a world where you've got multipolar actors with individual agencies that are not cooperating all the time, that every day, every major agent needs to assume that the other is actively working on innovation that's going to undermine the other players, right?

So there is no stopping the financialization wave, and there is no stopping the technology wave. These are binding constraints, right? So the externalities need to be resolved outside of tech and outside of finance, which means politics and, you know, the social contract, right? So, do you agree that's kind of where we're going to see the major changes?

None of those numbers are real. And so the question is, when does your computer screen collide with the reality? And the answer is, risks don't go away, they just migrate. So, you expelled it out of economic system, you expelled it out of capital markets. So, where did it go? Well, it got into politics, it's gone into polarization, inequalities, into geopolitics, into climate, into healthcare, and all of this outside the system. And so, if you're a policymaker, if you're a Federal Reserve, for example, you have no chance of either estimating or predicting when this real life will intrude into your screen. And you have no clue how we as people are going to respond to that, either to politics or pandemics.

How are we going to respond for fiscal and monetary means? Nobody knows. And so that creates a huge swipes up and down, whether it's inflation, gross rates, and the rest of it, or to put it in economic terms, we can no longer estimate neutral rates. And one of the things Jay Powell keep highlighting, and he must be a sailor because he always uses nautical sort of comparisons, but he is saying, look, we've been sailing out of the cloudy sky and he'd been saying that lately, or certainly for quite a number of years, we could not identify the location of the stars. And what he means by that, he doesn't know where A star is, he doesn't know where U star, Pi star, he doesn't know neutral rate of interest rates or inflation or unemployment.

Now, if you don't see the stars, then you don't really know whether you're in the middle of Atlantic Ocean or whether you're on Lake Michigan. You have no clue. Now, if that is the case, then you have to be data dependent because you can't look forward. Now, if you become data dependent, does it mean that you create even more waves because of that? Yes, because essentially you're saying that I can't see the stars. I don't know the future. I'll be just data dependent. So I could be hawkish one day, and I can change from one to the other in the space of three or four months. That is not a reflection of me wanting to be inconsistent. It's a reflection of the fact that neutral rates are very volatile.

Now, what creates this volatility is those risks that we expelled outside the system. Now, what that basically means, if you invest, that means neutral rates could be 2 percent or could be, there could be one, it could be three, it could be from Monday to Thursday that could actually change as quickly as that. Now that means your risk free rates also has to be very volatile. And because the risk you're assessing outside the system, your ability to assess risk premia, whether it's equity risk premia or debt risk premia, is also gone. In other words, 1 percent is just as likely as 5 percent. That means you have no weighted average cost of capital, you have no DCF and you have no reliable way of valuing.

So as a corporate or a fund manager, not only you're not clear where demand is, because neutral rates are volatile, but you also have no weighted average cost of capital to estimate whether opening a factory or closing the factory will increase the value or reduce the value of your company. The interesting thing I keep highlighting is that even as we eliminated economic cycles, they largely do not exist. Even if, as we eliminated capital market cycles, once again, they largely don't exist. Even as we expelled all the risk outside the system, the business cycles are accelerated. Not economic cycle, business cycles. So, in the past, it could have taken you a decade or longer to build a big company. These days, you know, four quarters is good enough.

It could be anybody. How they utilize technology and how they utilize finance. In other words, what I described as a Fujiwhara Effect. How did they use Fujiwhara effect in order to differentiate themselves?

So what's happening, industries and sectors are colliding. You thought you had three competitors. Suddenly you have 12, 15, god knows who it is competing against you anymore. And so the result is that you need to deploy it in a way that raises your productivity faster than a frontier in that market or in that industry or whatever happens to be. If you manage to do that, you have almost infinite values. On the other hand, as soon as you miss the turn, you no longer have that value. Somebody else will have it. And so, this is a recipe for mega caps becoming micro caps and micro caps becoming mega caps in a very quick succession. Very quick. It's also a recipe for very concentrated returns.

So when people say, oh my god, the market looks terrible because concentrated returns well, get used to it. And by the way, they're not the same companies. If you're saying a FAANG, the old FAANG, today's composition of FAANG index is very different to what it was five or six years ago. Now, you look at Magnificent 7, well, it's no longer 7, it's 4. And if you look at the Granola's in Europe. So, in other words, we will invent phrases to describe the degree of concentration. Constituents of those indexes will be very, very different. So one of the examples I highlight is that clearly NVIDIA has gone from a hundred billion dollar company to multi trillion dollar company in five years.

It took other companies decades to get anything like that. But as their products become more powerful and as a marginal cost continues to decline, eventually somebody will use that power at very low cost to build a brand new business. And you find media will go down in market cap, but that company that needs high power and low cost, suddenly will prosper. How long would that company prosper? Who knows? Maybe a year or two, maybe somebody else will overtake them. The same applied to, if you think of Microsoft versus IBM, and different fortunes of those companies. If you think of luxury companies, you know, your Hermes versus LVMH. So you can go on, you can look at the car companies and how they're changing.

And so to me, the interesting thing is that it's such a multifaceted game. If you are either a corporation or an investor, in a sense that you no longer have reliable, economic signals, or any signals you can use, you no longer really have capital market signals. As I said, you're playing computer games when you look at a screen.

None of it is real. The risks are completely outside the system. You have a highly volatile, as a result, neutral rate, risk free rate, as well as risk premia. But business cycles are being accelerated at a massive space, which means winning goes to the winner and loser gets nothing, which would imply, interestingly enough, that if you're an equity investor, you ought to become a stock picker again, because it's really understanding the management teams, the products, the positioning, how can they grow productivity faster than a frontier.

But then also recognizing that as soon as that's not the case, they will be punished severely. And the losers will have to rely on self-liquidations, share buybacks, dividends, and stuff like that in order to try to maintain the market capitalization. So it's an interesting world. That world basically tells you that everything is changing, economic cycles changing, the capital market cycles changing, role of money changing, role of capital changing, role of humans and their role in driving productivity is changing, the role of the jobs, role of education and scaling and what's the importance of that, role of the government, all of that.

Theoretically, that creates monumental opportunities in various forms, but also monumental problems, and how you actually navigate from A to B.

End miniriff here

Managing External Risks

So, are the tails just that, so you've got this really narrow distribution of outcomes, but then if they bulge out at the side, like it's very, we call it in, it's leptokurtic, right? They'll come, the risks are to come from outside of the financial system, and therefore those operating the financial system are unlikely to do a very good job anticipating it and managing it when it when it arises.

It's the only thing that keeps abyss away. It's the only thing that keeps chaos that those people experience first hand, away from us, and they were prepared to trade rights. If you think of 1956 as I describe in the book, it was not a liberal era by any stretch of imagination, socially, culturally, politically, or any other way. But they were prepared to trade it in and say, look, I'm willing to trade those rights in order to keep the ship afloat. Now, one of the things I discussed in the book is the younger generation. If you think of millennials and if you think of Z, basically anybody born after early 1980s, that survey after survey is highlighting that they have a very different view of the world compared to their parents and grandparents and much closer to the great grandparents, much closer to those people who were mature adults in the 1950s.

And they want community, they want government, they want the guardrails, they want sharing, they're willing to sacrifice some of their rights, they're willing to have greater social conventions established around them. So, one of the things in the book, I just summarized the qualities, and if you can see those qualities, it's almost replica of GI and silent generations and completely the opposite of baby boomers and X, completely the opposite. And so the good news is that all of them are now reaching the stage of maturity. So if you think of the United States, they already, more than 50 percent of the population, but they're only around 40 percent of the adults and they're only about 30 percent of voting because in the U.S. as you know, voting is not compulsory.

You should have freedom. This ridiculous ideas of absolute, absolutist free speech and the rest of it. They're still fighting against that. But it won't be long, because at the end of the day, they are bound to be a majority, and so the question is the next 5, 10, 15 years, as all of this progresses, can we put enough guardrails to minimize this damage? Can we put enough guardrails to minimize this volatility? Because as you correctly said, what keeps whiplashing us is polarization, political, electoral outcomes. Think of geopolitics, climate, healthcare, pandemics.

So think of the United States. If Democrats sweep Congress, Senate, and a presidency. Democrats, as you know, running on economic agenda. They're trying not to talk about it, but essentially they're running on economic agenda. If they do come to power and they do have control of the levers, whether it's a chips policy, infrastructure policy, education policy, healthcare policies, you know, student forgiveness policy, they have, they don't agree on everything, but they are in that, in that mould. Now, that basically would imply that primary deficits in the U.S., which are currently running three, three and a half percent of GDP, probably will go up a hundred basis points at least. Now, it won't be reflected until 26, 27, but Federal Reserve would need to react in 25 against it, because the market will reprice it.

Now, what impact will that have on the neutral rates and the monetary policies? If you have a divided government, i.e.: one party does not control all the levers, you probably will have a problem changing neutral rates, but you could attack institutional pillars. That's where Project 2025 comes in.

Whether it's a role of Department of Justice, FBI, whether it's a role of Federal Reserve, Department of Education. A lot of people say, well, if it's divided government run by Republicans, uh, you will have lower taxes, higher EPS, less regulation. That's true. But what about risk premia? U.S. assets have a very low risk premia right now. If they come anywhere near trying to attack institutional pillars, what will happen to risk premia? So all of that just to highlight, just one election and how much it can alter the outcomes, and I said, the only good news I find in this, and I keep coming back to that, that people are not yet mad enough to burn down the house.

And that's good news. And that's why people are gravitating towards a more neutral territory, which means hopefully the degree of volatility will not be as high. But as we go down this path of the next 3, 4, 5, 10 years, will they become angry enough? They might.

End miniriff here

Degradation and Positioning

[01:28:56] Viktor Shvets: But, but it's not just, if I say, it's not just unemployment, it's lack of self confidence in a sense. It's how you feel about yourself and about your life. You don't actually need to become unemployed. You need to just be degraded in what you do. Either the functions you do, how you compensate it, it's every day you sit in your chair and you feel less valuable. If you feel less valuable, and if other members of community feel you become less valuable, you immediately become angry. Even though unemployment might not increase at all, you're just not happy with your life. And then you think about your son or your daughter, what will happen to them, and they, and you become even more depressed. And so that's the only correction. It's not so much unemployment as your own perception of your own worths. Your own, how societies view you.

[01:30:32] Viktor Shvets: Yeah. I mean, as a 1930s, nobody knew what to do. So Britain had its own way. U.S. had its own way. France was ungovernable, you know, Spain, Italy, Germany, Japan got fascist. You know, liberal experiments in China evaporated. The Soviet Union gone from new economic policy in late 1920s to collectivization in the early 1930s, and industrialization, which was devastating in human terms, whether some countries which were better positioned, yes, but they were usually out of the way places and they were not as impacted.

And I think today there are some, there's some of those out of the way places, but they don't really matter in a global context. They might be great safety harbors. They might be great places to park in a context of what's happening, but they don't actually alter the global equilibrium. If you think of the key powers, if you think of the United States, U.K., European Monetary Union or EU, if you think of Japan, if you think of China, if you think of the United States, I can't say that any of them actually have the right policies.

One can debate a little bit about parts of Scandinavia, but as I said, I'm not, I don't think they matter. It was, all due respect for Scandinavians, I don't think they're going to swing the thing one way or the other. But, so the way I look at it, in bigger entities, I just don't see coherent policies. I don't see a realistic discussion of UBI. I don't see a realistic discussion of how governments are going to be funded. I don't see a realistic discussion of what is meant by public debt. Is it real? Is it not real? How are we going to handle it? I don't see a realistic discussion of taxes, what the tax rates should be.

Should we go back to 50s and 60s tax rates, for example, either in terms of income, capital gains, estate taxes? Do you, you know, desk duties, corporate taxes? I don't see any of that. I don't see any meaningful discussion of restructuring educational and scaling institutions, which are still designed to create very narrow skills, which are becoming less and less relevant and will be even less relevant 10 years from now, compared to today, globally. In terms of migration, we're still talking about walls and building walls all over the place.

As my book said, go and ask Emperor Hadrian or Byzantines, how well those walls work. They will tell you if they were still alive, that it doesn't work. But, so nobody is discussing that. Everybody is looking much more, much more shorter term and politicizing all of those issues enormously.

There are some discussions on technology and who should own technology, and how the benefits should be shared. But in my view, that's a very early stages of discussion. It’s not progressing anywhere near as enough. There are discussions on the role of the government. That's why the government is coming through with various policies, whether it is, if you think of, you know, chips policies, whether you think of infrastructure policies, but again, it's haphazard.

And so right now, if you were to ask, do you see anybody out there, either politically, geopolitically, economically, the answer is no. Do we need it? Yes, we do, but it's hard to find people like that, very hard, and ultimately politics reflects societies. When people say, you know, disorganized or disconnected Washington or London or whatever, it's really people who are disoriented, and that's reflected in politics when people finally connect and finally understand what is needed, and when they finally coalesce, politics will coalesce almost immediately, and will become consenting institutions, trying to solve problems. While people are disoriented, politics just reflects it and so you get into this problem of what do people want, how do politics reflect it, when would people coalesce? When a generational change will actually lead you to a decision, like if you think of Woodstock, if you think of late 1960s, clearly there was a desire of baby boomers to do something, whether it was drugs, whether it was sex, whether it was a flower culture, but essentially it was about freedom.

End miniriff here

Positioning for Growth and Resilience

[01:37:48] Viktor Shvets: Well, to my mind the first thing is don't worry about recessions, stop worrying about absolute blowouts, don't worry about, oh my God, this time it's different, it's never different, it is different, so stop worrying about that. The way I look at it is, assume that most of the time the system will be intact. The only thing what's going to happen, I describe it as a twilight. The sun will be shining less brightly every day as you go forward, but there will be no lightning, there will be no thunder, there will be no floods, and regularly your screen will go off. That's when the real life collided with your screen.

And then a couple of people will knock on a screen and the picture will come back. Now, people who will knock on the screen will be the central banks and the policymakers, and you look around, oh, okay. The screen is good enough again. So don't get this idea that, suddenly there will be like 40 percent, 30 percent drawdown in the marketplace, high yield market is going to explode, private capital is a mine waiting to explode, basis and parity trade will destroy the market, and all those headlines you're getting.

Now, what's your macro assumptions? Which countries do you want to be in? Which markets do I want to be in? Now, none of them are good, but some look better than others. We've just discussed Europe, for example. European Monetary Union doesn't tick any of the boxes, almost. That means if you've chosen the right place or the right stocks in Europe, that means you can perform, but you will always be a negative macro roof over your head.

Now, which countries look better? Well, U.S. is one of them. India is another one of them. So you'd say, okay, if I discuss it as checking in at the Hotel California and really not checking out. So you're kind of checking in and there will never be enough good reasons to check out because remember, bad stuff will not happen.

So why would you buy defensive? There is nothing to defend against and high cyclicality will not happen. So why would I buy cyclicals? So you sort of end up in this middle ground between the defensive and cyclicals and try to figure out what stocks, if you're an equity investor, in what markets would I prefer to have. And then you build those portfolios and then you monitor it. Now, is there a trading opportunity in between? There are, but they are very sharp and short. So, for example, in emerging markets frequently the real rates get very, very high, and so even though emerging markets in the world I've described are not really winners, there could be a significant re-rating very quickly occurring.

That re-rating only lasts maybe a few months, maybe a quarter or two at most. But you can try to take account of those trading opportunities. Otherwise, it's all about productivity growth rates. That's what we've discussed. It doesn't matter what sector it is. Can you find companies where productivity can increase faster?

Then a frontier in that market and stay there at least for a period of time. That will provide you resilience in your portfolio. Now, those sorts of portfolios are relatively expensive. In most cases you will find on the stock basis, you will be looking at around 25 times forward. But they usually have ROEs, which are at least 30-40 percent. They usually have pretty good balance sheets. And so to me, that's sort of a middle ground with some trading opportunities on the side, is the only way I can think of handling it. And so in the U.S., if you agree with my view in the U.S., in the U.S., there is a wide waterfront of assets to choose. In emerging markets, for example, India has a wide waterfront of assets.

In Europe, you can only select certain niches that actually do look interesting. Occasionally you can have emerging markets, as I said, being reproduced, being priced totally out of the whack with what's likely to happen. And one of the classic examples that are real rates. That's one of the classic examples you can look at, how you can benefit from it, and that's the only way I can think of how you can build that sort of resilience, considering the whiplashes that you're likely to experience.

End miniriff here

Preparing for Risk

[01:44:36] Viktor Shvets: I do. One of the things I discussed in the book that it's almost inevitable that the role of Federal Reserve or central banks will come under spotlight. It doesn't necessarily have to be inflationary by the way, because you're dealing with a lot of disinflationary backdrop, which has discussed how even media will not be able to price its products, properly as you go forward.

So it doesn't necessarily mean inflationary, but we would need to discuss how the government gets funded. What does the government do? What is the role of MMT? What is the role of, for governments that have sovereignty? In other words, they have a monetary sovereignty. They issue, use, and borrow exclusively in their own currency and mostly from their own citizens. Now, if that is the case what is public debt? It basically, we are, we are basically borrowing from each other and lending to each other. So this is where your MMT policy comes in and says, okay, how do you measure, how do you manage it through taxation policies, for example? So all of these debates we’ll have to go through.

Now, knowing how we work, none of it will be consistent, None of it will come at the same time. All of that will occur in emergencies. So, for example, with central bank digital coins proliferate. Right now, a lot of Republicans want to ban central bank digital coins. But the reality is that China does it, Russia does it, Europe does it. I mean, it's inescapable. You're going to have that. As you have central bank digital coins, then there is a question of what commercial banks are going to do. Because the role of commercial banks historically was propagating monetary signals through the economy. Central bank digital coins largely will negate that.

There is no need for that. You find central banks essentially will become banks. So what do commercial banks do? And if central banks or central bank digital coins can directly manage demand rather than indirectly via the markets as they already have done during Covid, for example, or during GFC. So how do you manage it? How well, what are the rules of that? How are you going to use it? And so to me, every time we're going to have an emergency, which we will over the next 10 years, so we'll be multiples of them. Those tools will be rolled out and then gradually a patchwork of rules will emerge.

Every country will be a bit different. Not all of them will be the same, but the philosophy will be the same. The government will be determining most of the rules. So they will determine probably margins that the banks will be allowed to make. They will determine where capital is going to go and how it's going to go on behalf of society, so to speak, because we have 5 to 10 times more capital than we need, but it's not allocated where people would like it to be allocated.

So there will be, because capital will not look the same as it is now. And so maybe at that point it becomes something else. So when people say, how does it end? The answer, it doesn't. It just carries on eventually until you get to singularity, whatever that is, and then people will figure out what is meant by capital? What is meant by money? What is meant by labor? What is meant by education? What is meant by skilling? What is meant by productivity, and as I said, the danger is really the next decade or two as you transit there, and could we have World War Three? And that's why my subtitle of the book is hard to avoid, the world on fire, because could we have that? Yes, because people in 1930s didn't make good judgments, really. Most of them.

End miniriff here

Different Directions

[01:50:28] Viktor Shvets: All of that, all of that is true, and by the way, in 1950s and 60s, you actually have high enough productivity that profit margins were high, REIs were high and there was enough money left to reposition the money towards the middle class, and that's why the middle class was growing through the 1950s and 60s.

They will take some of the profits. They will reallocate the money. And that's not always true. As I said, in 1950s and 60s, it was not true, and both corporate sector and the middle class managed to grow at the same time. Also, the government will be directing more, they already are, but they're not going to nationalize the industry.

We have competitive markets. None of those things are true. And so private sector is almost just as poor to inefficiencies as a public sector is, and in many areas, public sector could actually deploy it more efficiently, from social and other perspective. Now, what that does, of course, there are certain winners than losers.

One of the things I've been advocating for a while is what I call localization portfolios. In other words, portfolios that are designed to benefit from localized policies directed to localized corporates, okay, to implement those policies. It could be infrastructure, it could be chips, it could be education, it could be laboratories like Bell Labs and stuff like that.

The other thing you can argue is that different countries will prioritize different things, so the impact will be different. That ought to be translated into currencies. But I don't believe currencies will be allowed, and they haven't been allowed to move the way they should be moving anyway. That was a whole problem with Paul Walker. He was assuming that financialization he is spawning will be corrected by currencies moving and therefore excess deficits and surpluses will get normalized. They never did because currencies never cleared it. So I'm not even totally sure that a currency market will provide you with that.

Now the intangible versus tangible assets. As you know, I've been in a camp of intangible assets being much more powerful, but there are elements of tangible assets also valuable. These are the tangible assets needed for the new world, and so whether it's copper, nickel, cobalt, lithium, rare earths, I'm not, generally speaking, a great commodity believer. If I go a penny every time somebody told me that we're going to run out of commodities, I would be very well cemented by now, because none of it was true. We either find it somewhere, or if we don't find it, we use technology somehow, or we change industrial process, or we use less of that commodity.

But nevertheless, if you think of commodity space, there is your old industrial commodities, and there are newer commodities. So I tend to prefer newer commodities. So can you express all of that through localization portfolios? Can you express all of that through intangible assets and commodity space? Yes, you can, but the way I look at it, for most people, I think it will be easier to just go and say, whatever happens, there are companies and countries that have a wind behind their back. And there are companies that are facing the wind and the countries, if you find countries that have some wind behind their back and the companies are benefiting from that, either through localization or tangible, intangible aspects, then you are more resilient, no matter what happens as you go forward. But you're right, it could express itself in local politics. It could express itself in commodities It could express itself in currencies.

End miniriff here

[01:56:12] Viktor Shvets: Well, my book’s on Amazon will be the easiest thing to do. I'm also, um, reasonably active in LinkedIn, so occasionally I post. Otherwise, I guess, all the shows like yours, and thank you very much for inviting me ,and I really enjoyed our conversation.

[01:56:39] Adam Butler: Yeah. Thanks very much, Victor.

[01:56:42] Rodrigo Gordillo: Sorry to interrupt, but I did want to take a quick second to remind our listeners that the team works really hard on these podcasts. We spend a lot of hours trying to get the right guests and we do a lot of prep work to make sure that we're asking the right questions. So if you do have a second, just do hit that Subscribe button, hit that Like button, and Share with friends if you find what we're doing useful.