Rob’s comments are in italics.Derek’s comments are in normal font.
Today at the time of recording is the 7th of February. Things continue to move at pace, so we thought we'd do a quick roundup of recent events in the last week and see what's relevant from a sovereign finance lens. Where do we need to start?
Well, I mean, I think the most obvious thing from this week is Donald Trump's bull-in-a-China-shop announcement, which seems to have shocked everybody that Gaza would make a great seaside resort.
Along with Greenland and Canada…
The suggestion that all of the Palestinians should go somewhere else, like maybe Egypt or Jordan, despite the fact that the rest of the Arab world has said, look, we're just not taking these people. They've got their own homeland. The suggestion that they should leave there because it's rubble is kind of bizarre considering that it's been reduced to rubble by Israel...
Uh, didn’t the rubble just show up all by itself?
I think it was Colonel McGregor's comment that even if Trump thought that, it was very stupid of him to say so out loud. So, that was ridiculous.
On other fronts this week, the Senate hearings for the appointees are going through.
Cash Patel gave a pretty good account of himself at the grilling he had as potential head of the FBI. I don't know what the state of the confirmation is. With Robert Kennedy, he's got through the hearing in the subcommittee that was examining him. He's now going to a full Senate vote on his position. There are some concerns that he's going to be sort of constrained even if he gets confirmed in the position. We'll have to see how that goes. I think this is the most interesting thing. Once again, Tulsi Gabbard gave a pretty good account of herself. I don't know whether that confirmation is confirmed yet or whether these things are still unfolding. There are certainly some very interesting appointments there. We'll have to see how that works out.
Of course, the other area is Ukraine. I saw on the Internet today that the Daily Mail has published a proposed peace plan put forward by Donald Trump. The commentary that I heard today is that it doesn't seem to include reassurances of freedom to speak Russian. It lacks freedom to pursue the Russian Orthodox Christian religion for ethnically Russian areas.
Which was kind of the issue in the first place?
Yeah. So, you know, without something covering that, it's not going to fly anyway. I mean, on the battlefield, it continues to be a war of attrition, really. It's truly tragic. There's large amounts of the country laid to waste. Astonishing numbers of young Ukrainians sacrificed to this madness.
Apart from that, an interesting book I've read this week is called The Russian Peace Threat by a guy called Ron Ridenour. It's pretty meaty, it's over 500 pages long. I'm slowly plodding through that. It was interesting to be reminded that for the first 10 or 12 years of Putin's presidency, he was actually quite well received in America. He met George Bush when he was president a number of times. He was essentially cooperative with American, even providing them with bases in some of the southern Soviet members of the Russian Federation.
So it's quite interesting to reflect how he's now painted in the Western media as an absolute villain. I mean, I don't think he's a paragon of virtue…
I don't think he's a saint, but yeah.
He doesn't seem to be any worse than any other leading politician. He certainly seems to be sharper, more consistent and more measured in his pronouncements than the majority of the American or British politicians.
So, ‘watch this space’ really. I think that's all I want to cover this week. Anything coming up for you?
I just wanted to ask you about your reading habits actually. Every time we have these conversations, you pull out about three or four books that you've read that are all about 500 pages long. I struggle to read anything much longer than a children's book at the moment! How often do you read, and do you skim?
I very rarely skim actually. Sometimes I do, but usually the books I read are worth reading in depth. I probably read an hour or two every evening. I read an hour in the morning after waking up and before getting out of bed. So it's a pretty solid regime. But I'm just fascinated by the information.
Historically, I've read very widely lots of novels. But virtually everything, 95% of what I've read in the last 10 or 15 years has been non-fiction. Most of it is reflections on the way that the world has been unfolding and the situation that we're in now. Because, as I say, I think we're living through a really fascinating period of history. It's a real cliffhanger because there's no guarantee that it's not going to end in absolute disaster! In a way, it's miraculous that it hasn't already.
People seem oblivious to the fact that we're pushing our luck to a greater extent all the time. So again it's a question of ‘watch this space’ really.
Yeah, I think at some point the root narratives of how we're behaving will be reframed. It's a question of whether we exterminate ourselves in the interim. Hopefully not. Hopefully we're due for a greater awakening and a course correction. I'm more hopeful, but I think business owners and so on, like entrepreneurs tend to be more optimistic.
You have to be an optimist to be an entrepreneur. Otherwise we wouldn't do it!
Yeah, that was more or less what I was going to say. A comment from one of my colleagues was, if we weren't optimists, we would never have got started on this!
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