Odd Lots - Why It's A Big Problem That Economists Still Don't Understand Money

Episode Date: December 30, 2019

The severity of the Great Financial Crisis took economists by surprise, particularly the ones who believed that markets were largely stable and self-regulating. So why did so many eminent thinkers get it so wrong? On this week's episode of Odd Lots, we speak with Lord Robert Skidelsky, an economic historian who is known for being the pre-eminent biographer of John Maynard Keynes. Skidelsky is the author of the new book “Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics”, and he tells us why economists' failure to understand what money is has been so detrimental to their understanding of the world.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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slash audio. That's vanguard.com slash audio. All investing is subject to risk vanguard marketing Corporation Distributor. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Oddlots podcast. I'm Joe Wisenthal. And I'm Tracy Allaway. So Tracy, both of us are careers in finance media is roughly around the same time, right? Right? Like you started pretty much just before the financial crisis. Yeah, that's right. In fact, I joined the Financial Times in September of 2008, so actually directly in the middle of the financial prices.

Well, that was like, that's the same month, yeah, or maybe October 2008, I started Business Insider. And we really, I always thought it was like the best time in terms of career timing wise because there was just so much to cover in those days. Absolutely. And the best part was because everything that was happening was so unusual and so new, you were sort of on an even footing with people who'd been covering it for years and years and years. Everyone was trying to figure out what was going on at exactly the same time. Yeah, my thoughts exactly. And then I think the subsequent years, the last decade or so, has also been incredibly interesting. I mean, obviously the news has slowed down a bit.

But I think one of the, I guess, positive aspects of the post-crisis era has been this major rethinking about all kinds of conventional wisdom, all of the standard dogma. about economics and which direction should policy go and what framework should best be used, they're really coming under, even still today, pretty intense scrutiny and just sort of a rethinking of everything. I mean, I'm not sure I would call it a positive development because all these questions of economic orthodoxy are sort of coming up because people think that economic orthodoxy hasn't actually worked. And we still have sluggish economic growth and we still have lots of

problems in the international financial systems, so people are really trying to figure out what has gone wrong. But from a financial media perspective, yes. Yes, it's been very interesting. Yeah, I think that's a good distinction. It's not good that the post-crisis economies, especially in the developed world, have been so mediocre, sluggish, mediocre wage growth, et cetera. But from our seats, from our vantage points, it's certainly been a time of sort of a sort of a great opening up of the possibilities and lots of chances to explore different ideas. Yeah. And it's not, you know, it's an unusual time when you see headlines like the failure of central banks. And we see those all the time, right? That's sort of almost a given at this point in time with everyone talking about fiscal stimulus.

Exactly right. So today, I'm very excited about our guest because he's probably one of the best positioned people to talk about. the history of economic ideas, rethinking economic dogma, anticipating where policy will go during a period of such a profound change. We're going to be speaking to Robert Skidelsky. He's a member of the House of Lords, but he's mostly known for having been the most famous and authoritative biographer of John Maynard Keynes. He's written extensively about Keynes and his work. And he is the author of a fairly new book. It's called Money and Government, a Challenge to Mainstream Economics, and it's about this. It's about the history of the ideas that led us up to the global financial crisis, and it's a discussion of where things are going to go next. So sort of the perfect guest for this moment.

So Robert Skidelsky, thank you very much for joining us. And thank you for asking. So let's start with our intro. When you look at the post-crisis era and you see all these different debates going on about new frameworks and new ideologies and new approaches, are you heartened by it? I mean, I mentioned it's a positive. It's not positive that we've had such sluggish growth and that the old dogmas have failed. But do you feel excited by the possibilities that this is created in terms of new directions and you can. economic thinking? Well, we're in an interesting transition stage, Antri. I mean, I always recall

that that old adage, the old world is dying and the new world is powerless to be born. And the old world of economic policy, I think, suffered some pretty devastating blows, both in 2008 and really the failure of policy to lift economies back to anything like, vigorous growth since. That is most economies. There's a dissatisfaction with the orthodoxy. There's political discontent

with the orthodoxy, and that is shown right through the political systems of the world. But there's no agreed consensus on where to go from here. Everything, lots of ideas are

being put forward, there's a lot of turmoil, there's new developments in economics, which try to address some of the problems, the political theorists, social scientists, anthropologists, they're all feeling they've got something to say. But there's no unified doctrine of economics to carry us forward. So just to set the scene a little bit, what is it that you think economists actually got wrong about the 2008 financial crisis? Because I think that will inform some of your thinking about where we might go from here? Well, I think the thing they got mainly wrong was their view of financial markets as

efficient mechanisms for the allocation of capital. I think the orthodox view was that, you know, with a minimum, minimum regulation, financial markets would be efficient. And therefore, you couldn't get crises like the crises that happen. There was also the view that derivative markets and that whole process would spread risk, so individual institutions would be less likely to fail. As I said, that really came out of the Chicago School, Eugene Farmer, and the view that financial markets were efficient. I mean, that was a subset of the view that all markets were efficient,

provided, governments kept out, in other words, that markets and that markets were properly competitive, and you couldn't do better. And then one further requirement, provided that money was controlled, there was very little that could go wrong. Of course, there could be shocks, which were unanticipated and couldn't be anticipated, and that's always possible. But leaving the shocks aside, things would run pretty smoothly. and there would be some sort of optimization going on right through the economic system.

So I think that was the core mistake because markets aren't efficient. They're always going to have frictions and severe dysfunction, and it's the task of governments to correct them. And if governments give up that function, then things are quite likely to go wrong. The title of your book, Money and Government, is really interesting. And you actually, very early on in your book, you go into detail about theories of money, what money is, where money came from. Why is this important? Why is the sort of, I mean, both Tracy and I are interested in this. We've had several episodes about questions of the nature of money. But you obviously put it very front and center in laying out your book, this concept of, What is money? Why was that, why did you do that? And why, what do economists in your view get wrong there? Well, you see, I think money has a double function and always has. And that's sort of accepted, but only one of the functions has been stressed. I mean, on the one hand, money is what you need to buy thing. If you don't have any money, you know, you can't get the things you need.

but it also has a different function, which is what economists call a store of value, that is, as a hedge against uncertainty. And when the money you earned is being stored, it's not being spent. So when uncertainty increases, people spend less, and so businessmen sell less. The market shrinks, you get depressions. So I think what happens is that once you have a shock, or even if people don't think that the future is going to be too bright and start, instead of investing and spending in the expectation that tomorrow will be better than today, they think tomorrow might well be worse than today,

and so they start storing what wealth they have. And money is a prime way of storing wealth. And so it's always had that function. That's why you need to look to money always to understand why things go wrong and why periods of uncertainty are so bad for economic life. Money is the key. If you didn't have uncertainty, money would only have one function, which is to exchange goods with each other. So what you described there, obviously, and I mentioned at the beginning that you're, among other things, very well known for your biographical work of John Maynard Keynes. It shouldn't be a new idea.

I mean, what you just said there is something that, you know, many people or that Keynes wrote about nearly 100 years ago. But what is it about his writing and what is it about that conception of money that even as, recently as well right now, somehow economists are still missing because it sounds pretty intuitive, store of value, everyone saves, spending goes down. How is this something that economists still aren't truly internalizing in their understanding of the world? Well, I think, you know, you have to dig into the bedrock of economic theory. I mean, if you look at a textbook, and this is the way I think economic, economic, has been taught and conceived from very early days, you have a theory of what you call a real

economy in which goods are produced in exchange for other goods. And money isn't there. Money gets introduced as a sort of disturbing influence quite late at Chapter 6 or Chapter 7. And so all the old courses in economics were theories of value and theories of money, and the two things were kept separate. And one of the things Keynes did, which was crucially important. He says, you've got to bring in money on the ground floor, because money has an influence of its own. It's not just something that has an influence when other things go wrong.

Money is always a factor. It's always a possibility that people always have a possibility of retreating to money. And the world is uncertain. I think Keynes' thought of uncertainty is much more prevalent than Orthodox economists did, And especially economists in more recent times, they've always thought of the futures being in some sense calculable. You know, you find that people in economists and even financial journalists, they rarely talk about uncertainty. They talk about risk.

And, you know, this thing risks this or this policy risks something, as though you could calculate it. But in many cases, you can't calculate what the risk is. You haven't got a number for it. And I think one of the things Keynes said was, well, we pretend we have probabilities of things happening, and our institutions are based on that pretense. But when the belief in those probabilities break down, then, you know, the whole of the, the whole of people's thinking then simply they panic because they no longer have an anchor. economics is responsible for misleading people about the culpability of future events.

I think it's an absolutely huge weakness in the way economics is done. Because in some situations, there is no uncertainty. There's very little uncertainty. But in others, in terms of the macroeconomic economy, the uncertainties are huge. I mean, just look at what people are trying. They're looking into the entrails of the future and trying to work out where China's going to go. What the political repercussions of Russia and the Ukraine are? Will the disturbances in Hong Kong affect people's views of growth in East Asia and the stability of China?

And then in Europe, what's going to be the effect of Brexit? And will populists gain ground? what about Trump, the sort of, you know, errant or wandering cause in all this? And then they still have models in which you have rational expectations in which people know what the probability of all these possibilities is. And that seems to me just a wrong mindset. And of course it minimizes the role of government because if, you know, agents and markets have enough information to act, right?

rationally and on the whole win their bets on the future, then government doesn't really need to play a very big part. It should get out of the way as much as possible. It should make sure that there's no fraud, no corruption, that markets remain competitive. It should do a bit of welfare, have a safety net. But beyond that, there's no obvious case made out for government to intervene in these benign processes. So in the theory of the real economy, sort of classical economics. Goods are exchanged for goods. Everyone acts rationally and the market comes to an equilibrium without the need for government interference. But the Kane's argument or your argument is that money changes that equation because it can act as a store of value and basically allow people

to store up their spending because of uncertainty. So I'm curious, if you were to factor in the fact that money was impacting the economy itself. How different would developed market economies actually look? And what role would the government have in such an economy? Yeah, that's just the one thing you mentioned Keynes and his view of equilibrium. You can think of what's happened, what happens when people start to be more uncertain about things is that they increase their precautionary saving. That's why you don't get a bounce back to a position of optimal equilibrium. What happens is that you do get an equilibrium, but it's an inferior equilibrium. And I think Keynes introduced to two economics, the notion of multiple equilibrium. And you can easily get

stuck in an inferior equilibrium. And I think, roughly speaking, we have been over much of the world since 2008. And there's no obvious way back to an optimal equilibrium. And that's why I think he would argue governments have two functions. One is to prevent the collapses in the first instance. And the second is to use macroeconomic policy very vigorously to offset the increase in precautionary saving. In other words, the governments have to dis-save.

under those situations. And of course, monetary policy also comes into the picture. What I would say is that Keynes thought that fiscal policy was more powerful, both in prevention and in cure, than monetary policy. Going to the sort of pre-crisis period, a lot of the sort of dominant economic ideology, a lot of them, it would have been, I think, the term that people use is New Keynesian, a New Keynesian School of Economics or New Keynesian. Keynesian models. And my impression of it is that I think it's an attempt to extract some insights from Keynes, such as perhaps the need for fiscal stimulus from time to time, but to ultimately shoehorned back into the classical school of economic thinking in which everything is calculable and everything sort of restores itself to equilibrium in the ideal state. What do this sort of new Keynesian school economists misunderstand about the economist from whom they draw their name? Well, you see, it's a good question that. I think they bought the rational expectations model,

but they added frictions of one kind or another. And with frictions, you get some policy space, because things don't sort of adjust optimally, very quickly. If they don't adjust quickly, then they may adjust to a different equilibrium, so to speak. In the end, sure, the economies will resume their equilibrium of growth part. A lot of damage can be done in the interval. And it's not clear that you'll really resume at the place you want to. And so that creates a policy space. So I think New Keynesians would, let's say, in working out their fiscal rules and monetary rules,

they would always allow for some central bank and fiscal intervention, especially central bank intervention, to steady the cycle. And so, you know, I think that's what happened. That's what orthodox central banking policy was about. It allowed space for smoothing, cyclical smoothing, if you're a very purest, rational expectations, person you don't need. but that was because of sluggishness of response. I don't think they should have called themselves Keynesian.

I mean, I don't think that had anything to do with games, actually. But they want to distinguish themselves from the hardline Chicago school. So they created a bit of extra policy space. But it proved much too weak, both to stop, prevent the crash of 2008, or to bring about recovery. Today's show is brought to you by Vanguard. To all the financial advisors listening, let's talk bonds for a minute. Capturing value and fixed income is not easy. Bond markets are massive, murky, and let's be real. Lots of firms throw a couple flashy funds your way and call it a day. But not Vanguard. At Vanguard, institutional quality isn't a tagline. It's a commitment to your clients.

We're talking top-grade products across the board of over 80 bond funds, actively managed by a 200-person global squad of sector specialists, analysts, and traders. These folks live and breathe fixed income. So if you're looking to give your clients consistent results year in and year out, go see the record for yourself at vanguard.com slash audio. That's vanguard.com slash audio, all investing in subject to risk vanguard marketing corporation distributor. So Joe and I alluded to this in our intro, but nowadays, you know, it's fairly normal to see on a daily basis a headline

such as, you know, the failure of central banks or central banks face quantitative failure. The shock and awe era for central banks is over. And it does feel like there is more focus on fiscal stimulus, not least in Europe. Does it feel like we're moving in the right direction to you in the sense that we are moving to a more active role for governments? Or do you feel that we're doing this without a cohesive, economic theory actually behind that move? Yeah, well, I feel the second a bit.

We're doing it blindly. It was always a delusion to believe that central banks could take the place of governments in the management of the macroeconomy. And there are many reasons why they couldn't. But one of the obvious ones is they lack the legitimacy to do so. I mean, macro policy is a responsibility of government. It can't be sort of outsourced because monetary and, interventions by central bankers have political and social consequences.

People talked about those, the fact that quantitative easing, buying of assets, I mean, the people who have been selling the assets, so the people who have had the assets. And so in a way, you know, it's increased inequality. Now, that's a political consequence of a policy for which someone ought to be held accountable. But the central banks aren't held accountable because they're said to be neutral, politically neutral. But that was always a mistake. They may be individually. Central bankers may individually be politically neutral, but their policies do have political consequences. And so that's

one reason why central bank role has to be diminished in the macro economy. What they should do and what they are set up to do is to regulate the financial system, regulate the affairs of their member banks. And that is a key role. which they rather neglected before the crash because they thought that the financialism didn't need much regulation. So I think you have to rethink the role of central banks. But what we haven't done is to really properly rethink the role of fiscal policy. We're drifting back into fiscal policy in words like stimulus and words like that are being used. But when to stimulate, by what means to stimulate, what rules fiscal policy should be subject to, because we need rules, because rules are something that improves certainty, that, you know, reduces uncertainty.

So we need all those things, but we're forgotten. We've forgotten what fiscal policy is. And so that's where we have to think pretty hard. Yeah, I wanted to connect this to what you were saying. You sort of anticipated my question when you said rules designed to prevent or reduce uncertainty. And again, and maybe it goes back to the sort of New Keynesian way of thinking. We talk about fiscal stimulus as though, okay, we can pretend to identify some output gap. And if we spend this amount of money and then it multiplies, then that will return us to full potential as if that's a null.

number and then we get the economy back on course. It sounds like what you're saying, and it sounds like in terms of this sort of Keynesian idea of the sort of incalculable uncertainties, that it's not about replacing a certain quantity of money per se or getting us to some full idea of employment, but that the presence of government as an actor in the economy that can come in with force, that can reduce uncertainty. It's not about the amount of dollars, it's that there is this institution that doesn't have to be swayed by the whims of animal spirits, the bull and bear cycle, and can just present, be a stabilizing force.

Yeah. I think I agree with that. The difficulty is that they may not be swayed by the business type animal spirits, but they're certainly swayed by politics. Right. And that was really what brought the old Keynesian constitution, if you like, crashing down. The fact is that, you know, and led to Milton Friedman's critique, that politicians, they vote, vote hungry, and they'll make promises for spending irrespective of the real needs of the cycle at a particular time. And you see that going on today.

I mean, fiscal policies coming back, but not in the way I would approve. I mean, look at what's happening in the British general election. both parties making huge spending promises, not by any means the Conservatives saying we were wrong about austerity, we should have done it differently, but just to win votes. So they compete in the number of billions they're promising to spend. Now, that is going to discredit fiscal policy again. So what my idea is, is that fiscal policy should be made as automatic as possible. and you have a very valuable concept in the idea of the automatic stabilizers. I think automatic stabilizers can be made more powerful.

I mean automatic fiscal stabilizers, more powerful. So you wouldn't really be driven back to calculating output gaps and multipliers, all of which are pretty uncertain. But you would say something like, well, look, we have a public sector job guarantee and this acts as a buffer stock for labor in the economy. And it increases, you know, the stock swells when the economy turns down, and it automatically diminishes when the economy recovers. I mean, we have automatic stabilizers at the moment they're quite weak,

and I'd like to strengthen them. I don't think I can explain all this in one minute, but I think that's the way we ought to be going. The other way I think we ought to be going is I think we ought to be going, is I think we ought to revive the idea of public investment. State investment was a huge stabilizing force in the 60s and 70s, but it shrunk as a percentage of total investment, because people now have the idea that all state investment is bound to turn sour.

It's just not going to pay for itself. Well, I think you need to actually work out what things are investment, what will pay for themselves, what will benefit the economy, and what you ought to cover just from revenue. Those are things that are still in the melting pot. So you mentioned the general election in the UK, and I think when we talk about fiscal stimulus, part of the obstacle that governments will face is most of the population, certainly in the U.S., is distrustful of the way the government actually spends public money, even though, as you point out, there's a history of public investment actually being a stabilizing force and an overall social good

in the 50s and 60s. Why do you think we got to a place where lots and lots of people just think that there is no role for the government when it comes to this type of economic, stabilization or this type of investment. Why are people so distrustful of the government when, as you very clearly lay out, there is potentially an economic role for them? Well, I think Robert Schiller put his finger on it. I mean, people believe narrative. And if a narrative gains hold, it shapes the way they think about reality. The narrative that really got hold in the 70s and 80s, was really the Friedman narrative that governments are just spent threats and that if you leave,

if you leave macro policy to them, they'll just inflate the economy in order to, you know, ease their spending constraints. And I think that kind of narrative got hold and it was combined with another narrative, which is that politicians are like just their utility maximizes. but what the utility they maximizes is their own private utilities. And that was in line with the general motivational structure of neoclassical economists. So they're always going to be corrupt. They're always going to think about their own interests and not the public. Those two things coming together sort of have created a view of government,

which I think colors public debate. And yet in the United States, there's always been actually a huge role of government. I mean, people don't understand that most of modern contemporary digital technology is really all base, comes out to U.S. government military spending. And, you know, governments had a huge role all the way through. Yet that's become silent and ignored. And instead, you have these stupid things about governments that build roads that never lead anywhere and, you know, all that kind of stuff. I'm going to ask a question. It might be very controversial and you should tell me if it's inappropriate or you don't want to answer it. But nonetheless, you know, you're talking about rethinking fiscal policy and that it can't just be one of these things where when times are bad, suddenly politicians propose a laundry list and that we need more permanent role. And you mentioned a public jobs guarantee as one way of a source of, permanent public stability, a very strong countercyclical stabilizing measure.

And the one group of economists who talk about it, the public jobs guarantee these days of the MMTers, the modern monetary theorists. And I've noticed in your book that you actually mentioned them fairly early on in your argument. They got a prominent place. If Keynes were here, would he find a sort of, would they be kind of. spirits to him of the various factions out there right now in your view? Or is that going too far? Well, you see, I think there was a Kane's reaction to an early version of modern monetary theory, which was his reaction to Abilernas.

Oh, right. Paper of 1942, I think, in which was called functional theory of functional finance, in which Abelona was basically using this argument that you don't use the tax system in order to get revenue, but to drain the economy. of money and you need to do that when you're in a situation of inflation or incipient inflation. In other words, what Lerner was saying is that government spend money because they've got banks that print it for them. And it's a myth that they have to apply to the people for, you know, in order to spend.

Rather, their spending creates the taxes, which they may have to then raise in order to stop inflation. And now, Keynes' reaction to that was to say, well, technically, yeah, that argument is correct, but it's simply not practical politics to recommend it. And I go along with that. And what I'd say in addition to what Kane said is that although it's a myth that governments have to apply to the people for taxes or get them issued debt, it's a necessary. myth of a limited government. Because otherwise, what's to stop the state just spending what it wants for whatever purposes it chooses to?

In other words, it's part of the constitution of limited government that this myth should be there. And so, I would say some myths are very useful if you want to avoid despotism. And one shouldn't really attack this myth. just on technical grounds, but in fact that's not what government actually have to do. One should be aware of the political functions of this particular view of the relationship between government and its taxpayers and creditors. Yes? So that's the way I would deal with modern monetary theory. But where it's been extremely useful is to point out another myth, which is that the governments face a fiscal constraint whenever they unbalance the budget.

Now, that, I think, has been the orthodoxy, and it's been one of the big arguments for balancing that government should balance their books. And I think modern monetary theory has been foremost in pointing out that this is not the case. In that sense, it's been very useful. I don't think, I think it is a controversial. I doubt if modern monetary theory will become a dominant theory of fiscal finance in the next few years. In fact, you can do what you need to do on the fiscal front without having to use modern monetary theory. This was going to be my next question, actually. So if you were to write an essay right now on what economic orthodoxy would actually look like in 10 years' time, what's your best guess?

Is it a continuation of the existing system or going back to more of a pure Cain's model? What do you think it will look like, the economic consensus? Well, I don't think there's any linear path to better economics. In fact, I'm not sure that economics, as it now exists, will be with us in 50 years' time at all. I mean, there'll be economists, but they'll be attached to different subjects. That's probably my view of how it will go. But otherwise, it all depends on what happens, you know, events, as one of our former prime ministers used to say, events, dear boy, will decide how thought goes. And that's not entirely true, but I think there's a large element of truth in it. If we have new shocks to the world economy, that will stimulate thought. I think otherwise, economics may not be in the center of the rethinking of how you deal with economy, as you see. That's maybe a bit paradoxical, but we're much, much more aware of the fragility of liberal democratic societies.

It's not clear to me that economics gives any particular answer to that. And all economics should be able to say is we must not allow crashes like 2008 to happen. we should not allow so much inequality to exist. We should not be prepared for such long periods of subnormal capacity utilization. And what are the policies that can prevent those calamitous and misfortune? And so economics has to rethink the role of government. And it's not clear that economics is best place to do that. which is why I'm not sure that economics really deserves to be the queen of the social sciences, as Paul Samuelson called it.

I know that's not answering your question properly, but I don't think it's got a simple answer. No, that's great. I think it was a perfect answer. Robert, thank you for joining us. That was fantastic. I really enjoyed that. Well, I enjoyed talking to you. Thank you so much.

Bye. Tracy, I really liked his answer to your last question, actually. I thought that was kind of the perfect place, which is that economists have some insight, but that may be thinking about, oh, economics is going to give us the answers to sort of what else is now at a time when so much is obviously on the political side, I thought it was very insightful. Yeah, it kind of reminded me of a couple earlier all thoughts episodes that we've done where we always. was pointed out how I don't want to use the word primitive, but I guess how simple some of the models that economics is actually built on are, like this notion of the equilibrium between two sets of goods and the market will always move to that point. And it doesn't actually take into account, A, the existence of money or B, the sort of behavioral economics aspect of stuff where people don't always behave rationally. It's sort of, it's weird and sometimes

frightening to think that a lot of the way the world works is still built on these outdated models. Yeah. And from what I understand, and he talks about this in his book, and I've heard a lot of people say it, it's like many economists not only don't know how banks work, but don't feel that that's particularly important, again, because banks are seen as just sort of this extension of money. And of money is just this technology to sort of intermediateate person A and person B or

bank is just to intermediate two people or two entities, you don't really need to know how they work, even though the financial crisis obviously showed that you can't really understand the modern world without understanding what banks do. The other thing I really liked about that discussion, and by the way, I knew an MMT question was coming up. It was only a matter of time. But one of the criticisms of MMT is that even if you say that the government, isn't limited by a sort of household budget, it's only limited by inflation when it comes to spending, that doesn't overcome the problem of political will or achieving a political consensus. And Lord Skidelsky is quite clear on one way that maybe you could get to that point, which is

his idea of automatic stabilizers. So if you say, when X happens, Y is going to come into effect, you sort of bypass the towing and froing of Congress or Parliament or whatever when it comes to actually figuring out what to do. Yeah, I mean, the question is, and I think it sort of sums it up, is political leaders in developed markets tried to solve that problem with the creation of independent central banks and the hope that economic stabilization could be taken out of the hands of politicians. But of course, as he points out, central banks have their own, A, they have a credibility problem because they're not really accountable to the public in the same way. So they're not really, and they're only in a very sort of indirect sense. And leaning so much on monetary policy has distributional consequences that aren't ideal. So, you know, no one really knows what the sort of post-crisis future looks like. But it sounds like if we can sort of summarize it, it's how do you build a system that's robust?

How do you build a system that's powerful economic stabilizers while maintaining some sort of democratic accountability to it? Big questions. Big episode of Odd Lots. Yeah. No easy answers. All right. This has been another episode of the Oddlots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me on Twitter at Tracy Allaway. And I'm Joe Wisenthal. You can follow me on Twitter at the stalwart. And you should definitely follow our guest on Twitter, Lord Robert Skidelsky. He is at R. Skidelsky.

Also be sure to check out his new book. It's really good. Be sure to follow our producer on Twitter, Laura Carlson. She's at Laura M. Carlson. As well as this week's substitute producer Tofor Forges at Forges T. And be sure to follow the Bloomberg head of podcast, Francesca Levy, at Francesca today. And all of Bloomberg's podcasts can be found under the handle at podcasts. Thanks for listening.

The news doesn't stop on the weekends. Context changes constantly. And now Bloomberg is the place to stay on top of it all. Hi, I'm David Gurra. Join us every Saturday and Sunday for the new Bloomberg this weekend. I'm Christina Ruffini. We'll bring you the latest headlines, in-depth analysis, and big interviews, all the stories that hit home on your days off. And I'm Lisa Mateo, Watch and listen to Bloomberg this weekend for thoughtful, enlightening conversations about business, lifestyle, people, and culture. On Saturday mornings, we put the past week's events into context, examining what happened in the markets and the world. That on Sundays, we speak with journalists, columnists, and key political figures to prepare you for the week ahead.

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