The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Vulture Capitalism Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom By Grace Blakeley

Episode Date: March 12, 2024

Vulture Capitalism Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom By Grace Blakeley https://amzn.to/3TxZcV2 Longlisted for the 2024 Women’s Prize for Nonfiction A Next Big Idea Book Club Must-Read for March 2024 In the vein of The Shock Doctrine and Evil Geniuses, this timely manifesto from an acclaimed journalist illustrates how corporate and political power brokers have used planned capitalism to advance their own interests at the expense of the rest of us—and how we can take back our economy for all. It’s easy to look at the state of the world around us and feel hopeless. We live in an era marked by war, climate crisis, political polarization, and acute inequality—and yet many of us feel powerless to do anything about these profound issues. We’ve been assured that unfettered capitalism is necessary to ensure our freedom and prosperity, even as we see its corrosive effects proliferating daily. Why, in our age of unchecked corporate power, are most of us living paycheck to paycheck? When the economy falters, why do governments bail out corporations and shareholders but leave everyday people in the dust? Now, economic and political journalist and progressive star on the rise Grace Blakeley exposes the corrupt system that is failing all around us, pulling back the curtain on the free market mythology we have been sold, and showing how, as corporate interests have taken hold, governments have historically been shifting away from competition and democracy and towards monopoly and oligarchy. Tracing over a century of neoliberal planning and backdoor bailouts, Blakeley takes us on a deeply reported tour of the corporate crimes, political maneuvering, and economic manipulation that elites have used to enshrine a global system of “vulture capitalism”—planned capitalist economies that benefit corporations and the uber-wealthy at the expense of the rest of us—at every level, from states to empires. Blakeley exposes the cracks already emerging within capitalism, lighting a path forward for how we can democratize our economy, not just our politics, to ensure true freedom for all.About the author Grace Blakeley, one of the fiercest anti-capitalist advocates of her generation, is an author, journalist, and commentator. She graduated from the University of Oxford with a first-class honors degree in philosophy, economics, and politics. Her writing has appeared in Tribune and the New Statesman, and she regularly appears in the media - from BBC Question Time to MTV News. She is the author of Stolen, The Corona Crash, and Vulture Capitalism, and edited Futures of Socialism.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep in keep your hands arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hey folks welcome to chris voss show we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in thanks for being a part of the show today we certainly enjoy having the family that loves you but doesn't judge you at least on as harshly as your mother-in-law.

She never liked you anyway, folks. Refer her to the Chris Voss show so that she'll enjoy just the wonderful guests that we have on the show and everything else. Tell her to go to goodreads.com, fortuneschrissvoss, linkedin.com, fortuneschrissvoss. Chris Voss won on the TikTok. Chris Voss, what is it?

Facebook.com, fortuneschrissvoss. As always, we have the smartest people on the show, the CEOs,oss, what is it, Facebook.com, forcexchrisvoss. As always, we have the smartest people on the show, the CEOs, the billionaires, we have another one on tomorrow, by the way,

the Pulitzer Prize winners, the great authors, the great minds, and none of them, of course, are me, because I'm just some idiot with a mic,

but we have an amazing young lady on the show with us today for her hot new book coming right off the presses. It's called Vulture Capitalism, Corporate Crimes,

Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death the death of freedom comes out march 12th 2024 my god we're in march and 2024 at the same time grace blakely joins us on the show today we'll be talking about her insights and everything that went into this newest book of hers and she's written quite a few books she is one of the fiercest anti-capitalist advocates of her generation and if you don't believe her she'll fight you no i'm just kidding i made that part up she is an author journalist and commentator she attended university of oxford where she graduated with first class honors degree in philosophy economics and politics and later obtained a master's in african studies she's written for the guardian tribune and new statesman among others and she's appeared on msnbc and mtv news she sounds like there should be like

a music soundbite whenever i say that mtv news whatever please play some italica anyway she's the author of stolen the corona crash and Vulture Capitalism, and Edited Futures of Socialism, etc., etc. Welcome to the show, Grace. How are you? Thanks so much for having me. I'm doing really good, thank you. Thanks for coming. We certainly appreciate having you as well.

Give us your.com so that people can find you on the internet, please. Yeah, it's just graceblakely.com. There you go. So, give us a 30,000 overview of your new book and what's aside. So Vulture Capitalism is really about why our economy and our societies are so skewed towards the people at the top. It really argues that, you know, we're told we live in this free market capitalist economy where there's lots of small businesses competing with one another for market share and the state gets out of the way. But actually, we've got massive corporations that are colluding with one another as much as they're competing. Every time they're under threat from the market, the state steps in and provides them with massive bailouts. And all this means is that power gets sucked up to the top of the economy of society. And it really undermines

democracy in the long run. There you go. I mean, it really does. I mean, we kind of, we've been living in an interesting world, and there kind of always has been bailouts for the rich, the corporations, the powerful, at least over here in America. That seems to have been kind of a thing that's been going on. But in recent years, and I know you're in England, I think. Is that correct? Yeah. Yeah.

I know here in America, we've had some recent SCOTUS Supreme Court rulings that ruled like Citizens United that basically said, hey, if you're a billionaire, you can buy yourself a politician, no questions asked. And nowadays, we just recently found out that if you're a billionaire, you can buy your own SCOTUS judge. So there you go. Just give them a free RV and away you go. And so we've been kind of living in an interesting world. Do you think that we live between, I think, your Margaret Thatcher and our Ronald Reagan, we issued an era of illiberalism in politics. Do you think that that's true, that more and more we just kind of live in an illiberal sort of political climate? Yeah, absolutely. You know, those two politicians, Thatcher and Reagan, came to power and they said, we're going to create free markets. They kind of drew on this almost like libertarian spirit that I know is really strong in the US, the idea that the government needs to get out of the way and let people be entrepreneurs

and kind of do their own thing. And, you know, whatever you think about that particular view of the world that's not what we have it's not what capitalism is actually because you know you saw politicians like thatcher and reagan just deliver massive support to big businesses there was this whole idea that you know the state got smaller after the 1980s because it was shrinking to make space for markets but it didn't it's just that we started shifting spending away from certain areas so stuff that benefits working people and create these massive subsidies for the rich and for big corporations i mean i know in the us

you've got these huge subsidies for the fossil fuel companies for example and at the same time i there's a there's a section in the book where i talk about the aerospace company boeing which i'm sure you will have seen recently has been all over the news planes plummeting out of the sky doors falling off these planes there's this whole history of boeing about how the top executives knew about all of these failings with their airplanes but did nothing because they were trying to safeguard their own profits they weren't being properly regulated and they were getting billions in subsidies and tax breaks from the government so you know you've got this idea that there's a big corporation that's capitalism it's you know competing with companies and delivering this free market dream but actually it's just big businesses big government working

together to promote their own interests at the expense of everyone else. Well, and most people don't realize that what Boeing was actually trying to do was come up with the new revenue base to charge customers for. They charge them for extra baggage now and all that sort of stuff. So if you want bolts on doors, you're going to have to buy the bolts on doors package if you want that. Otherwise, free air conditioning. Sure. Good stuff. There you go. It was kind of the reaction to COVID. If we open up the cabin, less people get COVID since there's a lot of fresh air going through. I think that was kind of the idea. It's capitalism at its finest, really. This is why I bring my own bolts and wrenches now when I fly on the plane.

Yeah. When you're flying on a 737 MAX, I would genuinely recommend it. And probably a parachute as well. Yeah, yeah. You get a discount on your ticket now if you bring a toolbox. Oh, great. Yeah, yeah. It's kind of cool.

So, I mean, you know, it's kind of what Boeing has done. A lot of people just don't realize what Boeing has done. I'm just going to turn this into a stand-up bit. What they've done is they've, you know how they have the self-checkout things at Walmart where you have to bag your own groceries, which I find annoying because, i don't work for you what do you want me to do bring the shopping carts back in and if i want something off the shelf do i have to go in the back and stock it is that is that the next step after me having to be the cashier person and so i think that's what boeing is doing they're just like hey you know what we can get rid of those union maintenance

guys that we have to pay on the ground if we just get people to fix the plane as it's falling apart in the sky it's a smart business strategy and you know what if they did do that we wouldn't have much of a choice because there's only two aerospace companies in the world yeah there's only one really in the u.s yeah i mean spirit they don't even bother putting the wheels on the plane so let's talk a little bit about your history. We'll come back to the book, but let's tell the audience on you a little bit. Tell us about your upbringing, some of the books you've written, some of the thoughts, and what's got you down this road where you're writing about this stuff and you're interested in these topics?

Great question. Yeah, so I was born and raised in the UK, in England. I came from a pretty political family. So my grandparents, in particular particular on my mum's side, my granddad was a communist. He was a shop steward in a trade union. Really? Proper kind of old school organiser, yeah.

He worked, you know, for basically the same company his whole life, kind of organising his colleagues to try and basically kind of, you know, do socialism. And he was always kind of pretty underwhelmed with the response that he got when trying to organize his co-workers. So yeah, I was raised in this really political household. My parents kind of brought that tradition through as well. My mom tells me this funny story about how they were at university together, and then they decided that they were going to go traveling around the world for a while. And they wanted to go kind of support revolutions in Central America. So they rocked up in Nicaragua.

They said, we're here to pick coffee beans for the revolution. Put us into the field. Tell us what to do. And they started doing the picking of the coffee beans. And the revolutionaries were like, your hands are too indelicate to pick coffee beans. Go back and make revolution in your own country. So they went back to England and both ended up getting jobs in the city of London,

basically doing kind of professional jobs that had nothing to do with fermenting the revolution. But they did have me. So it's been my job to carry that torch, basically, and make them feel okay about the fact that they kind of had big professional salaries for most of their lives. So you didn't feel like you wanted to do the anti-parent thing where you do the opposite of what your parents tell you to do

and just go, I don't know, work at a big venture capitalist firm? Well, I did do that in some ways. You know, I wasn't an angel of a child. I got diagnosed with ADHD a couple of years ago, and my parents were the least surprised of anyone. They were like, yeah, that makes sense. You were climbing on the roof of your school at 12. So, yeah, we didn't really need that diagnosis.

It's a good disease to have, though. It's a CEO disease. Most CEOs have ADHD. Oh, yeah, 100%. They're all entrepreneurs. It's crazy people, basically, who are like, hmm. Yeah, pretty much, yeah. You're looking at one. But it makes a lot of money if you if you can learn to ride the horse right yeah it's it's kind of cool but it's like trying to it's crying it's crying it's just

it's like trying to trying to control a meth addiction really good way of putting it and sometimes it is because they literally put you on speed. It's like trying to control an acid trip where you're like, I'm still in control, damn it. But there you go. Raccoon. You're not. Squirrel. So there you go. So are you a socialist then?

Or how do you feel about, okay, so you're a socialist. And do you feel like we need to end capitalism as an experiment and just go full socialist? Or what do you feel yeah so i know this is a super dirty word in the u.s so i'm here to kind of bring the flame of what i think socialism really means so yeah i mean you know in my book i want to take apart this distinction between like socialism and capitalism that we all have which is like capitalism is free markets and it's what goes on in the economy and socialism is government and it's what happens in the state and you know my whole argument is like the government works for the corporations just as

much as most of the people inside the corporation these two things aren't separate they're working together towards the same aim so most socialists aren't there saying yeah let's just give more power to the government without any other reforms because we know that the government will just use its power to kind of repress people and expand the military and support big business so my argument is really that it's for democratic socialism so you've got all this new generation of congress people in the u.s right you're all part of this democratic socialism movement and really what it means is like building democracy from the ground up so that's know, it looks like kind of organizing in your workplaces to make sure you've got kind of a vibrant and democratic labor movement. It means organizing in your communities.

I've got a bunch of really cool examples. Some of them are from the U.S. of communities organizing to provide themselves with food and services and organizing politically to do things like participatory budgeting, where you get to directly determine what your local government is spending money on, building co-ops, building all these different models of how we organize the economy. And they're doing that at the grassroots themselves, just by coming together as a community. And I think that's really what socialism is. There you go. So it's more of a, i think you said a democratic socialism

exactly how does one keep ending up you know i watched the i watched the fall of venezuela over what 20 30 years or something yeah i remember watching when what's his face came i forget his name came into power and he started using the sort of fascist levers of socialism and you know tinkering trying to put his thumb on the scale of the economy as opposed to letting a federal reserve bank run it the how do you keep from that you know capitalism cap or what you say social socialist capitalism from turning into that sort of debauchery where it just spirals downward into complete socialism yeah well look i think there's there's a big difference between democratic socialism and state socialism just as there's

a big difference between liberal capitalism and authoritarian or state capitalism you know china is basically a state capitalist economy right now that's a capitalist economy basically you've got kind of private production the production of commodities all those different sorts of things and yet it is a completely different economic system to what you have in many other parts of the world actually it's kind of more similar i would argue to what you've got in the u.s than it is in some smaller economies because you've got a huge amount of power among a small number of people at the very top all telling everyone else what to do but you know again for me the big distinction isn't does the state have more power or do

corporations have more power these are the same kinds of people half the time you know they leave a corporation they go work in the state vice versa exactly the big distinction is whether or not power is decentralized and democratic and you've got people you know you've got freedoms you've got freedom of speech freedom of assembly freedom to protest freedom to organize in a labor union so i know in the us you have all these right to work laws that stop people from organizing in in unions which are you know just kind of crazy i mean we have some similar laws in the uk but not nearly as severe so it it's actually about, you know, how do we make sure that people have the freedom to take decisions about how they should live their lives rather than constantly being told what to do by politicians, by their bosses, by powerful people. It's really about, yeah, how we kind of build democracy.

I think, how do people, you know, you build at the end that the book can light a pathway forward on how we can democratize our economy and not just our politics. Does it have to be one where we need to get everybody involved? There's an old saying, you get the government you deserve. And a lot of Americans over here, I don't spend time in Britain as much. It's a beautiful place. But over here in America, we have, I don't know, what is it, it 50 of people show up to vote yet 100 of them claim bitch about everything and so you know it's like i i i just ask people now when they're bitching about politics i'm like did you vote in the last couple elections no shut the fuck up yeah you're you're the problem you're why we're here so what

do you think about that do you get the get the government you deserve're why we're here. So what do you think about that? Do you get the government you deserve? How do we get everybody to get off their ass and give a shit? Because I think if more people did, we'd be closer to governments that are more interested in people. I could be wrong. We could just go full fascism. No, I mean, I think that's a big symptom, I would say. People kind of losing trust in democracy and not bothering to vote because politicians are all the same for me that's it shows the kind of problem that we have

which is that people think that voting won't change anything they think that there's you know that there's not enough diversity in terms of the policies that they're offered by the major parties and they also think that politicians promise things and then don't deliver. And actually, they're not wrong. You know, it's not surprising that people kind of lose faith and lose trust in democracy when they're just lied to over and over and over again. And they promise things and then those promises are broken.

And look, I'm not saying that like voting and democracy isn't important because they really, really are. The question is, is how do we like reinvigorate democracy from the bottom up how do we make people feel excited and enthusiastic about organizing in in politics and like getting out there and getting to vote and working in their communities because politics isn't just elections right it's everything we do to try and shift the levers of power so for me we need to really push back against and this is i think the biggest thing that gets in the way of all progressive change is individualism it's the idea that i'm just by myself i don't need to work with anyone else to

achieve things i'm competing against everyone else so it's about me on my own getting to the top rather than organizing with other people to change the way that the world works and we had that shift particularly during the 1980s where you know if you couldn't put food on the table you wouldn't go to work and talk to your colleagues and they'd all say we can't put food on the table either let's organize and make sure that our boss pays us a living wage today Today, it's now, I can't put food on the table. I'm a failure. I'm going to take out a high interest loan to feed my family. And when I can't repay that loan,

I'm going to feel bad about myself rather than have any thoughts about what I'm paid or the nature of the economic system. So for me, this problem of like individuals only relying on themselves, not organizing in social movements, not being part of a community, not getting together with other people to say,

how do we work together to fix things? That's a big problem. And it's the problem I want to tackle in this book by just saying, look, there are all these different ways that you can get involved in politics and they're all pretty radical. There you go.

Get involved. I mean, if you don't do radical, but it seems like people are sitting on the couch. I mean, radicalism is just getting off their ass and registering to vote these days. You know, and I mean, I really wish, America is a really unique place because we have the U.S. government and then we have states' rights and they have their own powers. So even if the U.S. government is like, hey, it's okay to unionize, you have states ruled by Republicans for years, decades actually,

that have undermined with right-to-work states and things like that. It's kind of come back a little bit, but we just saw Google lay off their YouTube music department, I think it was, because they were trying to unionize. And it was definitely a bully pulpit. And that started with Reagan and Margaret Thatcher,

where they started union busting. And that was the whole intent of that whole illiberalism. And I'm still waiting for my trickle-down economics check for Ronald Reagan. And I've watched the whole middle class disappear because of the Ronald Reagan illiberalism. And, you know, they just, I mean, all the way up until Trump, they gave more big breaks to corporate people and business people. And I'm a corporate entrepreneur.

I mean, I understand what sort of gifts I get. I'm like, yeah, maybe we kind of had a lot already. Do you really need to give us more? But yeah, there needs to be more, I don't know, there needs to be more reach out or more demand by people in the streets. But you know, the problem we have now is a society, if you study the failures of democracies, the failures of empires,

we're on the downside of it where what happens is people get so sick of it, they'll move to fascism or authoritarianism. And that's what America stands at the precipice of right now is we're at that point where we're going to end up very venezuela we're going to put somebody in power who is going to seize power and we're going to end up an oligarchy or kleptocracy really what russia is but more likely we're going to end up like venezuela because he's going to he's going to he's going to try and fuck with the economy try to do it the

first time so yeah it's really interesting people just get so pushed to the wall, they're willing to take anything. And the bigger the promise, the bigger the lie, they'll deliver and the lower the self-esteem. You know, that's how Hitler, Mussolini came into power. You know, it was such a demoralized society that they were like, hey, this guy has got great ideas and says he'll fix it and make the trains run on time. Fuck it. Let's try him. See what happens.

What could go wrong? So there you go. But I like it. I mean, fascism is what you get, right? When you have the majority of people knowing that the system is broken, but they all feel so disempowered that they don't think they can change it. That's the big issue. Because I think most people know that the economy doesn't work for them. They know that big business and governments work together to protect themselves but they feel

that makes them feel hopeless and when you feel hopeless and angry rather than kind of organizing and trying to change things and building a better world you think i just want to burn the whole system down i just want to give these guys what's coming to them so you vote for someone like trump and you think i don't care about whether he respects democracy or even what he does to the economy i just want to see the people at the top suffer i want the whole system gone and ultimately that actually ends up benefiting the people at the top even more because they use someone like trump to get loads of tax cuts and get more kind of stuff delivered through the back door even while he's saying to everyone i'm gonna fight for you, fight for workers.

Oh, yeah. The kleptocracy that was going on during the Trump administration was insane. Yeah. It was literally a pirate ship of money and where everything was for sale. And it was just, it was so insane. And it'll be worse. And you're right. Now they want, you know, he's talking about, I am your retribution.

And so he's tagging on what you're saying, being retribution. And burning it down is not the way to do it. If you want to live in bread lines like the USSR or like Venezuela or some of these other countries that have tried playing these games, it doesn't end well. I mean, you'll get, the trains run on time for about a month. And then everything goes to hell. And, you know, everyone's on the grift everyone's on the take everyone has to be bribed and you end up with a whole different system and and so it'll be interesting but i love that your book is telling people to get motivated to get organized to get

out get involved and that's what we need everyone to do i wish i wish we had a law like other countries where you have to show up to vote or i I don't know, we fine you and send you to jail. I think it's Iceland or Greenland that has that. And I think there's a couple other countries that do. But you have to show up to vote. Everybody's got to show up to vote or else. And, of course, we don't have that because we have these games we can play with the college and states and the, what do we call it, the voting college that we have. There's all this sort of weird ways that you can cheat the system and win.

You know, we've had, we've had what, two or three elections now where the popular vote has been superseded by a very small handful of people. And it's really weird. So there you go. So I'm glad you're ready. You've got, you know, governments trying to stop people from turning out to vote. Oh, yeah. There's kind of restrictive id laws and all that

kind of stuff like it's the republicans do better right when it's the same here the conservatives do better when fewer people vote yeah yeah it's it's you know they're it's an interesting dynamic that we've come to in this world but you know these are i mean we're an interesting country it's a young democracy and a lot of people don't understand these democracies can fail. You saw Viktor Orban in Hungary pretty much falls a democracy in 2020. There's a lot of actually Europe seems to be turning now back to sort of authoritarian fashion, socialist sort of ways. I don't know what your thoughts are on some of those recent elections that have taken place. Yeah. recent elections that have taken place yeah i mean i think it's really interesting when you see as you say democracies start to fail because there's this idea right that history is just

going up and up and up and up and more and more countries are going to democracy and they're going to capitalism and they get to democracy and capitalism and that's the end point and then everyone's happy and and we've won and that was kind of the idea in the 1990s right it was like the end of the cold war was like the end of history there wasn. And that was kind of the idea in the 1990s, right? It was like the end of the Cold War was like the end of history. There wasn't anything that was exciting that was going to happen in politics anymore because it would just be every country

kind of converging on the same economic and political model. And that was just really short-sighted of people to think at that point for lots of reasons. But firstly, because that whole model that we had of kind of liberal democracy and capitalism it started to to break particularly after the financial crisis the whole thing was sustained by just this massive increase in in-house prices the booming finance sector that meant that

everyone felt better off because they could all buy a home for a brief period of time and those homes were getting more and more valuable and that meant they could borrow more money and go out and use their credit cards to buy new tvs and everything seemed to be getting better and better and better until we realized it wasn't based on anything you know productive in the real economy it was just this kind of massive financial bubble and since then there's been this problem of right okay well the rich are getting richer the poor are getting poorer everyone in the middle is kind richer the poor are getting poorer everyone in the middle is kind of stagnating or getting worse how does democracy work in that context right and it just doesn't yeah it doesn't in in the the big people that were really behind 2008 were the hedge

funds and these in the venture capital firms these are the people that made it they made it happen the rich getting richer and they all got bailed out for the most part except for exactly except for Lehman Brothers they took it on the head but you know you're seeing that now in China where an authoritarian regime has been putting their finger on the GDP and building for so many years and changing it flipping it back and forth that now they're in a I think it's eight I think it's eight trillion now deficit where they're probably going to enter their 2008 probably a great depression and they're probably going to have some political upheaval because a lot of the families had their money in the market and in those homes as deposits and yeah i talk about

the streets yeah i talk about the evergrande crisis book actually which is this big property developer evergrande that was you know part of this chinese construction boom and then started because chinese savers they can't put money internationally so they can only get small returns and these companies like evergrande started offering them investment products basically saying lend us your money and we'll give you these really high returns and it was basically a kind of ponzi scheme where all this money was coming in and it was being used to pay off kind of new, new invest, old investors. Sorry. And on like underneath all this, this property developer was in masses and masses of debt. But because it was a lot of debt that was owed to like Chinese state banks, which are all controlled by the government, and they thought the government's not going to let us go under, then it creates this different dynamic.

Right. But ultimately, there are some similarities here. It's like there's a big debt-fueled spending spree that benefits big corporations and the wealthy, and the government ends up bailing everyone out. So, you know, there's this big battle between China and America right now, but actually, they've got a lot more in common than you might think. I would agree with you, too.

And the zigzagging of the authoritarian regime over there is where it really mucked it up we kind of probably did the same thing with what's his name and there was a law that was put into place to keep things from getting stupid and from banks and and investment firms in in playing with the market and investing in higher high risk elements and it was taken back by the republicans and then and then that's what helped lead to the craziness of the boom. And Dodd-Frank? The Dodd-Frank Act, yeah.

Yeah, Dodd-Frank Act. He's the guy who started it, and then later he fixed it, allegedly, whatever, which is kind of interesting. But yeah, at first they were letting these, they were loaning out that money with the banks, and then they decided to cut them off because they were worried about it. And so then they went to the people to borrow the money and you know they just they basically have created their own freaking giant mess over there and then on top of it you've got you know they're starting to be a falling empire with their population like japan and other places where they that one child policy basically screwed them population wise so then now they're failing as

a population and so their people can't get jobs their people can't get wives because there's so many men to women they can't start families and like you say they they all the people put their money into just like the great depression put all their money into the markets and now that money's tanked i think there's going to be some political appeal over. I think there's going to be some political upheaval of this. I think there's going to be some revolution. I don't see there is any way that there's not going to be, there's going to be, I mean, people were kind of marching in the streets over the COVID thing after a while, but I think this is definitely maybe the thing that breaks the back because I've seen the way they're trying to come up to fix that 6 billion or 8 billion shortfall. And there really isn't. i don't even think they

have a federal reserve bank like we do where they can print money or i know they can print money but yeah it's it's it's a very different setup for a lot of reasons but mostly because it's like a closed economy yeah so there's not free flow of money in and out of the economy and that gives the state a lot of control over what happens internally but it doesn't mean that they can control everything you know the big the big bargain that has existed in china for a long time has been growth of at least seven percent a year and there's no trouble and that is now starting to fail because the government is basically realizing they have this trade-off between financial stability and economic growth. You can either keep piling on more and more and more debt and try and expand

everything more and more, or, you know, that creates economic growth, but it also creates financial instability. Or you say, right, we're going to try and deal with all of these fragilities that have emerged in the financial system. But that then means we have to take our foot off the accelerator and the economy starts to slow down, means slower job creation and we're already starting to see see the impacts of this in china partly because of the pandemic for a lot of other reasons as well the economy slowing down and the massive impact that has on china's trading partners on the regional economy and on the global economy because really it was all the investment that china was doing after 2008 that dragged the rest of the global economy out of recession

and created all this demand for raw materials and infrastructure and whatever. Now that's gone. You know, it's much harder to see where kind of future global growth comes from, especially when you add in the geopolitical conflict, all the extreme weather events, all of these, you know, longterm things that can push up inflation and constrained demand. It's going to be a very hectic world over the next couple of decades.

That's for sure. So there you go. All the more important for you to get active in politics and everything that's going on. Give us your final thoughts as we go out. Tell people where they can order the book and your.com there, Grace. Yeah, thank you so much for having me today. It's been great chatting to you.

Please do check out my book, Vulture Capitalism, and you can find me on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. I'm just at Grace Blakely. And you can buy Vulture Capitalism, all good bookstores. If you just search Vulture Capitalism, it should come up. You can find me at Graceblakely.com and yeah you know my big takeaway for everyone is just there's lots of powerful people who want you to think that you shouldn't get involved in politics that you can't understand these things that it's all beyond you and actually it's up to us to hold those people to account by proving them wrong amen you get the government

you deserve so if you don't shut up and or, or if you don't show up and vote for it, don't complain. Because you're the problem. I mean, I just look at people that, you know, I had all these people running around with their heads on fire going, going, oh my God, they overturned Roe versus Wade. I'm like, I showed up for Hillary on 2016. Did you? Did you? Did you show up?

Oh no, but her emails. Oh no. You know, I voted? Oh, no, but her emails. Oh, no. You know, I voted for, I wanted, I wanted, I wanted, I wanted, no. It was Bernie. And I'm like, well, shut the fuck up because I don't want to hear from you. If you didn't show up in 2016 and vote for Hillary and now you're complaining about Roe versus Wade being overturned, you're the problem. You're the reason we're here.

Because it was, it was a very small margin he won by. So we just needed some people to get off their ass and quit making Instagram posts and come vote. So I love the message you're sending to people. Thank you very much for coming on the show, Grace. We really appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me, Chris. Thank you for coming. Thanks for tuning in.

Go to Goodreads.com, 4chesschrisfast, LinkedIn.com, 4chesschrisfast, chrisfast1 and the TikTokity and all the places on the internet. Thanks for tuning in. Be to Goodreads.com, Fortress, Chris Foss, LinkedIn.com, Fortress, Chris Foss, Chris Foss, one of the TikTokity and all the places on the internet. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. And we'll see you guys next time.