The Munk Debates Podcast - Friday Focus: Year in Review

Episode Date: December 23, 2022

Friday Focus provides listeners with a focused, half-hour masterclass on the big issues, events and trends driving the news and current events. The show features Janice Gross Stein, the founding director of the Munk School of Global Affairs and bestselling author, in conversation with Rudyard Griffiths, Chair and moderator of the Munk Debates.  The following is a sample of the Munk Debates’ weekly current affairs podcast, Friday Focus.   On this week’s edition of the Friday Focus, Janice and Rudyard look at the year that was. Who is the person who made the biggest difference in global affairs in the last twelve months? Which event will go down in history as a turning point in 2023? What surprised Janice and Rudyard this year? And what did they get right and wrong in their predictions and analysis as the year unfolded? To access the full-length editions of the Friday Focus podcast, consider becoming a donor to the Munk Debates for as little as $25 annually, or $.50 per episode. Canadian donors receive a charitable tax receipt. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue. More information at www.munkdebates.com.Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The following is a complimentary excerpt of this week's edition of the Friday Focus podcast by the Monk Debates. To access full-length editions of each and every episode, along with all kinds of great additional benefits and perks, become a donor to the Monk debates. You can do that for as little as $25 a year, and you'll receive each and every year 50 Friday Focus episodes at full length. It's all available right now on our website in just a... few simple clicks. Triple W. The Monk Debates.com. Look for the Friday Focus option in our navigation bar, the top right of the website. Make your donation and we will send you each and every Friday a link to listen to the full-length edition of this program. Thanks in advance for your generous contribution. Hello, Monk listeners, Reddy and Griffith here, your host and moderator. Welcome to this

latest installment of our Friday Focus podcast. This is the weekly. program where we dig into the big issues and ideas in the news, leaving U.S. a new analysis and insights on the week that was. We do this each and every Friday with Janice Gross Stein, founding director of the Monk School of Global Affairs, internationally renowned scholar and author. Janice, where are you sheltering as this storm rips across Ontario, where we're both recording from, snow, winds, freezing rain, you name it, it's going to be quite the 42, 72 hours coming up.

It sure is, Richard. I am watching this at my apartment window. It does not look pretty and thinking of everybody who is trying to get home for Christmas or for the last few days of Hanukkah and I have some friends who celebrate the winter solstice. this is what you call awful timing no doubt it did make me think of Ukrainians though yeah it made me also think of the poor retailers you know hoping for that last minute you know Christmas search so if you are searching for presents at this moment you are going to be donning a parka and a very big hat a very warm hat to try to get that special thing for the someone you love my advice reggaid give them an i.

with a beautifully written card and stay home. Exactly. Maybe a gift certificate for a Air Canada vacation to some sunny destination. I might go down well. Janice, here's what we're going to do in this week's show. We're going to do a kind of review of the year that was. We're going to talk about our respective choices for person of the year,

event of the year, surprise of the year. And in the name of, yeah, just some bit of self-inspection and the show with some thoughts on maybe things that we got wrong over the course of your assumptions we made that turned out to be opposite of what actually happened. And then, hey, let's end with a pat on the back on the one or two predictions that weren't a lot in my case that I got right. That'll be our show, or year that was. I want to remind our listeners that we are going ahead and thank you for all the voice

recordings that you're sending us for our kind of Ask Me Anything program that we'll be doing over the holidays. So if you have a question for Janice or me, please record a voice memo on your smartphone and simply email it to us at podcast at monkdebates.com. Again, podcast and unkdebates with an S.com. If you can tell us where you're listening to the show from and a succinct on point question would be amazing. Send us that audio recording now and we'll be going through all of those in the coming week. And over the holidays, again, we'll put together a show featuring your questions for us on absolutely anything and everything.

So we look forward to that special holiday program for Monk members. Janice, let's start with your person of the year. If you had to think back on 2022, who jumps out as you as the individual that I don't know how you measure it, maybe made the biggest difference? came to our attention in a new way. Who is it for you? You know, Roger, the obvious one, and Time Magazine got there before me,

is Vladimir Zelensky, but I'm actually going to pick Joe Biden. There was, fortunately, someone in the White House who understood the significance of the moment warned everyone in advance that Russia's invasion of Ukraine was coming and it was designed to overthrow the government. Rallied allies, it has been a long time since the U.S. President was able to do that. Sustained these allies through what has proven to be 10 long, miserable months of fighting,

is committing to do so again and show what in that old-fashioned word we use so often, but actually this is somebody who showed through what he was able to accomplish leadership. It is really, I think when we look back, Biden goes down as a really great president for what he was able to accomplish leadership. for what he was able to do this year. Great recommendation. And interestingly, you know, in some ways validated by the ballot box, you know, everyone predicting this red wave that was going to wash across the United States, really reduced the Biden presidency to a lame duck for his final two years.

Quite the contrary, you know, keeping the Senate in some pretty high-stakes races, where that Republican wave just never showed up. And I think part of that surely has to do with the president and the perceptions, I guess, rightly, that he is a kind of calming, more centrist figure in an American politics that maybe is finally getting off the, you know, the high of populist anger and angst, you know, from the Trump years.

You know, as Michelle Goldberg put it, Reddard, the fever seems to be breaking. You know, watching Zelensky's speech to Congress, what was striking is that the overwhelming number of Republicans who were on their feet and applauding him. So Biden has been able to bridge that divide. This was not on one side of the aisle

or the other side of the aisle photo, as we've seen so often on so many issues, he's been able to build some bridges across that aisle, as you just said. So it's truly a remarkable performance, and he has defied everybody's expectations. He really has. Do you think he'll run in 2024?

Wow. Allegedly, allegedly, he is talking to his wife and his kids over the holidays about this. this you know better than i Roger this could change on a dime it is events driven um but my intuition and that's all it is is right now he's gearing up to run yeah well my choice for person of the year isn't so much necessarily who they are and the notoriety that brought themselves it's kind of in a sense what they represent which are some of the big to me themes of 2020 And that would be Sam Bankman-free, the now disgraced and soon possibly to be incarcerated,

founder of the Cryptocurrency Reserve, FTX. He was released on bail this week, the highest ever posted bail in the United States, a quarter of a billion dollars to be, I think, rendered back to the home of his parents with an ankle bracelet on and again a very serious federal set of. charges and no doubt a trial coming up in in 2023. I pick Sam Bacon-Fried because to me he represents something that has been tough for all of us, but also I think maybe ultimately good medicine. And that's been the effects of these record interest rate hikes in terms of the pace of these hikes over the last year in 2022. They've exposed a lot of really broken in cases

of FTCX, seemingly corrupt and kind of, he would say, criminal business enterprises that really had no basis in a spreadsheet that made sense to anyone, but people threw billions of dollars at them because money was free. After COVID, we crashed overnight borrowing costs for our central banks effectively to zero. And when money is free and capital comes at no cost, our capitalist system really doesn't work that well. We end up assigning a lot of our shared wealth to business ideas and enterprises that really shouldn't exist. And it was a horrible misallocation of capital, not just to FTX, but to other businesses and tech and, you know, Carvana.

You can go through the S&P and the NASDAQ and see these stocks that have crashed 80, 90% over the year. And tough for investors, yes, but I think good for us because we have to have a price for capital because it provides a signal to all of us about where to invest and the businesses in a sense that are worthy of that investment, that can sustain growth, productivity, profitability over time. So I think San Bank and Free will go down in history is kind of the, I don't know, the cat that rang the bell of the end of the easy era money that we've just gone through, not just COVID, but really since the great financial crisis. And I just hope, I just hope we resist the temptation to go back to zero bound rates

on the basis that, hey, it feels good. A lot of growth, a lot of money, a lot of excitement with things like crypto, but ultimately these things are not real. They're creations, their financial fabrications of a world where cash really has almost no value. You know, you and I have talked about crypto a lot this year on this show, and I don't think Either of us were surprised by what happened. We don't have a category called the weirdest story, but let me tell you, Roger, there is one connected with Sam Bankman Fried. There were some 12 locked wallets where people lost money in 2016 because the founder died and had the passwords with him.

Well, lo and behold, in these last weeks, as money was being moved in and out of XTFDX, those 12 locked accounts were open. That Twitter chatter, could it be that somebody who is, should have apparently died six years ago, somebody else has access to those passwords or he didn't die? All of this just says the regulation, the line of sight into this whole sector is frankly abysmal. And I think the next year we'll come to that in one of our shows. Next year is going to see much stiffer regulation. Yeah, you're here. Well, let's move on to events of the year, Janice. So you have to pick one event that you think encapsulated the year that was, what would be?

It's Russia's invasion of Ukraine. It's probably a decade game changer rather than an event. Shook up everything, shook up everybody's assumptions about security, shook up energy markets, shook up food markets. There's almost nothing, no sector that has remained immune. to the shockwaves that came out of that event. It just stripped away anybody's optimistic assumptions that we had put major land war behind us. It is, was, and will remain just a shocker.

Well, my, I think, event at the year was the ascension of Chairman G to an unprecedented in recent Chinese history, third term as kind of supreme leader following Mao Zedong. I picked this as a significant event because I think it really suggests a trajectory, unfortunately, between China and the world and China and the United States of increasing, not just competition, but the risk of conflict. And I think we will look back on the ascension of Xi. as a turning point in contemporary Chinese history and relations with Canada, with the United States, and again, with everyone.

This is a very, very different China from the Chinas of Dang and the other modernizers that came in the post-Mao period, and we're willing to embrace not just economic liberalization, but some political liberalization and a culture for the state and for the people of China that just wasn't as relentlessly kind of authoritarian controlling surveillance-based as the one that the party that Xi now represents. And you have to think that this is all a reflection, Janice, of an increasingly defensive attitude on the part of the Chinese Communist Party, the Chinese state about its relative position in power. in the world and possibly its relative position in power domestically.

This is an example, Roger. You picked a really important event because China is so important in the global economy. You know, in short, this did not have to be this way. There were other leaders in the party who might have charted a different course. If you, you know, we often talk, we just did, who's the person of the year. We might, it be interesting sometimes to talk about who the worst leader of the year is. And for me, it would be Xi Jinping. And not this year, but this is, in fact, a leader who has taken his country down a road. You just said it, authoritarianism, centralization of power, surveillance state.

given China, frankly, government that it does not deserve. The Chinese people deserve a lot better than what he's provided. And there were other leaders who could have and would have done so. It is a rough road now for anybody in that party who dissent from Xi Jinping. Well, let's take a break. We're going to say goodbye to our complimentary month members. We're going to welcome back on the other side, our donors to the Monk Debates in Friday Focus.

We're going to talk about what surprised Janice in the last year. What was the big unexpected event? And what do we get right and wrong in terms of our prognostications and predictions? Before we say goodbye to our complimentary monk members, just a reminder that if you'd like to participate in our Ask Me Anything episode over the holidays, please send us a voice memo with your question for us. It could be absolutely anything or everything. us where you listen to the show from and we will attempt to answer your questions on our

special holiday Ask Me Anything edition of Friday Focus. You can send your voice audio recording right now to podcast just like it sounds at monk debates and unk debates with an s.com. Back to you right after this short break. Thanks for listening to this excerpt of the Friday Focus podcast. To get full-length editions of each and every episode of this program, simply go to our website, www.com. Click on the Friday Focus tab in our navigation on the top right of the site.

Make a donation as little as $25 a year or 50 cents an episode, and we'll send you not only the full-length editions of each and every Friday Focus podcast, but all kinds of special offers, perks, access to events, and additional content. Again, you can do that right now by becoming a donor to the Monk Debates, a triple W. Monk Debates, MUNK, DebateswithanS.com.