TRASHFUTURE - The French Lieutenant's Wager feat. Dominik Leusder

Episode Date: November 5, 2024

Economist and host of the Eurotrash Podcast Dominik Leusder rejoins the gang to discuss the recent U.K. budget - who’s in, who’s out, who’s “hot” and who’s “not.” Also, a final look at the US presidential campaign through the lens of one Frenchman’s $30m commitment to Peanut the squirrel. Get access to more Trashfuture episodes each week on our Patreon! *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s UK Tour here: https://miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

Riley, you were very evasive about this, but what do you guys think? I think Riley would do fairly well in a Mark Ruffalo lookalike context. I get this. This is not the first time this has been proposed to me. Yeah, plausible. Yeah, exactly. You need that post-stroke facial paralysis, and you need that puckered Ruffalo kissy face. Are you suggesting that if you have a stroke you either go Ruffalo or Chrétien? My man's gone full Ruffalo.

Either Gary Busey or you're Ruffalo. Yeah. I think you're- Ruffalo-Chrétien scale. Something that the doctors use. It's very funny to like go on podcast and be like, have you considered having a stroke? You know? They didn't let me back on Shelfpo after that.

So I think, number one, there's a lot to hate in the budget that Rachel Reeves presented last week, or this earlier this week at time of recording, but you can't fault the fact that what she has done is dropped a fucking daisy cutter on the Royal Agricultural College. 900% luxury tax on salmon trousers. Sirencester will never look the same. Tattered bits of gilets being found all over the Worcestershire. Like, it's the combination of the gigantic middle fingers to people dodging taxes by like putting all of their money into agricultural property.

Or as you might more and more curtly call them, farmers. Yeah. And also, taxing small private schools that are not particularly prestigious. Absolute nuclear weapon dropped on Sirencester. Cannot fault it. Hello, hello, hello everybody. It is TF. It is me, Riley.

I'm here with November and Milo. Hussein is now officially on paternity leave. He's gone off to start his new farm business. Bad news for the Kesvani household. After becoming an oil warehouse and SPAC, we have now also become a farm and trash future farm. Clarkson could do it. We're going to do it and we're going to be fully inheritable by our descendants. Farm come minor public school.

That's our business. I feel like Jeremy Clarkson is going to start a kind of, well, in fact, the national unit of farmers did say that farmers are going to get militant about the fact that they're passing on agricultural land through inheritance is now just going to be taxed as normal. So I do think that what's going to happen is Jeremy Clarkson is finally going to build an onboard technical. No, it's just, they're just going to do the European thing of like firing manure at Downing Street, and Stammer is going to have to stand within the kind of reign of manure and be like,

I respect you for all you do growing like, you know, wheat or whatever. Tilo- That's right. Before we go on, I also want to welcome our guest. We are here with the former guest of this show and host of the newly revamped Euro Trash podcast. It is Dominik Loisder. Dominik, how you doing? Dominik Loisder, Euro Trash Podcast Host Hey, good to be back. Dominik Loisder, Euro Trash Podcast Host We are, of course, going to be talking about the budget and how's that farm that you run.

Now that you're within seven years of dying, how do you like being a farmer? Dominik Loisder, Euro Trash Podcast Host The whole way that Inheritance Tax works, where it's within seven years previous to your death, has set a load of farmers into a kind of B-tier Liam Neeson movie now. Yeah, well, it's either they have to die now, or stay alive seven years. There's no other option. Hmm. Just, I have sort of like a weird wrinkle in the speed franchise, you know? I've picked up a very particular set of skills.

Farming. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. Combine harvesting. Hey, baling. James Dyson is, of course, furious at these taxes, which again is- Renowned farmer. Well, he is a renowned farmer because he is trying to pass 77 million pounds worth of agricultural land to his children and he owns like half a million pounds worth of agricultural land to his children, and he owns like half a billion pounds worth of farmland, largely because of this tax loophole. Yeah, it's like a tax... whatever the legal one is, a tax avoidance device, right?

That there was no inheritance tax on agricultural land, which was insane. And this is something that, like, Rachel Reeves has now closed in order to fuck with James Dyson specifically. Very sick. Well, he really needed the Reform Party to get in and bring in some rule where there was no inheritance tax on tea-baggable hand dryers. In that case, he would have been sitting pretty, but unfortunately... That's a kind of, like, anti-social behaviour for which the ASBO has not been invented

to like recirculate your own testicles through an entire bathroom. Yeah. I think the reform party while trying to get James Dyson's vote is going to scrap inheritance taxes on as you say, Taggable hand dryers. Well, similarly, The quote, as you say, teabaggable hand dryers, is so perfect. Well, simultaneously, like, allowing landowners to inherit workers as well.

Yeah. We're going to tie people to the land again. We're going to go feudal Russia. That'll be fun. That's right. But we have Daman to talk a little bit more about the budget in detail, what's in, what's out, what does it actually mean? And of course, how does it compare to the US? Both of which really are examples of trying to fix a creaking and nearly, I

would say, destroyed neoliberalism with the US willing to do it. Again, not a good thing, but they are at least doing the thing and us making some gestures at trying to do it and then falling flat on our faces. That's how I see it. Dom, what's your headline take? Yeah. You're putting me in the really uncomfortable situation of having to defend US macro policy. Then again, the point of comparison is the UK and it doesn't really get much worse than that in the European context. Both countries are sort of smoldering neoliberal, bombed out wreckage and sort of broken social contracts.

Unlike the UK though, the US has generally a high investment, high productivity economy. So there's that. The US, in many ways, the UK is in the worst position, but standards of living are still higher or rather more equal, and there's less. There are fewer Gary Indianas in the UK, and you don't quite have that sort of Rust Belt type deprivation.

But you also don't have the firepower. I mean, the reason why this budget confuses so many people, and my heart goes out to all my friends in the journalistic profession. Very few of them, I should say. But those who I do consider friends have to deal with this bullshit on a detailed level. They have to crack their heads about the weird little accounting tricks that the UK seems to think it has to do to actually get any money out to the solution, you know,

to lubricate the juices of this economy. Whereas the US in a way, because of its even more extreme neoliberalism and because the the labor market situation was so extreme in the aftermath of the pandemic. Where we've forgotten this, but there was a moment where people genuinely feared some form of social collapse, with unemployment creaking up to 20% again, almost back to Great Depression level. And the cool zone, I remember that.

That forces the hand of policy makers. Suddenly the congressional arithmetic has to work out, because otherwise you have a big fucking problem. And so then you get this consensus behind, yeah, very regressive spending. A lot of it goes to corporations, but you also get these direct transfers to households. You get this big, big, big fiscal push, right? So the reason things have been going well on the surface, at least, is there was a lot of money and basic arithmetic means the denominator is going to grow a bit. And there's more pressure in the economy, in other words, and because

the labor markets are so weak, there aren't the protections that you have here, there's a lot of churn. People are out of a job, but then they get into a job and they get in with a bit more leverage and their reservation wages, so their demands are higher. And they can then suddenly bargain for higher wages and then you get this wage spurt. All of that you don't have here. And you don't have the spending power, at least that's what they tell themselves. So in that sense, yes, the US did better, but it did better for the reasons of having less social democracy and fewer labor market protections. Now we can get into whether or not the UK can go on a big spending spree on its own

and whether it really had to do this accounting trickery. But I think the similarity with the Biden push, spending push is that it ain't going to fix the broken social contract, right? Like a few chip fabs here and there in Arizona, whatever, they're not going to change the nature of American capitalism. And the same thing in Britain with even shorter horizons, right? It's not going to really fix anything. If anything, it's just going to buy some political time for this government, which is already doing very poorly. Well, I mean, we know what it's doing very poorly because I don't think I've ever seen

an approval rating crash so hard, and with spending now set not to grow... This is the high watermark of spending, is this budget right here? This is the thing, to say essentially, we're not gonna put the fire out, what we're gonna do is we're gonna manage the fire so that a consistent portion of the room is on fire indefinitely. Pretty much. And look, so we're going to get to the sort of the details of the budget, but I have a few other bits of news to talk about.

Number one, I wish to extend a hearty congratulations to Kemi Badenok, the Tory MP for Facebook. Friend of the show. Yeah. Winner by default, Kemi Badenoch, after James cleverly sort of gerrymandered himself out of the race. Yeah, which of course we know the Labour policy response to this is going to be to sort of like very smugly brief that this is a huge win, because now the next election is going to be forced on the basis of like reasonable Kirstama versus mad Kemi with all of her Facebook bullshit. And in the intervening four years, they're just going to give Kemi Badenok everything

that she wants, which is mostly going to be about making my life worse. Um, which not thrilled about. It was weird that she mentioned your name. Yeah. Yeah. The thing is, well, this is the thing about Kemi Badenok is that she, of every politician involved is most likely to have seen one of my tweets, because this is a terminally online woman. This is a thing we will get back to about, about like the US election next, next show we do. But like,

this is, this is a poster. This is a poster's poster. Kemi Badenok has the international space station tweet printed out in like eight bit pixel art on her wall and she throws darts at it every day. Because she wants to defend the International Space Station. It was very expensive. But the other thing is, as you say November, right? Yes.

The Labour Party is going to spend the next four years giving this like raving lunatic culture warrior everything she wants. I mean, not, not just because they're cowards. That's a big part of it, but it's also because it's all stuff that they want to be doing, by and large. RILEY But also, they're going to be giving voters, as Dom was alluding to, nothing. ALICE Of course.

RILEY They're going to be giving voters a budget that feels like big spending compared to the last 12 years, but that feels like austerity compared to what you actually need. ALICE Yeah, well, I mean, I was kind of like going to tie this all together later, but I may as well say the thing now. The thing that strikes me about this is the politics that you're setting yourself out to do there are very much like, and you know, time will tell how well this is working, but like certainly you can judge the level of affection for it.

Will Stancil on Twitter, right, going, well yeah, you might feel alienated and you might feel shit and you might not be able to like, eat your house or buy food, but look at this graph. The graph is going up, and that means don't fucking worry about it. And to then do that in this country where things are in some ways, you know, considerably ways considerably less pleasant on a lot of levels. Whenever they find whoever the fucking British equivalent of Will Stancil is, it's a horrifying prospect. Will We know who that is already.

TG Do we? Will We absolutely know that that's Torsten Bell. TG Testicular Torsten Bell. Um, yeah. Will How has he got two cock and bull related puns, right there in one name? Um, but yeah, so I look forward to the next election where it's gonna be like, you know, we're gonna fucking nail me into a barrel and throw me down Cheddar Gorge, but also, you know, the economy's fine, don't worry about it, everything's fine.

All the parties are gonna be running on a two point platform. But also, you know, the economy's fine. Don't worry about it. Everything's fine. All the parties are going to be running on a two-point platform. Number one, November of the barrel down the gorge. Number two, we're going to look at this hospital that was 30% rebuilt and we're going to say, well, we fixed the staffing levels for 2024 and 2024 only. We rebuilt 30% of the hospital. Wait times are down from four years to three and a half. What are you complaining about?

It's like the way this government's decided to fund the NHS in this budget, particularly of the hospital, wait times are down from four years to three and a half, what are you complaining about? ALICE It's like, the way this government's decided to fund the NHS in this budget, particularly, is interesting to me, because it's a little bit like asking for money from your parents, to be like, well, you know, we'll let you run a health service this one more year, but like, after that, you're on your own. RILEY Yeah. Before we get to that, because that's all jumping ahead a bit. I think it's worth saying as well that like Badnock is a conservative leader who brings the party closest to what

its most Facebook people believe, which is that the state is big because of identity politics, basically, right? This is that there's a giant state because it's giving out participation trophies and there's this Gramscian belief that she has and the Facebook people have that like, if you just crush identity politics, then you will crush a huge amount of the state and then entrepreneurship will be able to flourish. Which is, yeah, which is really funny. Yeah. So she said she has a plan to reprogram the British state and reboot the British economy to consider every aspect of what the state does to look at the international agreements,

the Human Rights Act, the Equality Act, Judicial Review, the Treasury, the Bank of England, devolution in Quangos, the Civil Service and the Health Service, and all of the right-wing papers are lining up to say that this plan, which is exactly the same as every conservative leader for the last, I don't know, 14 years... It's what Liz Truss wanted to do most notably. Yeah, they say, ah, finally, someone with a plan to reboot the UK economy. So like the idea that the Tories have discredited themselves as the party of like economic competence

or whatever. That is, yeah, God, that was what? Like three, three and a half weeks. Yeah. But at least Labour used that honeymoon period to a lot of effect. You remember all those big policy announcements like, you know, the you know, the, Whoa, raising, raising tuition fees. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like that. Really, really popular stuff. You know, you get it out of the way now. Uh, so you don't have the fight about it later.

Or do you remember when they said that they nationalized the railways? Like they only said it, they didn't do it, but they did say it. Well, they nationalized the ticket buying portal, basically. Yeah. Pretty cool. Yeah. Again, you say that and then Torsten Bell comes in like the fan man. Slowly twisting downwards. I think it's also worth noting before we get to the budget, of course, that knowing what we know about Morgan McSweeney, the brains behind the Starmor operation is that he is going to be obsessed with catering to either like, Batonocchian madness.

And by the way, the other thing to mention is that like, just like never Trump Republicanism in the States, One Nation Toryism was always a columnist fantasy. It has never existed. It is dead and buried. It is gone. What if we just had the one decent Tory out there? You know? One of the less weird British columnist fantasies, to be fair. And I mean, and that's no that's no credit to one nation tourism.

I'm just like, do you remember when Charles Corrin wanted to burn that 12 year old boy to death? It's just one one nation conservatism can only exist retrospectively. Like Theresa May, for instance, you know, staunch, reasonable Tory. Yeah, exactly. What I'm talking about right as well. We know Morgan McSweeney, the brains behind the Starmor operation. He's going to be obsessed with catering to these people, whether it's bad knock or whether it is reform. It's already being like, hey, we want FBI crime statistics

here so we can win arguments on forums. All of that, they're now competing with who's going to be the true right winger. And we know that the Starmor organization is going to be catering to them. And how do we know that is because I couldn't believe it when I read it. I could believe it, but I was shocked at the fact that they called it the same thing, that they're having small boats week, which Rishi had and Boris had and Liz Truss would have had if she was in office long enough. It's just, it was the same then as it is now. It's the sign of a government that is desperately

out of ideas, right? And it's just like, well, what if, what if we bang the big racism drum? What about that? At least Rishi Sunak lasted longer before he declared Small Boats Week. I swear to God. It's quite Discovery Channel, isn't it? Small Boats Week. Yeah, there's a bunch of like weirder content on Small Boats Week. And much like the Discovery Channel, it's a lot of reruns.

Special episode of Mythbusters. So he, for example, he say, oh, we're going to fund the Border Security Command, right? Uh huh. Right. We're going to have more high tech surveillance equipment. We're going to stop the people smuggling gangs. And he says this, of course, in a joint press conference with Georgia Maloney, I believe in Hungary. It's so cool that they're just friends now, you know? Yeah. You know, saying, oh, we're finally, we're going to beat the gangs that are causing people

to come here outside of official channels when official channels still don't exist. We are finally going to make it so no one gets into Britain, and then the right wing papers have to like us, reform will have... Reform will voluntarily disband. If Small Boats Week works, I guess. ALICE Yeah, I mean, I'm amazed by how out of touch I am with the latest generation of misfits in the Conservative Party and their attended media outlets, which I attribute to just muting half of the Twitter universe. I didn't know that Badnock was that terminally online. Just from reading her public

statements, I had an idea that she was somewhat deranged and that she was trying to beat this drum of equity and diversity hiring as the reason the state is so large. And if we just clamp down on that, then suddenly we'll become some sort of Singapore type economy. But yeah, I have nothing left to say about the Conservative Party in general, to be honest, which is alarming because I think they're still the most successful

democratic, like, mass political party of all time, really. And given how poorly the current government is doing, they're probably going to be back in a few years. So yeah, I'm quite alarmed by how out of touch I am with those little freaks. This is a sign of, like, good mental health, to be fair. Like, the fact that I know that Cammie Badenock, when she was a student politician, was trying to hack Harriet Harmon's email, or like, was in group chats with some alarmingly spicy things, and was then getting, you know, sort of referred to being like, oh, you don't need to flag out a thing up to Cami, because she reads everything, because she's super online. That

reflects poorly on me. How on earth do you know that, though, that she was hacking into her... Because she admitted it, as far as I remember. Like,, like, it made a bit of news at the time, but like, it wasn't the career ender that it probably should have been. Yeah. I mean, I think when we think about the Conservative Party being so electorally successful, we do have to bear in mind the environment, I mean, they're kind of like... The Conservative Party are kind of like if you let Millwall play in the under-15s. It's not that they're good at football per se,

but the opposition don't stand a chance. Well, let's see how well the under 15s defend the title. Yeah. I do want to jump over the Atlantic for one moment before we go into the budget. And this is the lens that I want to view the American election through. The soul lens, right?

Yeah. Just to be clear, the election will still not have happened by the time this comes out, right? Yes, this will come out the same day as the election, as people are Pokemon going... Some tense listeners! Congratulations, I hope you're enjoying your self-care. Try not to think about it. We are going to talk about it one little bit, I guess.

Don't forget to get out and vote for Gary Johnson. Yeah. Fortnite to the polls. Why don't you walk to the polls and vote on that thing? Yeah, that's exactly right. But the lens I want to view this through, of course, is my favorite story to come out of this whole thing is the Trump whale. Hmm. Yes. Yes.

I'm a whale. Okay. I live in the sea. People are saying he's too wet. I'm supposed to be wet. Okay. I'm a whale, okay, I live in the sea. People are saying he's too wet. I'm supposed to be wet, okay. I'm actually a mammal. People say I'm a fish, it's not true. They had Trump played by Brendan Fraser in that one, it was kind of a comeback, you know? So, the Trump Whale is a man who bet more than thirty million dollars on a Trump victory

on various online betting markets, such Cauchy and Polymarket. I mean, briefly, before we get into this, the whole existence of these betting markets and people on the right and around the Trump campaign and Trump supporters suggesting that they're sort of meaningful is really funny in itself whether or not Trump wins. I mean, I think more funny if he loses, but this idea that all of these people have hyped themselves up into the idea that this is going to be some Trump landslide, because they are betting to drive the odds up in his favor, and so is this one guy, to the point that he's like, you know, 67% or something on betting markets, to which, you know, it doesn't

reflect anything except their confidence, which, you know, it doesn't, it doesn't reflect anything except their confidence, which means nothing. What it reflects specifically is that he has captured the degenerate gambler. Yeah, he's, he was captured the Rube market, which is not news about Donald Trump, I will say. And if I wanted to be bullish about this, you know, and I wanted to risk jinxing things, I would look at how much, you know, Kamala is down on any one of these things and be like, hey, they're selling dollars for 33 cents or whatever. Well, so, Kalshi and Polymarket are two betting platforms that allow you to bet on any

outcome via crypto. Kalshi is my favorite one because it's the best business idea in history. They just advertised during Trump rallies. Yeah, you too can make his numbers go up. They're also advertising on the Adam Friedland show, aka Formerly Come Town, which I don't know what that says. What we're talking about, right, is this one French guy who has bet so much money on a Trump victory, but well, I don't think he himself is at all partisan. He's just... It's funny whether he is or he isn't, but he he has bet like so much that he's

been a big part of like moving the market on within these like betting markets, right? Which hilariously appears to have like adjusted pollsters expectations of what certain states will like it's gone into adjusting polling errors, which I think is hilarious that like this one French guy has like scared like Nate Silver so much. He's like caused like a non-trivial amount of poll hurting. So is this guy who says, Theo, who was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal says, my intent is just making money. He self-described as a Frenchman who previously lived in the US and worked as a trader for banks. Theo's huge wagers in polymarket, which is not open to Americans, drew broad attention last month He self-described as a Frenchman who previously lived in the US and worked as a trader for banks. Theo's huge wagers and polymarket, which is not open to Americans, drew broad attention

last month after the journal reported four accounts of the platform have been systematically purchasing wagers in a Trump victory. It turns out that he controls all of them. Speaking English with a slight accent, he said he made his bets after concluding that the polls were systematically underestimating Trump's support. ALICE By the way, the article that initially identified this guy as this whale, did also note that all four of these accounts had been posting in the forums associated with these betting things, in sort of like, broken English, really like, questionably coherent political rants.

And it's like, hmm. Okay. current political rants and it's like, I love Donald Trump in France. We consider him very normal, you know, supposed to be, you know, my father was much like this. Don't let me say. That's like a resist French guy. What we want is like sort of like Trump French guy. He would be like, you know, like anti-wock, you know? L'évocisme. Oui, oui, oui.

L'évocisme c'est très fort. Faire America génial encore une fois. J'y dévance, je l'aime. I love it. I love it. I love it. I love it. Don't you have sex with the couch? The sofa. Like this guy bets 30 million dollars because he thinks that Trump's support is being systematically undercounted, puts himself into such a position that he can no longer unwind that bet because he's the whole market.

So he can't start selling or the value of it will crash. Imagine what must have been going through his head when he saw Kill Tony get up on stage and just start like bombing at Madison Square Garden. Tony Angecliffe has lost me $30 million. Tony Angecliffe. Antoine Angecliffe, no. Or like when he read that it's like, oh shit, they accidentally outsourced all of the ground game to Elon Musk and Scott Pressler. And it looks like their like October surprise slash November Hail Mary is to do with like not my name peanut

the squirrel. Yeah. I this is the thing. Even if Trump wins, this will have been more uncomfortable than I would want to be to make 60 million dollars. You know, the French guy who say he says, I admit feeling nervous, but a surprise can always occur. Equal. Equal. Largid may turn around the polls. I love how you default to a Quebec accent. That's really good. I can do no other. I'm stuck on a Quebec accent. Tabernacles are money I have bet on Camelari, she's lost. Yeah. From my ski-do-funs. They did not Pokémon go to the polls, huh?

Yeah. This is very amusing, though. This is the guy, right? Who's just like, well, I suppose it's just we have, just like, you know, I suppose we have the shy Tory, the shy Trump voter, we're gonna systematically undercount them. I'm gonna put all of my liquid cash.

He said this is 80 to 90% of his liquid assets are now tied up betting on the, betting on the Trump campaign. I see. Listen, right? Because of, because of the obvious reasons I was going to experience Schadenfreude if Trump lost, right? But like now there's a whole little extra, you know, little extra saver to it, knowing that it has also immiserated one French bond trader. Or, you know, if it goes the other way, then, uh, we're all going to Paris to say désolé to Theo. If it goes the other way, we all work for that guy, as does everyone else on Earth.

Like Nate Silver is gonna have to disembowel himself and throw himself down a step pyramid. Ah, Nate Sondageon? Wait, Nate a step pyramid. Ah, Nathan Dajon. Nate Gold? No, yeah, Nate Silver, sorry. I mixed up my French. He's gonna be Nate Bronze after this shit. That's right. Can is asked, were you guys talking about The Election or was that the newest Thomas

Pynchon novel? Like, a heavy-handed Pynchon novel. Maybe a later Steingart novel, because it's... Ooh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. I was expecting a Gary Steingart reference today. Fantastic. Everyone's copy of Infinite Jest, it turned out, just had two pages stuck together, where

they talk about the Frenchman whose life was destroyed by Peanut... L'Archide, l'Ecruel, de Soullement Fans? Peanut the Only Fan Squirrel. Being like, their last big push to the nation. I don't know what any of these words mean. Yeah, yes you do, I'm afraid. Yes I do, but I like to pretend that I don't sometimes. In this performance of weariness is my kind of, like, escape capsule, you know?

Dome is able to look at all of this and say, wow, that's a pension novel, because he's removed enough from it that he understands it all together. We're looking at all of it one at a time and being like, yeah, it's really stupid that Theo the Frenchman bet thirty million dollars on a campaign that hinged on peanut and squirrel. Every step of that makes sense to like us and most of the people listening to this. So like commuting with like a higher intelligence, you know? Yeah, well lower as the case may be.

Conversation between two guys at the tennis academy. Yeah. Dom doesn't process that one thing after the other. He sees it all at once. That's what I mean, yeah. And wonders what the fuck is going on. Yeah, but I think we both end up wiping the vomit from our mouths.

So, in the end it's the same thing. This is to say nothing of how it will go tomorrow, but it is certainly amusing to think of Theo finding out slowly more and more things about the Trump campaign and saying tips off quietly. Just betting on Trump we've never seen before, you know? Imagine betting heavily on Trump and then seeing a photo of him for the first time. Yeah, all the Zut Alor. Yeah, on paper, you know. However it goes, right, I hope that Kamala wins just for all of the obvious reasons,

but also for my newfound Shard and Friday, you know? And I think this is not a moment where we can or should be brunching, you know? But if America does decide to vibe like that, you know, I think a lot of people will be. A lot of people will be, you know, sort of like, it will be white women summer? Is it summer? No, it's not summer. It's almost, it's almost winter. So yeah, it's pumpkin spice season. White woman autumn. One of white women's favorite times. Yeah. It takes a woman of color to finally make it white woman season. I mean, this is the thing. If she does win, and this will really add some more to it, Hillary Clinton will be the only person on earth to lose an election to Donald Trump.

It makes the happy birthday to this future president tweet even funnier. There's no ceiling on this. The last thing, right? Is that again, like imagine you're Theo and then you're like, oh, the Trump campaign has lost Martin Shkreli because Trump Jr. rug pulled him? NARES This is the thing, right? Different economies, right? Like the UK doesn't have a Martin Shkreli, right? We don't have those kind of figures, we don't have those kind of characters. We're spiritually deprived in that way, right?

MIGUEL Our closest thing is what? Like, Michelle Mohn, basically. NARES Yeah, sure, but like, she did the scams. MIGUEL Matt Hancock's pub landlord., basically. Yeah, sure, but like, she did the scams. Matt Hancock's pub landlord. Yeah, but neither of those people disrespected the Wu-Tang Clan, right? Whereas Martin Shkreli did disrespect the Wu-Tang Clan, and that's an essential part of his, like, arc. Yeah. You don't know if Michelle Mohn disrespected the Wu-Tang Clan or not. All you know is that

you don't know that she did. It's very funny to imagine someone bang on British politics in this way. Oh no, Kevin Baden-Hawk has lost his support of Michael Barrymore. I do not know what this means for the state of the polls. I can't believe Michelle Mohn rug pulled you, God. I want to talk about the budget. No, I won't let you. I want to talk about the budget. We need to won't let you. I want to talk about the budget.

We need to stop trying to figure out from just guessing what Dom's a Mentorian candidate activation phrase is. Look, we got to talk about the budget. All right. So what we're talking about at a broad level is we are talking about trying to use a combination of accounting trickery, which we've talked about in previous episodes, right? Like unlocking more borrowing for investment. But again, unlocking as though the accounting trickery is real. It's just participating within the

logic of the crazy rules that we've set for ourselves, altering one of them. Yeah. And on the other hand, raising a bunch of taxes to cover increases in day-to-day spending. The taxes raised are employers, national insurance, as well as capital gains and inheritance taxes being raised slightly with of course the funniest raise coming from the daisy cutter dropped on the Royal Agricultural College in Sirencester. The minimum wage is rising by 6% from when it was last brought up, which is of course, considering all the inflation that has happened since then, still a real terms cut.

And then some like tweaking syntaxes. Vapes taxed up, of course, because this government is a hate-vaper. Draft beer taxes down by 1p, fuel duty frozen, the bus fare cap raised... The fucking, the bus fare thing is bad enough, but like, the pandering with the, you know, a penny off on pints thing was really like every budget is an, it's like an insult to our collective intelligence, but that was really like, you think me stupid. It must be the fifth of November.

Cause we're talking about a penny for the guys. Am I right? All right. All right. Well, I have a Laurel crown. I'm having delivered to Milo's house. Thank you. Thank you.

Oh, we are going to be bringing him through the roundabouts of Essex on a Well, I have a laurel crown. I'm having delivered to Milo's house. Thank you, thank you. We are going to be bringing him through the roundabouts of Essex on a chariot with a laurel crown being held over his head and a local tradesman saying, remember, you are mortal. Yeah, I've got one payoff, Estella, and I'm putting it on Kamala Harris to win. Yeah, only because it's going to piss off his Frenchman. Just a short comment on this accounting trickery that you mentioned. The context is, Britain is a low investment economy, it's a low productivity economy, and when I say low investment, that's what we call fixed capital formation. Right? It's particularly

public and particularly net public fixed capital formation. So basically, investment into public infrastructure. Right? Mason- We don't build things. We don't build hospitals. It's almost as if looking around you might get the sense that this is a country maintained on the cheap. Yeah, yeah. It's maintained, like, everything is the attendant infrastructure of, like, finance capital, and everything around it is, like, shitty, low productivity, service jobs, and nothing else really matters, and has been sold off, or has been left in a state

of disrepair, or to the extent that it has been sold off, we then come back to bail out these new private operators of previously public infrastructures when all they did is to saddle these companies with debts. But nothing really gets done in the meanwhile. It's not been quite as bad as Italy or Germany in terms of the public investment trend over the last decade. But those economies, even Italy, are in some ways more functional than the UK. Out of the 10 poorest regions in Western Europe, nine of them are in Britain. And that's partly due to the squeeze on public spending over the last decades.

So anyway, on top of that, there have been these fiscal targets. What they have in common with the European ones that they have until recently had as their targets, the stock of public debt relative to GDP over a given time horizon. So it's in this country, whereas five years from now, our debt levels relative to income will be X, given our current growth path. And therefore, because we want to meet a certain target, we can only spend this much now. It's a stock measure that informs the current flow measures, if you'd like, the deficits. What she's done, what Reeves has done is just replace that stock measure with a different stock measure, basically. So this

is what's called public sector net financial liabilities. The snuffle as columnists have taken to calling it very cutely because they are some of the most insufferable people around. That tracks completely. But I mean, it's all pretty dumb. So I mean, if that just adds to mocking this whole thing, then I do support it. But the point is that, you know, it's helpful to think about things in a balance sheet with a balance sheet heuristic in mind. Everything has an asset side and a liability side, household firms and governments, although governments, external, like public balance sheets work a bit differently, I would say, because you're kind of also responsible for the value of your own assets in a way that households and firms aren't.

But what this means, by accounting, by acquiring new financial assets, by counting certain things as assets, you suddenly free up space in the liability side. You can take on new borrowing. That's what I think has been done here. On a reasonably large scale, there is quite a bit more investment in the aggregate. That's in combination with what you just outlined, Riley, these new taxes. It's certainly much better than nothing, but if we go into detail, which we might do with the NHS for instance, you see it's so far removed from what we need that it's just going to feel like austerity even though there is a decent

increase over the next few years. So there's one study recently that estimated, okay, whatever, I mean there's several studies, but they all agree that the investment needs of the NHS are something in the over a hundred billion pounds over the next years. From what I understand in this case, that the day-to-day spending will increase by just over 20 billion for the health budgets. And a lot of that is just going to fund current staffing

levels. I have the specific numbers in front of me, which is that the additional money for the NHS is 22.6 billion over this year and next, which she claims is the biggest spending increase for the health service since 2010, if you take out COVID. But so much of that just funds current staffing levels. There's no sense of trying to make things better, trying to make things faster.

You have to go to the private sector for that, right? Yeah. It's not to make things better or not to make things faster. In every case where this government wants to spend money, they're going to spend not enough or what they're going to do is they're going to spend enough to be swallowed up by and alleviate the problem for one year. But if you look at their projections of what they intend to spend over the next five years, it drastically drops off. Much of the spending is front loaded and then you're going to be three years into like, Kemi Badenok just saying whatever she sees on Facebook, which people are going to consider fun. And then they're going to be like, Oh, what's Keir Starmer done? Well, I guess the waiting times are

back what they were when the NHS was just at a tailspin rather than a death spiral. I still have a broken leg and I can't be seen for like 20 hours rather than 24. Kemi Badenok, inviscorating Keir Starmer by saying, but do you remember when the bin men were hard? Well indeed. I'd say like the analysis from the King's Fund is most devastating, which says the investment will bring some benefit from extra appointments to upgrades to a small number of very outdated NHS facilities.

Yeah, you won't have to get a guy like firing x-rays at you with some kind of like 19th century like beam, you know? Yeah. Like the hospitals where like patients above a certain BMI can only be treated on the ground floor because otherwise they'll fall through first floor operating theaters. Those are going to mostly be fixed. Rack concrete is fat phobic. I do believe that like until very recently, and this may still be ongoing, like 1940s vintage anesthesia

carts were still in use in hospitals. Great! That is perfect. But that's an example, right? Where there is this huge amount of money being spent that only looks like it's big because there was nothing before. And when it measures up to the scale of what's needed to have a functioning public service, it is not there. It's like there is a 9-inch long knife that's been embedded in the NHS' back, right? And what Rachel Reeves has gone is essentially said, well, we've pulled out this knife three inches, which is more than the last government did.

Yeah, the last government pushed it in slightly. We've removed it. We at the new Labour government, we have stitched up 80% of your wound. You know, do you really need your- Getting like a part finance hip replacement on the NHS. Listen, if you wanted to bend, you've got to go and speak to our partner here in the private sector. Sorry, being able to bend at the hip is downloadable content, I'm afraid. I've got my new hip on 25% APR from the dealership. Getting sticker shock from my hip.

The moment you walk off the lot, the hip value goes down by 50%. Just get a used one. Yeah, Raleigh, what you said reminded me of something Walter Benjamin said about Weimar Germany as stabilised misery, basically. Yeah. It just sort of held things in place for a while. But as we know, Weimar turned out perfectly well. I was going to say, remind me what happened after Weimar Germany, because this is all

good stuff. Yeah, of course. What you were describing is, this is the Stancil, Torsten Bell principle. This is the baseline effect. You can draw a chart that, if you choose the baseline correctly, is going up. But then you have to rebase it to the beginning of like this whole hollowing out of public services, and then it would just way, way, way well below any level of... ALICE You could get way more NHS care than like an early hominid, you know?

That pilt down man was getting fuck all in the way of hip replacement, so you should be grateful. ZACH Yeah, you think they had MRI machines down in that bog? No way. The MRI machine was the bog. That was the best diagnostic thing they had. I'm also quite hung up on a 1930s Frenchman bedding on straysamans to win the 1933 election. I've put my entire reserve of Franks into this. I really believe that his introduction of the rent and Mark will prevent it.

He's alarmingly bald head. Although he is a Zutelor, he appears to have killed a popular vaudeville squirrel. An erotic squirrel from an erotic cabaret. I like that kind of American newsreader speaking French voice he did there. Zutelor. Zutelor, the Chancellor of Weimar Germany, appears to have presided over a regime that caused the death of a popular, erotic vaudeville squirrel. Le Homme Orange dans la maison blanche.

Il s'appelle le sir, le Donald Trump. We talk about Weimar Germany as you say, Dom, stabilized misery. And I think that's the perfect comparison here. You know, when we want to compare like the Inflation Reduction Act and chips, and I've long been talking about this, right? Which is that the thing about chips and the Inflation Reduction Act is that it is the product of a country that has the global reserve currency behind it. Yeah. product of a country that has the global reserve currency behind it. Yeah, I mean, also the other thing about this is to do the Stancil thing, you have to at

least give Biden credit that he went to the things, he went to the brewery and said, oh Earth Rider, thanks for the Great Lakes. He put his name and signature on all the projects that it funded. Whereas we're not going to do that here, right? There's not going to be a portrait of Stammer next to the bog the NHS radiologist throws you into to see what that lump is, right? Like, and so we're gonna do all of this stuff in a, like not only are we doing it worse,

but we're not even marketing it as well. Well, I think that comes down to the different ways that like the American left wing of capital party rescues neoliberalism versus the way the UK left wing the capital party rescues neoliberalism versus the way the UK left wing of the capital party rescues neoliberalism and the way that they involve the private sector. Because the chips and IRA, that's in many ways huge giveaways to the private sector, but that are quite direct. And that also involves just a massive expansion of state capacity.

The place where it's most similar, weirdly, I think is actually in American building of a bunch of data centers versus creating creating power infrastructure or versus just like pumping money into like a securicrat tech economy, building chip fabs and so on. Where like in Britain, what we're essentially trying to do is build stuff that will be a little bit ours, but that mostly is going to... We're mostly trying to crowd in private investment into stuff that will be I just as much as I talked about insulting people's intelligence, right? This is a country whose population are begging to be pandered to and to be honest

Like even the the insane Facebook shit still isn't really doing as much as it might, you know Like Huey Long could be running this country by like, brunch if he started this evening. But I honestly think, right, like, that the way that we intend to do this is to fix the health system, for example, by funding about 20% of what it needs, maybe about 1% of what it needs for capital upgrades, and then kind of throwing open the door to private industry to come in and develop even closer relationships with these state functions and then rent seek from them. The portraits of Richard Branson next to the bog. Yeah. Well, yeah, I think that's essentially what we want to do is we want to build one

tenth of the MRI machine in the bog and then put a portrait of Richard Branson up while he funds the construction of the rest and then is able to extract huge rents on it basically forever. That's how I see this going. Let me just take a step back to add to something you were saying earlier, Riley, which is the US, first of all, has the benefit of having the global reserve currency, right? So it can actually spend. And the Weimar comparison is almost unfair to Weimar Germany in the sense that at the time, you can fault them for doing austerity in 2019 after the crash and that brought up the Nazi vote share, whatever.

At that time, they were still on the girl standard and the US stewardship of the global monetary system meant in a way their hands were tied. They couldn't actually spend very much without risking the inflationary pressures that really destroyed and radicalized the middle class a few years earlier. You could argue that their hands were tied. There's no such thing for the budget, for the current UK chancellor to worry about, especially because the pound is not the key currency, but it is a reserve currency. The Bank of England is a competent central bank in many ways.

So they don't have to worry about much. I think all this thing about the MRI machine and the bog and let's take out the blade by three inches, they're not that stupid. Go back and look at what Rita was saying a few years ago. She was more or less having the same conversation we're having now about the Tories. We need investment. This is bullshit. The NHS needs $100 billion.

We can't just always engage in these fiscal fictions wherein we underspend, depress our growth path, and therefore our future debt ratio is higher and therefore we can't spend now and therefore we just end up in this vicious circle, whatever. She's very cogent about this. So this is obviously about politics. It's bad macro, a nonsensical macro, like arithmetically nonsensical, but it's downstream of shitty politics. And what are those shitty politics? And we were talking about this, Raleigh, it's the politics that UK policymakers don't want

to be seen as an emerging market. But by creating the impression that they care about borrowing costs and market reactions to fiscal policies, or how will the borrowing costs on the 10-year guilds change overnight when they announce the budget. They sort of tattoo the letters E and M on their forehead. E and M, not E and M, to be clear. Yeah, E and emerging market. It's amazing because you said that you've elected a Blairite and you've turned the country

into Venezuela circa 1996, basically. I mean, on the one hand, that's, I think, valid. But on the other hand, it's not clear whom they're trying to assuage. They don't want to come off as spendthrift lefties. So there's an internal political thing, and also maybe worrying about the next election, worrying about their very weak majority as they perceive it. But yields are an issue for the central bank.

So just to go back here, what we're talking about is quotes from... After this budget, just to give some context here, after this budget, the yields on British bonds went up slightly, traders punished the UK slightly. And this seems as though Starmer and Reeves seized upon this as a kind of thing they have to suddenly apologize to bond traders for. Yeah. And that's been... But they've been consistent about that being their most important day-to-day policy variable, which is against totally self-defeating. But also the fact that the pound didn't sell off too, which is that's the sign of an emerging

market. Yields go up and your currency depreciates at the same time. That was the case in the trust Quateng budget for totally different reasons that has to do with the vulnerability in the British financial system. But the point is this is all completely unnecessary. They could have much more borrowing and spending if they can communicate that this is productive investment that also renders your future debt sustainable, which is how you should think about spending. You shouldn't have these dumb, made up fiscal targets. You should think about, is our debt sustainable? How do we measure that? Can we

service it sustainably in the future? What is that a function of current levels of productive investment? And that's how you go. But you don't invent these targets and then say, we worry about bond yields and then people punish you for it. Yeah. I mean, that's, they're fundamentally unserious people, what I'm trying to say. If we want to talk about insulting intelligence, I mean, changing one of those rules to say, oh, we've changed a rule that's going to allow us to magically invest more, which is we all agreed we couldn't do forever. I think that also insults the intelligence of, well, bond traders. Yeah, listen, you might be doing your bond thing, but I've been talking to all of Nigel

Lawson's old stuffed animals that we keep in the exchequer's office. And we've got all of their permission to do this, so it's fully vetted. What bond traders are thinking about generally is also like, well, is this going to be a profitable investment for me? Am I going to be able to keep getting paid back? Was quantum of solace really the best one? Things of this nature. You know? Yeah, that's right. I think the, the idea that like they're taking seriously what is essentially a fiscal rule

for domestic consumption so that everyone gets to feel very serious. It's laughing. This is laughing. They're all fucking laughing. This is what it is. I've solved it. Well, that's essentially what I was going to say with more words in answer to Dom's open question, right?

Which is what are the politics behind such bad macro management? I hit the deficit with my foam sword, you know? Yeah. I am live action role playing in the persona of, you know of a serious Ironclad commitment to the rules chancellor. Yeah, and so the bad politics behind this I think are mostly about spite, they're about hating on the people who they know that they have to hate on to be taken seriously. We talk about the Labour old right as being different from Blairism because the labor old right takes like groups of people who are insiders and benefits them while whipping people who

are outsiders, right? Is that they believe like that they are there to infuriate and crush like students, like unprotected workers, like migrants, people who aren't already insiders. And they also believe that the only way that they're going to be able to do this within the rules of Thatcherism, right? They're trying to be the labor old right within the rules of Thatcherism is to like pander to bond traders for your investment, which means you're never going to be able to invest enough to fix the stuff. Like if you want to know what the politics are behind it, it is simply a sort of spite driven commitment to never go outside of a political framework

that was established in 1980. But to do that with the trappings and traditions of the labor old right of the Ernest Bevin labor party, basically. That's what I think the politics are. This isn't Ernest Bevin, this is sarcastic Bevin. Yeah. You know, so by saying like, yeah, we're going to NHS, we're going to give you enough money to pull the knife out by three inches. That's all that they can do within this realm. And then what they're next gonna do is say, okay, well, we fully anticipate that what's gonna happen is either private investment will come in and then fill the rest of the gap. And

then as that's happening, there'll be so much economic growth that our spending envelope will get bigger just inherently, and then we'll be able to solve those problems then. So it is what like 5% less magical thinking than trustism, maybe, essentially. And if you want to talk about experiencing this as austerity, not just at the macro level, this being pretty incoherent, but if you want to talk about experiencing this as austerity, you have to look at local government because that's where people most feel cuts to services most acutely because that's where there's a huge amount of statutory obligations and very little statutory funding. Like adult social care, for example, you have to fund

that as a local government yourself legally, statutorily. You have to have council tax set at a certain amount legally, statutorily, and the government is only going to give you certain decreasing amounts, especially as your needs pile up and pile up and pile up. Well, the government is motivating local authorities by doing that sort of thing. You know, like some parents do where they start charging their kids rent at 16. They're like, well, they're going to just have to figure it out. You know, we had to figure it out. You're going to pull your socks up, Birmingham.

Look, every government started as a local authority. Yeah. I've had enough of Hampshire lying in bed till noon. Look, when I was a young local authority, a mere northern French duchy, I was ambitious. So this is 1.3 billion goes to local government. And that is again, not enough because local authorities are going to be in deficit by not even how much they need to like let alone running a growing needs for service. They're going to be in deficit by 9.3 billion by 2026. So get 1.3 billion. It's pulling a nine inch blade out one inch.

Yeah, and it's profoundly, I mean, as you said, it's, it's, people will feel that much harder than any setback at the central government level, because a lot of the social services are at the local level. And there would be only two options there. Either you would preside over a lot of council bankruptcies and consolidations, which often mean more cuts to local services, or you raise council taxes, which are profoundly regressive forms of taxation, right?

And which aren't officially taxes, so you could actually change them much more easily. I mean, it's terrible economically and socially, but also suicidally, politically. Yeah. So for example, Hampshire, Milo, you mentioned Hampshire. One of the richest local authorities in terms of like the people that live there in the country doesn't have any youth centers left. Libraries and bus services have been squeezed. Highway maintenance is being cut. Street lighting is being rationed,

and people who like school crossing guards are going to be like weaned out, right? This is a conservative led council that should have been like at least the poster child of like the previous governments. And yet even still, it is fighting a death rattle against insolvency. Well, look, kids are going to have to figure out a road by themselves. No one helped us cross the road. And you know, we know street lights, they'll be less vulnerable to the luff offer. What if through a process of natural selection, all children in Hampshire are extremely alert to cars?

Yeah. Or we made them just immune to cars. Like we developed the children Hampshire into that guy. The Australian Road Safety Commission made a mock up of who could survive any car accident. You know, they all just have like no net and a big like kind of trapezoid head. And so like if you're a voter, you're going to spend the next five years hearing about all of this spending that's happening. And then not seeing any of it, but in fact not seeing it so much because there's no streetlighting. Yeah. And the bits of it that you're seeing are keeping, again, keeping services largely at the

level that they're at now, which is considered to be pretty fucking horrible as opposed to getting even worse. But what you are going to see is stuff like libraries get worse. No highways are going to be maintained. Cultural and community spaces are going to close. The streetlights won't be on. Road gridding will cease. So that's what you're going to notice on a day to day basis. The plan seems to just hope that like Kemi Badenok or Nigel Farage cannot then turn to all of that and drum up kind of desperate support for a much crueler option of how to deal with it.

You know, too little, too late in the wrong areas seems to be. Too little, too late in the wrong areas. And mostly we're spending our time talking to bond traders who don't really care. We are 1996 Venezuela. Because they're busy thinking about skyfall. Yeah, that's right. But this is the insane thing. The bond traders do care and there is a huge coalition that includes people even in the

financial sector who want more spending. This is the insane thing. This is the Labour government who's to the rights of much of the most virulent capitalists on what the appropriately sized budget would be. Yeah. Once again, woke bond traders to the left of the UK government. We talk about Habsburg AI, right? And what happens when you keep feeding a system on the products of itself? And I think UK politics and wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait,

wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait,

wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait It's hallucination sort of multiply. It's essentially like a prion disease. Yeah. Mad cow GPT. Yes, essentially. Very good. I like to think about what happens when closed systems are too self-referential for too long. On this show, we have come at the UK as a closed system that feeds on itself from a lot of different angles. Whether we're talking about it's incredibly good at defending its elites and keeping them from recirculating,

keeping new elites from entering. Yeah, like another country would have replaced Prince Andrew with another better prince. Or how like we are sort of so our institutions are incredibly insular, the very, very close connections between the press, Downing Street and think tanks. You can approach it from any angle, but ultimately why this is the only country I think where like bond vigilantes tend to be to the left of the government because we don't take in new information. At the risk of sounding like a sort of prediction markets person, the priors never get updated. We never break out of the, as we alluded to earlier, the things that make us feel the fiscal rules are necessary. Everyone's talking to Nigel Lawson stuffed toys because everyone believes that that is the most important

ritual for power. It is so much of the government of this country is so ritualistic that there is nobody who seems to be able to or willing to deliver any kind of remedy that is within anything close to the scope of the problem. And again, we're comparing this not to America the progressive, right? This is because Americans also make no mistake that a lot of them are feeling the sort of post inflation reduction act slash chips act world as austerian also. Yeah. It might be about to lose camel of the election, right?

It's driven by like very wealthy people getting much wealthier, spending quite a bit more, and with the very largest companies, especially those that profit directly from government contracts, getting incredibly outsized profits. This is a very brittle way to manage the economy and it looks good, as you were alluding to earlier, Dom, at the top level, but it's also felt like austerity by everyone below. Yeah, but I'm sympathetic to this notion of, you know, there's a, there's a closed system that's feeding on itself, but, you know, spend any amount of time in Germany or in Brussels. And it's far more insular and stupid at the level of like fiscal policy, at least in social

policy. It's the exact same thing, but even more stupid in a way because they have, in a way they have fewer limitations than the UK does. But it is curious though that the UK is, maybe it is an insular system, but it's uniquely open to the global economy at the same time. So the institutions don't update, but the process of institutionalized capital cannibalizing the country, it goes on unimpeded. And it's actually one thing that I forgot to mention about or to add to you, a rundown of the budget. This whole thing about increasing carried interest rates, for instance,

where capital gains tax effectively, it's a complete non-starter because nothing is actually changing about the way this actually happens on the ground in private equity firms or in these large asset manager firms. Because what happens is that they don't really put in their own money, the partners. Well, they will simply do so at a ceremonial level.

They'll put in like 100 pounds or something. And the pool of the partners' contributions add up to a few thousand pounds. And that's what they end up paying the 30% on. But of course, they make outsized gains, either asset stripping or establishing permanent claims to productive means in this country. That's the thing that no one ever talks about. And in that sense, it is incredibly

insular, our political discourse. But then I also think the same thing happens in every other damn country. The UK at least is sort of, I say it's ratio of elite and institutional insularity to financial openness is probably the most dramatic of any of the other states. We are the most like trying to fire a nuclear torpedo from a sloop ass country. I think in that case, if we don't want to take on new economic ideas, we should start going back to some old economic ideas and see if they work. No, I know. I think Keir Starmer should dissolve the monasteries and use the various

golden jewels contained therein to, you know, fund a new age of economic development. The problem with Tudorism is sooner or later you run out of other people's monasteries. Well, cause true Tudorism has never been tried. Yeah, that is very true actually. It's all been sparkling Yorkerism true Tudorism has never been tried. Yeah, that is very true, actually. It's all been sparkling Yorkerism. Yeah. We've been going a little bit long, but number one, Dom, I want to thank you very much for coming and talking about the budget.

And I'm sorry that we kind of derived a pinch of novel from first principles for you in the first 20 minutes of the show. I was having the time of my life. Thanks for having me back. It was our pleasure. And of course you can check out Eurotrash with Dom and David Adler also lately of this parish wherever you find podcasts. Also, this is probably the last day to order shirts. Are they not going off sale like now?

Oh, right. Nevermind. Well, you should have bought it earlier. Yeah. Live show though. Hey, you know, you could buy a shirt there, a different shirt, but a shirt nonetheless. 24th of November at Between the Bridges. That's a Sunday. Yeah, there'll be a tick-a-lick in the description. Also come and see me. Bath 15th November, Bristol 16th November, South End 19th, Oxford 21st, Liverpool 22nd, Manchester 23rd, Leeds 25th, Salt Out, sorry. December 14th, Taunton. There you go. With Taunton. Southend, there are others. That's right, correct. Milo Webisocode at UK.

Okay, all right. So sure, it's probably not on sale anymore, but if they are, they won't be for very long. And also, there are live show tickets as Milo mentioned, so do check those out. And of course, there will be a premium episode this week coming out later. So that's five bucks a month on Patreon. All right, All right. See you in a few days everybody. Bye. Bye