reSee.it Video Transcript AI Summary
At the end of World War II Asia and Europe were devastated, and the United States emerged as the last man standing, profiting hugely from the war. They ended up, due to isolation, the strongest economy in the world with more than half the world’s gold and half the world’s GDP, with standing industries that could shift from making tanks to making cars and trucks. They did extraordinarily well for a few decades, but then, as described, they began to financialize, and it became more profitable to speculate in investments than to actually invest. In recent years, companies with money often pursue share buybacks rather than expanding research and development or industrial capacity. We are in a stage where the underlying basis for markets is questionable: what are markets for, are they accurate at price discovery, and do they predict productive investment and returns on capital? We are in a transition phase where we’re not sure anymore.
There is a huge bubble, and corporations creating these bubbles, with banks that loan money relying on the state because they are too big to fail. Bailouts have totaled trillions since 2008, as the US Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, and the Bank of Japan pumped trillions of dollars, with help from Gulf Cooperation Council countries to bail out banks in Britain, the United States, and Europe. It’s fascinating because China, since the financial crisis, has also created about 17 to 18 trillion dollars. China has actually been leading in creation of money, while investing that money in building 50,000 kilometers of high-speed rail, a space program, massive industries, and the Belt and Road initiative—real investment and so on. The enormous difference between the two is notable, but how far can states—the United States, Britain, the EU, and Japan—borrow and pump money into the market to keep this bubble going?
We don’t know. Bubbles are hard to gauge in terms of expansion and when they break, which is why they can be sustained so long; the bursting of a bubble is painful, and no policymaker wants responsibility. China is interesting and is the only case in history of a property bubble being deflated without collapsing the real economy, deflating its property bubble over five or six years while the economy continued to grow—not at 8% but at 5%—and continued to expand. That is worth studying because other countries let property bubbles run until they burst, causing wider harm and deflation. Japan, for example, has had thirty years of zero growth since it began quantitative easing three decades ago, a growth killer because it protected existing companies, banks, and properties and never really recovered. Europe has had zero growth for about fifteen years since 2007. The United States sustains growth largely by buying it from the rest of the world—acquiring profitable companies or getting them to list on NASDAQ and then earning rents from profitable companies wherever they are—while the US economy has been largely hollowed out. It’s an interesting time to watch monetary dynamics, because this doesn’t go on forever.