Speaker 1: But knowledge to work and grow your business with c
Speaker 1: i T from transportation to healthcare to manufacturing. C i
Speaker 1: T offers commercial lending, leasing, and treasury management services for
Speaker 1: small and middle market businesses. Learn more at c i
Speaker 1: T dot com put Knowledge to Work. Hello, and welcome
Speaker 1: to another edition of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway,
Speaker 1: Executive editor of Bloomberg Markets, and I'm Joe Wisntal, Managing
Speaker 1: editor at Bloomberg Markets. Joe, can I just say I'm
Speaker 1: glad to have you back because I missed you for
Speaker 1: two episodes. That is really sweet of you to say,
Speaker 1: and I am very glad to be back. Uh. I
Speaker 1: had some interesting travels around the world, but glad to
Speaker 1: be getting back in the routine. And I have to
Speaker 1: say I really enjoyed. Uh. I really enjoyed the episodes
Speaker 1: that I listened to the episodes, I really enjoyed them.
Speaker 1: So I was glad to see my substitutes did great.
Speaker 1: I'm glad we could provide you with listening material on
Speaker 1: the plane. Very I appreciate it all right. Well as
Speaker 1: a welcome back gift today, I think I have a
Speaker 1: guess that you're going to really enjoy because one of
Speaker 1: the things we've been talking about for I guess the
Speaker 1: past few months now, when we've been dealing with things
Speaker 1: like globalization, Brexit, US politics, things like that, is the
Speaker 1: idea of the world distrusting people in authority and in
Speaker 1: particular experts and technocrats. Yeah, I think this seems like
Speaker 1: such a big theme that pervades all aspects of life,
Speaker 1: from the media, which is the industry, obviously that we're
Speaker 1: directly into finance, which we cover, and obviously politics, which
Speaker 1: we have a a certain election on our plates right now.
Speaker 1: So um, yeah, I agree. This sort of whole idea
Speaker 1: of distrust of experts and the erosion of traditional structures
Speaker 1: of a worthy is about is a big of a
Speaker 1: theme as you can get right now exactly. And you
Speaker 1: and I both know that in finance and economics and
Speaker 1: markets there is an overabundance of experts, let's put it
Speaker 1: that way. And perhaps one of the I guess the
Speaker 1: most stereotypical expert in the field would have to be
Speaker 1: the central banker. You're sort of ivory tower technocrat, uh,
Speaker 1: you know at the e c B or the FED
Speaker 1: or the Bank of Japan sitting in their sort of
Speaker 1: ivory tower and guess pronouncing monetary policy. Yeah, I would
Speaker 1: say the central banker probably has a unique role in
Speaker 1: our society and it's hard to uh think of any
Speaker 1: other position quite like it because they're not really accountable
Speaker 1: to anyone. There's no obvious checks and balances except over time.
Speaker 1: With them, they can implement policy without dealing with the
Speaker 1: political ramifications, at least in the short term. There incredibly
Speaker 1: INFLUENTI choll absolutely that was well put. So our guest
Speaker 1: for today is actually the author of a new biography
Speaker 1: on Alan Greenspan, who's one of the most famous central
Speaker 1: bankers of all time. I guess you would say, uh,
Speaker 1: it's Sebastian Malaby. He's a long time journalist. He's also
Speaker 1: penned a bunch of really good books, many of them
Speaker 1: to do with the economics and finance. And we are
Speaker 1: going to be looking at this phenomenon of the world
Speaker 1: falling in and then out of love with experts with
Speaker 1: technocrafts through the prison of Alan Greenspan. So I think
Speaker 1: it'll be good. Yeah, I'm looking forward to that. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think, you know, I remember the nineties economy pretty
Speaker 1: well and the degree of reverence towards Ellen Greenspan at
Speaker 1: the time was absolutely extraordinary, and it's pretty hard to
Speaker 1: imagine in anyone quite achieving that level of love and
Speaker 1: the popular culture and the popular press ever again, or
Speaker 1: at least anytime soon. All right, let's bring Sebastian in. Hi, Sebastian,
Speaker 1: thanks for joining us today. Hi Ty, al right, so
Speaker 1: should we maybe start with green spans role as the
Speaker 1: ultimate technocrat? Can you walk us through how he got
Speaker 1: to that position and what made him different to other technocraphs.
Speaker 1: Green Span was the ultimate central banker partly because of
Speaker 1: the length of time that he survived in office. If
Speaker 1: we think of other sort of big names we associate
Speaker 1: with the Federal Reserve, this Ben Bananke, who survived there
Speaker 1: for eight years. This Paul Volka also eight years. Green Span,
Speaker 1: in contrast, survived in office for eighteen and a half years,
Speaker 1: more than twice as long. And if we add in
Speaker 1: the two and a half years he spent as the
Speaker 1: Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors in the Ford
Speaker 1: White House, you get twenty one year. So by ship
Speaker 1: didn't of longevity. Green Span is the ultimate technocrat, the
Speaker 1: ultimate central banker. What's interesting, though, is that he actually
Speaker 1: created the reverence for central bankers. It did not exist
Speaker 1: before he got there. He was appointed at a time
Speaker 1: when it was perfectly normal for elected leaders to beat
Speaker 1: up on the technocrats, to belittle the central bank, twist
Speaker 1: its arm. And it was really by dint of green
Speaker 1: SPAN's force of character that he was able to stand
Speaker 1: up to pressure from the Bush administration. That's the first
Speaker 1: George H. W. Bush administration. And then when Bill Clinton
Speaker 1: came into office, these attacks on central banks stopped, and
Speaker 1: instead you had the deference towards the technocrats that we
Speaker 1: have come to take for granted recently. So, you know,
Speaker 1: I remember the green Span era, I think pretty well.
Speaker 1: I mean I was only in high school, but I
Speaker 1: was very interested, and I remember people referring him as
Speaker 1: like the author of the Great Economy, and that it
Speaker 1: was sort of all back to his brilliance, that unemployment
Speaker 1: was so low, and everyone was making a fortune in
Speaker 1: the stock market and all kinds. You know, everything just
Speaker 1: seemed to be going great in America. You know, when
Speaker 1: you went back and looked at his life, how much
Speaker 1: was him and how much was just lucky timing? And
Speaker 1: why were people so quick to give him all the credit?
Speaker 1: There was certainly so lucky timing. Two things happened. Globalization
Speaker 1: was rapidly progressing, and in particular, China was integrating into
Speaker 1: the world economy, and that drove down import prices in
Speaker 1: the United States and made it easier to control inflation.
Speaker 1: So that's piece of number one. Piece of lack. Number
Speaker 1: two was technological advance driving out productivity. Again, that took
Speaker 1: pressure off prices. So if you were a central banker
Speaker 1: whose mission it was to stabilize prices been fashioned down,
Speaker 1: it was easier in that period than in other periods.
Speaker 1: But I think even when you acknowledge, you know, these
Speaker 1: two pieces of good fortune, it still remains the case
Speaker 1: that green Span stood out for his skill, a particular
Speaker 1: kind of skill, which was essentially to resist politicians who
Speaker 1: were trying to push him around. If they took the
Speaker 1: fight to him, he took the fight to them, and
Speaker 1: politicians backed off from trying to bully the Federal Reserve
Speaker 1: because they were essentially scared of being bullied back. Well,
Speaker 1: Joe alluded to this earlier, but one of the things
Speaker 1: that makes central bankers different to other types of experts
Speaker 1: is the independence that they have um or are supposed
Speaker 1: to have from politicians. So how does that kind of
Speaker 1: play into greenspans rise. Yeah, well, that idea of independence
Speaker 1: of central banks from politicians is something that was really
Speaker 1: established in the nineties and did not exist much before. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, you go back to nine when Arthur Burns,
Speaker 1: who had served as FED chairman for much of the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies, gave a kind of retrospective speech on his tenure.
Speaker 1: It was all about the fact that central banks were
Speaker 1: inevitably in a political system, in a democratic system, going
Speaker 1: to be pushed around by the elected leaders. I mean,
Speaker 1: those guys have been elected, they had a mandate, they
Speaker 1: had power, and they were going to beat up on
Speaker 1: the technocrats if the technocrats did not cut interest rates
Speaker 1: ahead of elections and deliver other things they wanted. I
Speaker 1: think it's so fastly because right now the idea that
Speaker 1: central bank independent is a really important aspect of a
Speaker 1: functioning economy and an important and functioning central bank just
Speaker 1: seems to be absolutely taken for granted, and people really
Speaker 1: bristle anytime politicians tried to muscle their way in on policy.
Speaker 1: But it's fast thing to think that that's really a
Speaker 1: fairly new concept. Absolutely. I mean even Paul Volker, who
Speaker 1: we think of as this sort of rumpled eggheaded Church
Speaker 1: Chilean Old Testament scourge that nobody could possibly mess with.
Speaker 1: I mean, the reality is that the Reagan administration appointed
Speaker 1: people to be governors of the Fed who would be
Speaker 1: loyal to the Reagan Treasury and not to Volca, and
Speaker 1: so Volca was outvoted by his own committee on interest
Speaker 1: rates once and on regulation at least twice. So you know,
Speaker 1: the Central Bank was a long way from being independent.
Speaker 1: So in retrospect, and just to play devil's advocate a
Speaker 1: bit here, is it odd that we have people who
Speaker 1: wield incredible power through monetary policy who don't really have
Speaker 1: a democratic mandate, like no one voted them into office, um,
Speaker 1: and we don't have a sort of checks and balances
Speaker 1: system like we do for the rest of US politics,
Speaker 1: at least on them. Is that odd in a transpect? Well,
Speaker 1: I think the way to avoid it being owed is
Speaker 1: for the democratically accountable elected leaders to come to a
Speaker 1: sort of settled understanding of what central banks are supposed
Speaker 1: to do, so that the goal is set democratically, but
Speaker 1: then the means of achieving that goal left to the technocrats.
Speaker 1: To figure out. All right, let's so let's move it.
Speaker 1: Let's move it forward a little bit, because I remember,
Speaker 1: obviously and then as I was saying, people called, you know,
Speaker 1: Greenspan was the maestro and the one behind the great economy,
Speaker 1: and the entire world hung on his every word. Uh.
Speaker 1: And now thinking about the kind of attacks that say,
Speaker 1: Jenny Yellen comes under, or Ben Berneggi came under during
Speaker 1: at least the post crisis era, you know, two thousand
Speaker 1: and eight on, it's just hard to imagine any central
Speaker 1: banker ever again having the being held in as high
Speaker 1: esteem as Greenspan was, even if even if the economy
Speaker 1: were doing well. Do you think, uh, we'll ever get
Speaker 1: that back. Well, I think that the inflation targeting consensus,
Speaker 1: which as I said, underpinned central bank independence um, is
Speaker 1: itself coming under attack. I mean, these days there's all
Speaker 1: this argument about whether negative interest rates are productive or
Speaker 1: kind of productive. There's some debate as to whether, you know,
Speaker 1: you should switch from an inflation target to a normal
Speaker 1: GDP target, Should there maybe even be targeting of asset
Speaker 1: prices at least, as you know, an additional thing to
Speaker 1: keep an eye on. All these debates mean that the
Speaker 1: goal of central bank because it is less clearly defined,
Speaker 1: and then for politicians are inevitably going to run away in.
Speaker 1: That's exactly what's happened in the last month. For those
Speaker 1: of our listeners who have followed the UK debate around
Speaker 1: the central bank. Mark Kearney, the governor of the Bank
Speaker 1: of England, was under a lot of political pressure because
Speaker 1: the Prime Minister, to reason May had made a comment
Speaker 1: on qualitative easing and said well, QUEI has bad distributional
Speaker 1: consequences that we should be mindful of. That was interpreted,
Speaker 1: of course as being an attack on the QUEI pursued
Speaker 1: by the Bank of England. It wouldn't have happened if
Speaker 1: there had been no experimental tools in the first place.
Speaker 1: Once you get into this you know, dangerous and sort
Speaker 1: of difficult and disputed arena of new tools, you're band
Speaker 1: to get politicians waiting in. I mean this gets back
Speaker 1: to the point that I was sort of trying to
Speaker 1: make earlier, which is how do we hold central bankers
Speaker 1: and other types of technocrats into account or to account
Speaker 1: like when they introduce new monetary policy tools, things like
Speaker 1: quantitative easing, how do we judge the success of those
Speaker 1: tools and judge the success of the people who are
Speaker 1: implementing them. I think in an ideal world, the politicians
Speaker 1: need to set the objectives and let the central bankers
Speaker 1: decide the tools. And so quantitative easing is a tool,
Speaker 1: not an objective, and so politicians ought to bite their
Speaker 1: tongues and not speak out about quantitative easing. Now that's
Speaker 1: easy for me to say and harder for a political
Speaker 1: culture to deliver. But I think, you know, we've gone
Speaker 1: through a bit of a learning experience actually in Britain
Speaker 1: just recently with the Prime Minister sort of regretting that
Speaker 1: she spoke out about quantitative easing, and um, I suspect
Speaker 1: that we'll find the same in other societies. There's a
Speaker 1: reason why politicians decided to give central banks um some independence,
Speaker 1: because the credibility of the central bank is actually good
Speaker 1: for the elected government and makes the economy work better,
Speaker 1: and it makes the politicians look better and more likely
Speaker 1: to be reelected. So UM, I think this is a
Speaker 1: lesson that has to be relearned from time of time. UM.
Speaker 1: But the basic contours of the bugging politicians just set
Speaker 1: the goal and if the goal is you know, stable
Speaker 1: inflation or it could be stable nominal GDP growth. That's
Speaker 1: I think a legitimate political debate. But then when you've
Speaker 1: had that debate, whether you use negative interest rates or
Speaker 1: quaditative easing, or the purchase of assets other than government bonds,
Speaker 1: that should be up to the central bank. We have
Speaker 1: to take a quick break for a word from our sponsor.
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Speaker 1: with Sebastian mail Be. He's the author of a new
Speaker 1: book about Alan Greenspan, and we're talking about the role
Speaker 1: of experts in a modern public life and the sort
Speaker 1: of decline of prestige of the central banker. Prior to
Speaker 1: the break, you were talking about, how is the FED
Speaker 1: has undertaken new endeavors. Naturally, it invites some sort of
Speaker 1: a degree of political involvement that wasn't there before when
Speaker 1: it was just as simple as targeting inflation um. But
Speaker 1: it feels like something that this my probem there is
Speaker 1: it feels like this is a story that goes beyond
Speaker 1: central banking. So this is a clear example. The decline
Speaker 1: and prestige of the central banker is obvious, but it's
Speaker 1: being echoed elsewhere. And whether we see it in the
Speaker 1: media whose prestige is down, or politicians in general. Um,
Speaker 1: is there a sort of grand, unified explanation for why
Speaker 1: experts in any field, even beyond central banking, are just
Speaker 1: not taking as seriously as maybe they were twenty years ago.
Speaker 1: I think there's a basic rule which is that when
Speaker 1: experts appear to be delivering results, then you're happy to
Speaker 1: trust them, and when life does not seem to be improving,
Speaker 1: then you get mad at the experts and you say,
Speaker 1: wait a second, who elected those guys? UM? And I
Speaker 1: think that has happened, you know, across more areas than
Speaker 1: just central banking. And so the sense of stagnating middle
Speaker 1: class living standards UM and an uncertain future means that
Speaker 1: people are more skeptical about, for example, technological advance in
Speaker 1: the nineties. As I recall those years, UM, people had
Speaker 1: nothing but good things to say about Silicon Valley, personal computers,
Speaker 1: you know, fiber optic cable and so forth. Now, if
Speaker 1: you look at books about technology coming out. They're more
Speaker 1: to be about artificial intelligence gobbling up to a job.
Speaker 1: The negative side of the fruits of expertise is emphasized
Speaker 1: when people just feel insecure. One other factor that I
Speaker 1: think a lot about and that I think it's kind
Speaker 1: of relevant here, is just sort of the changing nature
Speaker 1: of media and the sort of horizontal peer to peer
Speaker 1: media social media, and the role that that has in
Speaker 1: sort of breaking down traditional hierarchical ways of conveying in form.
Speaker 1: We did a whole podcast about this. We did a
Speaker 1: whole podcast, and I'm thinking back to like in the nineties.
Speaker 1: I remember the one place that I saw criticism of
Speaker 1: Greenspan regularly was not on CNBC or Bloomberg and not
Speaker 1: on uh in the Wall Street Journal, but on stock
Speaker 1: message boards, uh like the Raging Bull message board, and
Speaker 1: people would rage at him when the stock market went
Speaker 1: down or whatever that they were unhappy. And now, of
Speaker 1: course that's the norm. I mean, we're all on sort
Speaker 1: of like a permanent message board. And I wonder to
Speaker 1: what extent that has something to do with it that
Speaker 1: there's just an infinite number of sources and people can
Speaker 1: construct their own realities or at least their own narratives
Speaker 1: to describe reality, and that the people that we held
Speaker 1: up as experts in the media prior to this era,
Speaker 1: they just don't have the institutional support that maybe they
Speaker 1: had before. Yeah, I mean, jo, I think that's a
Speaker 1: very smart point, and I've thought about it slightly in
Speaker 1: the context of um presidential politics in the past. It
Speaker 1: seems to me that in the roughly speaking, the first
Speaker 1: sort of seventy five or so years of the twentieth century,
Speaker 1: technology tended to build up the power of the presidency.
Speaker 1: You know, you had radio, which allowed FDR to do
Speaker 1: his fist side chats. You had television that was exploited
Speaker 1: to great effect by John F. Kennedy and his successes.
Speaker 1: But then, all of a sudden, in the second term
Speaker 1: of Ronald Reagan, he was the first president ever to
Speaker 1: request a prime time slot on TV to do an
Speaker 1: announcement and to be refused. And the reason that the
Speaker 1: network TV people refused is that they were by then
Speaker 1: competing with cable, and as cable competed, you know, there
Speaker 1: was more of a cacophony. But then, as you say,
Speaker 1: after cable came blogs, and you know, after blog comes
Speaker 1: social media, and the more you democratize the channels of communication,
Speaker 1: the more the bully pulpit of the presidency becomes the
Speaker 1: bullied pulpit. And I think the more you know, that
Speaker 1: same point can be applied more generally to experts and
Speaker 1: figures of authority overall. Well, going back to Greenspan, you
Speaker 1: write in your book that one of the reasons he
Speaker 1: enjoyed such success in Washington was the way he courted
Speaker 1: the media and maintained relationships with some prominent journalists. If
Speaker 1: you're a tech a technocrat now trying to regain the
Speaker 1: public's trust, how do you actually mount that outreach program
Speaker 1: if going to traditional media sources is no longer as
Speaker 1: powerful as it once was. I think it's incredibly difficult, Tracy.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think you know that's what we're all
Speaker 1: struggling with. And UM I was actually part of a
Speaker 1: UM start up company in London UM at the at
Speaker 1: the beginning of this year, which which put it would
Speaker 1: put together a website to sort of try to do
Speaker 1: fact checking on the Brexit referendum. And the notion was,
Speaker 1: you know, people were going to spread all kinds of
Speaker 1: fake information and we would try to correct those mistakes
Speaker 1: quickly and we did that, but the problem is, you know,
Speaker 1: people can invent their own reality. They could you know,
Speaker 1: ignore the facts, even when the facts were distributed with
Speaker 1: great energy by our team, and we used all the
Speaker 1: social media techniques that everyone else uses to distribute and
Speaker 1: make sure, you know, keep people understood what the real
Speaker 1: facts were. But you know, if somebody else is going
Speaker 1: to ignore that and persist in making stuff up, what
Speaker 1: do you do. So on that note, here's the big
Speaker 1: question for me. I guess, is this distrust and experts
Speaker 1: that we're seeing now is it a cyclical phenomenon that's
Speaker 1: going to go away at some point or has something
Speaker 1: structural happened? Um that's a permanent state, either because of
Speaker 1: new technology or because of the way the media works now. Well,
Speaker 1: I think it's a good question, precisely because there's a
Speaker 1: bit of both. The stuff that we're talking about with
Speaker 1: the media feels like a secular trend. You can never
Speaker 1: put that genie back in the bottle. On the other hand,
Speaker 1: I do think that you know, populism comes in waves.
Speaker 1: People succumbed to it, and then they elect a populist,
Speaker 1: and then the populist messes up and bad things happen,
Speaker 1: and that's what happened in Latin America, and then people
Speaker 1: learn a lesson and they actually go back to value
Speaker 1: doing experts and people who know what they're talking about. UM,
Speaker 1: So I think that bit of it is cyclical. So
Speaker 1: let's talk about the ramific, the real world ramifications of
Speaker 1: this decline in a reverence for experts. Whoever is the
Speaker 1: central bank chief now these days? Obviously right now is
Speaker 1: Janet Yell and at some point shall have a successor
Speaker 1: how much harder is their job because they don't have
Speaker 1: the level of standing and trust that someone like Ellen
Speaker 1: Greenspan had, That they have all these blogs and social
Speaker 1: media who are always going to be slamming them. What
Speaker 1: is uh, what does it turn into? How do these
Speaker 1: how does this become a practical roadblock for them to
Speaker 1: execute policy? Well? I mean, I do think that Janet
Speaker 1: Yellen faces a tougher landscape because of the cacophony of criticism,
Speaker 1: just in the nature of the cacophonists social media world.
Speaker 1: But I also think that Greenspan's model of how he
Speaker 1: ran the FED teaches some lessons that Janet Yellen could
Speaker 1: well pay attention to. For example, if you thought about
Speaker 1: the FED in the nineteen nineties, at the height of
Speaker 1: Greenspan's power, and you ask yourself the question, what proportion
Speaker 1: of sort of messages coming out of the FED are
Speaker 1: really Alan Greenspan? Like, does Alan Greenspan account for of
Speaker 1: my consciousness about what the FED thinks? Or no? The
Speaker 1: answer would have been, I mean, he dominated the institution,
Speaker 1: and he spoke for it, and when somebody else tried
Speaker 1: to speak for it, he shut them up. I mean,
Speaker 1: he was pretty ruthless about controlling other members of the
Speaker 1: Federal Open Market Committee UM and making sure they didn't
Speaker 1: speak too much and too openly and too sort of
Speaker 1: interestingly to the media. Janet Yell, on the other hand,
Speaker 1: has a kind of more democratic approach. She lets her
Speaker 1: colleagues say what they want, and the result is we just,
Speaker 1: you know, we have no ideas. Particularly, I don't think,
Speaker 1: you know. I mean, well, I would say that Janet
Speaker 1: Yellen's voice is less than fifty of what we're hearing
Speaker 1: from the FED today, And I think that's a mistake.
Speaker 1: I think, particularly because the social media landscape is cacophonists.
Speaker 1: An institution night the FED needs to speak with one
Speaker 1: powerful voice, otherwise it will just get ignored. That's really fascinating.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think there's this uh so much love
Speaker 1: for transparency and openness and so forth. But it feels
Speaker 1: like maybe we're coming to the end of that, and
Speaker 1: maybe people will realize that you can have too much
Speaker 1: of a good thing, or that we haven't really seen
Speaker 1: many tangible benefits from people always speaking and everybody having
Speaker 1: their dot and everyone having their even their own economic outlook.
Speaker 1: I think it does feel as though people are wondering
Speaker 1: what we've really got from all that. I mean, I
Speaker 1: am grew up in Britain, as you can tell from
Speaker 1: my voice, but I spent eighteen years in Washington, d C.
Speaker 1: And while I was there for a long time working
Speaker 1: as a journalist, I is to love teasing my my
Speaker 1: friends by saying that the U. S. Constitution was a
Speaker 1: very good idea in the eighteenth century when you were
Speaker 1: revolting against absolutist monarchy, right, um, But it was quite
Speaker 1: a bad idea in the twenty one century when there
Speaker 1: were checks and balances everywhere, and you know, the media
Speaker 1: was attacking you and you had you know, emptying think
Speaker 1: tanks and lobbies second guessing everything you did, and that
Speaker 1: actually you needed to unify power in government more and
Speaker 1: divide it and check it less, because the nature of
Speaker 1: society has become more pluralistic. And I think the same
Speaker 1: thing applies to experts, to central bankers and so forth.
Speaker 1: The more that the world out there becomes a sea
Speaker 1: of argument, the more in order to break through you
Speaker 1: need to have one powerful message. That's a great that
Speaker 1: is a I think that is a perfect point to
Speaker 1: end it on, and that is something really fascinating to
Speaker 1: think about, and I think that is a a compelling
Speaker 1: and interesting argument Sebastian to be thank you very much
Speaker 1: for joining us this week on the podcast. Thank you Tracy,
Speaker 1: and thank you Joe. So Joe, uh, welcome back? Was that?
Speaker 1: Was that a good welcome back episode for you? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I really like that one because I you know, obviously
Speaker 1: we've talked on this episode on this show Prime multiple
Speaker 1: times about this idea of the decline of the expert
Speaker 1: and the decline of expertise and the way the Internet
Speaker 1: changes the way we get information. But I like the
Speaker 1: concrete application of it here that is not theoretical that
Speaker 1: you can look at the central banker now and you
Speaker 1: can look at who was running the Fed twenty years
Speaker 1: ago and see pretty clear differences in how they're seen
Speaker 1: in the world. That, Um, you know, it's a nice,
Speaker 1: crisp example of what we've been talking about. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: a prism through which to view it. One of the
Speaker 1: things that struck me was just Sebastian's last comment about
Speaker 1: the idea of having more of a unified voice coming
Speaker 1: out of not just the FED, but out of UM
Speaker 1: politics in general. At a time when opinions are quite disparate,
Speaker 1: just having a sort of strong voice to unify them. Um,
Speaker 1: that's an interesting idea. Yeah, I think it's probably controversial,
Speaker 1: but there's the logic that to it that, you know,
Speaker 1: at a time when there's so much and everybody has
Speaker 1: an opinion, everyone can broadcast it, that perhaps the only
Speaker 1: way to break through is to be really disciplined and
Speaker 1: have one viewpoint. The other thing that just strikes me
Speaker 1: and I just the degree to which we were people
Speaker 1: revered Alan Greenspan at the time. I don't think unless
Speaker 1: you're paying attention, I just think it's it's so unimaginable
Speaker 1: now I just can't. I mean, maybe one day there'll
Speaker 1: be enough shifts and we'll have new institution and there
Speaker 1: will be someone that could achieve that. But it's really
Speaker 1: hard for me to imagine us ever having that. Again,
Speaker 1: the idea of a singular figure that everyone in the
Speaker 1: media just accepts is a genius and that we owe
Speaker 1: so much of our wealth and prosperity to this one person,
Speaker 1: I can't even fathom it. Well, this gets back to
Speaker 1: the cyclical versus structural question, right, like, are we just
Speaker 1: in a big populist upswing or are we experiencing, um
Speaker 1: something more significant that's going to be with us for
Speaker 1: a while. I feel like we might shift back towards
Speaker 1: the experts and the technocrats and the politicians at some point.
Speaker 1: But but I agree with you, I don't think it's
Speaker 1: ever ever going to be quite the same. We didn't
Speaker 1: even get into this so much, but Alan Greenspan, you know,
Speaker 1: experienced his own spectacular fall from grace in the form
Speaker 1: of the financial crisis um, which was pretty illustrative of
Speaker 1: the pitfalls of being revered as an expert. No, that's
Speaker 1: totally true, and you know, may be we will one
Speaker 1: day go through another phase where the role of experts
Speaker 1: is uh built up again, but it might be a
Speaker 1: really long time, Like it might be decades before that happened,
Speaker 1: because these swings don't just happen overnight. And you know,
Speaker 1: we might still be at the early years. We might
Speaker 1: look back at the yen to say, oh wow, we
Speaker 1: really respected experts a lot more back then. Like you know,
Speaker 1: maybe in twenty years. I mean, you never know, like
Speaker 1: we we don't know where we are in the pendulum.
Speaker 1: So maybe it'll swing back, but maybe it's still swinging
Speaker 1: in this current direction for ways to go. Yeah, all right, um,
Speaker 1: shall we leave it there? That sounds great and uh,
Speaker 1: it's great to be back. Excellent. Okay. I'm Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 1: You can follow me on Twitter at Tracy Alloway and
Speaker 1: I'm Joe wi Isn't Thought. You can follow me on
Speaker 1: Twitter at the Stalwart. And you can follow Sebastian Mallaby
Speaker 1: on Twitter. He is at sc Malaby. Thanks for listening.
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