"China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin." — Ken Rogoff

Kenneth Rogoff

Ken, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. In your book, you have a lot of anecdotes about meeting different Chinese leaders, especially when you were chief economist at the IMF. It seems like you had positive experiences: they would listen, and you met the premier with your family, and he would listen to your advice.

How does that inform your view of how competent their leadership is? And how do you think they got into this mess, with their big stimulus or whatever else you think went wrong? To the extent that, when you were talking to them in the early 2000s, it seemed like you were seeing eye to eye, or that they would understand your perspective, do you think something changed in the meantime?

Thanks so much for having me, and welcome to Harvard, which is where we’re filming this. First, I want to be careful to say that they listen to everybody. The Chinese are way better than we are at hearing 100 different views. Mine would be one of many that they heard.

I was very impressed by the competence of the Chinese leaders. I actually gave a lecture at the Party’s training school, where, if you’re a mayor, a provincial governor, or any bureaucrat on your way up, you go to this thing, which for them is like Harvard Business School. They really looked for competence. Of course, there were various loyalty things.

But when you met the leaders—and I met a lot of them when I was at the school—they actually asked really raw questions, too. They said things I couldn’t believe they were asking. And I was told that within the school, you’re allowed to say anything. So they had that system for a long time.

When you met Chinese technocrats—or even the mayor of Shanghai—they were impressive. I’m not saying ours aren’t, but it’s a mix. I think you know that. I think Xi Jinping has really changed that. He’s been president since 2013, and over time he’s pushed out that system and moved more toward loyalists, people who are less technocratic.

Probably the most important talk I ever gave in China was at what’s called the China Development Forum in 2016. It’s this giant hall that had most of the top leaders in the Party. A lot of the elite of the tech world, Mark Zuckerberg and many others, were there.

I said, “Okay, I’m looking at your housing. I’m looking at your infrastructure. It looks to me like you’re going into a classical housing-crisis problem. Your catch-up is over. Your demographics don’t look good.” I gave a list of things. “And by the way, it looks like power is becoming very centralized in the economy.”

And I said, “I’m a Western economist. You’re doing an amazing job. What do I know? But I don’t think that would be good for growth.” After I gave the talk—I just figured you only live once, so you have to say what you have to say—a couple of top leaders came up to me and said, “Professor Rogoff, we very much appreciated your remarks.”

I was thinking, “Oh no, they’re going to put me in jail or something at the end of this.” I’m less impressed by them now, and I’m worried. Let’s say they get into a crisis—which I think they’re in now. I think they’re still in a deep crisis—or somehow hotter heads prevail between the United States and China, and we get into some kind of entanglement nobody wants.

I worry that we’re not as competent. I’m speaking about right now. We have some very good people, but the average quality at the very top, I think, has gone down. And China’s not as competent either. That’s a recipe for having bad things happen.

On that talk, you mentioned in the book that, before, you had to clear your talk. So you gave them a sort of watered-down version of what you were going to say. I have to say, it would take some gusto to go up to the top Party leaders. Were you nervous while you were giving the talk, saying, “Oh, it’s too centralized”?

Kenneth Rogoff

I mean, I was pretty experienced by that time. I frankly never used notes, so the idea that I was going to read my speech didn’t even occur to me. Maybe it was a little bit spontaneous.

But I certainly felt at that moment, “What am I here for? What’s the point of coming to this? Why don’t I talk about the elephant in the room?” Everybody knows this. I don’t know if everybody knew it, but it was clear to me, and I’m going to say it.

I think a lot of people in that situation—even though they should, or the logic makes sense—often don’t. Yeah, I’m a professor, so people who had a big tech company or a finance company, or all these other businesses, most of them can’t afford to do that.

I think they know that when they invite a professor, they can stop you from going again. They invited me again, by the way, although the second time I just talked to a tiny room instead of the big hall. But I give credit to the Chinese for listening.

You’ve said that the seeds of their current crisis were sown in 2010 with their big stimulus. Is it wrong, then, to blame Xi Jinping for this? That was before his time. It was Hu Jintao’s government that launched the stimulus that’s causing all these problems now.

Kenneth Rogoff

Hu Jintao did it, but they kept it going. The local-government debt—that was an innovation put in with the 2010 stimulus. But they kind of left it running and used it as a stimulus program.

This is a long tangent, but the local governments don’t have enough ways to fund themselves. So they were allowed to sell land to start and fund these construction companies, get revenue, and sustain themselves. They let that keep going.

When Xi Jinping came in, I was told he was going to be Ronald Reagan. I had very good contacts in the intellectual sphere in China: someone who had worked for me when I was chief economist at the IMF, and other people I knew whom I really trust. They’re really smart and well-connected, and I don’t want to say their names.

But they were telling me, “He’s going to change everything. This is really the time we’re going to liberalize our markets a bit. We’re going to do the things we haven’t done.” And he didn’t do that much.

If you look at China’s growth, it actually slowed down quite a bit when he came into power. There are different ways to measure a country’s output because China produces completely different stuff than we do. They use their currency, and we use ours. Nothing’s perfect.

But one way to do it is this: What do they report their output to be in Chinese currency? What do we report ours to be in dollars? Then we use the exchange rate to compare. We can look at growth that way, and if you do that for China, it’s been spectacular. It’s been very, very good. It’s obvious they’re pulling it out of thin air.

But there are approaches that try to control for how you’d really compare how an ordinary person lives or how an ordinary firm gets by. When you look at those measures, China’s growth is quite a bit less.

If you go from 1980 to 2012, the official growth rate is almost 10 percent. This purchasing-power-parity rate—forgive me for using those words—is just over 7 percent. If you look at more recent years, it’s really slowed down a lot. Even the official numbers have slowed down.

I don’t know the number off the top of my head, but it’s 6 or 7 percent for Xi Jinping, and maybe only 3.5 percent. They’re starting from a very low base. Things were going to slow down. It’s not all his fault.

But I think he’s been reluctant to take risks, and I think it’s gotten us to where we are. I think they’re in a lot of trouble. They’re overbuilt in infrastructure. They’re overbuilt in housing. Have you been to China?

I was there six months ago.

Kenneth Rogoff

Where did you go?

Shanghai, Beijing, Chongqing, Chengdu, Hangzhou, and Emeishan.

Kenneth Rogoff

So you saw a few of the medium-sized cities. At least one of them, I think, is the new tech center. I can’t pronounce it.

Hangzhou?

Kenneth Rogoff

Yeah, it’s a big tech center. Some of the smaller cities don’t feel like the big cities. And 60 percent of Chinese income is from what they call their tier-three cities.

I grew up in Rochester. That’s like a tier-three city in the United States. But you could pick Cincinnati, Liverpool, or Rouen—I may not be saying it right—in France as an example of a tier-three city.

And they have invested like crazy. I’ve been to a few, and I’ve studied the data on it a lot. They have amazing roads, amazing real estate, and amazing housing. But there’s a feel of death in those cities.

They were very good at building stuff. The Soviet Union was very good at building cement factories and steel plants and railroads. But they’ve run their course.

They have other stuff: green energy, AI, and electric vehicles. But, believe it or not, that stuff’s still tiny compared to infrastructure and real estate. Real estate’s a third of the economy by some measures. So I think they’re in a lot of trouble now in China.

They let it go on too long. But again, I wasn’t running things. If things seem to be working and you try to change things, you get thrown out. It’s not easy to be in those shoes.

When I was in China, we visited a town of half a million people outside of Chengdu, so one of these tier-3 cities. Arriving there, the train station is huge. Compounds are huge. Even when you’re driving around, a movie theater is this humongous complex. I realized things were bigger in China.

I was used to that because I’d seen these other cities by that point. But I just thought, I’ve seen cities of half a million people. I live in a city of half a million people in San Francisco. This just doesn’t seem proportionate to the size of the population.

Then we visited a Buddhist temple that had been built recently as a tourist site. It was ginormous. You would go through one little shrine, and then behind it would be an even bigger structure, and then another one concentrically for like 8 turns. It would take you probably 10 minutes to drive through this thing. There was just nobody there. It was like me and 3 other white people.

Kenneth Rogoff

It’s very much that feeling. And the young people don’t want to live there. I have a lot of young people here as students, and I run into people. They don’t want to live in these towns, and the jobs aren’t there. I can’t criticize them for trying that.

If you’d asked me in 2005, “Should we try to encourage people to go out to the Rochesters and the Liverpools and the Rouens in France?” I would have said yes. There’s too much in the big cities. There’s overcrowding. Look what happened to São Paulo. Look what happened to Mumbai. But I would’ve been wrong.

These forces are very powerful. So a lot of their growth, and what they call their GDP, is this stuff. So they’re having to reorient, and people just aren’t that flexible. It’s like when AI comes and puts everybody out of jobs. When construction jobs are gone, and all these indirect things are gone, it’s not that easy to move everyone.

If it hadn’t been for financial repression, and all this investment had been done through purely market mechanisms, would things have turned out much better? Even if China gets rid of all financial repression today, they save a lot. So this money has to go somewhere. Are there enough productive opportunities to soak up all these savings, or could there have been in the past? If they get rid of financial repression, is this a problem solved, or could it have been solved?

Kenneth Rogoff

What everyone’s told them forever is that their saving rate and investment rate are astounding. It was higher before, but it’s still maybe 45%. Their consumption rate is much lower; ours is pushing 70%. European countries are a little more temperate, but they’re in the low 60s. Their consumption is very low.

They have some wealthy people that you saw when you went to the marquee cities. But a lot of China is living on $200-a-month kind of incomes. You could give them money. You could let them consume instead of exporting it. They’ve been very reluctant to do that. You could do things to encourage consumption. Actually, even just changing their exchange-rate policy to allow it to appreciate more at times would make imports less expensive.

They have been very reluctant to do that. That’s what everyone tells them. That’s certainly what I said in 2016 also. The ticket to getting people to spend more is to provide more security than they have. First of all, there’s nothing like our Social Security system. You need to save for your old age.

There’s nothing like our health system. If you work at one of the big state-owned factories, they give you health care, but otherwise you’re on your own. They’re not allowed to invest abroad. It goes in waves, but they’re not allowed to put their money abroad. So they’re trying to be careful about all of that and not do things suddenly. There’s nothing to do overnight.

But fundamentally, if you’re looking at China and asking what’s wrong, it’s that the consumer isn’t spending enough. What’s happening right now is worse, because housing prices are collapsing. That’s the only thing they really let people save in. You could either save in a bank account, which gets you a crummy interest rate, or in a house. Now they’re going down, so people are cutting back.

They can dig their way out. There’s no magic bullet to make them grow at 5%. By the way, that is the official number, but I don’t think they’re anywhere near that. There’s no simple thing, but the general goal would be to try to rebalance investment and consumption.

Going back to your point about whether purchasing power parity is the right way to compare, or whether nominal is the right way to compare, I think in the book you say the nominal comparison of GDP is better because you can’t buy Patriot missiles or oil with purchasing power parity dollars.

But if we’re trying to compare the strength of the 2 countries—their relative strength, especially in a military context—if they can build ships and munitions much more cheaply, and they have to pay their soldiers less, isn’t that actually more relevant if we were trying to figure out who would win in a war? Shouldn’t we actually be looking at the fact that they have a bigger PPP economy than us as a sign that they’re actually stronger?

Kenneth Rogoff

Yeah. So in the book, I’m talking about your geopolitical power, where if you’re going to give money to somebody, what’s it worth and how much can they use it. But no, you’re absolutely right. They just crush us in shipbuilding. It’s partly because they build commercial ships, and there’s a lot of symbiosis between commercial and military. I think they’re 50% of the global shipbuilding market.

For us to build a new aircraft carrier takes years and years and incredible expense. One of the mistakes we’re making is trying to build everything ourselves. Let our allies do some of this. The Koreans are really good at building ships. That’s another place we could be importing from. You’re right about the soldiers.

They’re paid much less. They have a lot of advantages in a conflict against us. We’re way ahead in your department—tech. That is our advantage at the moment. If that were to dissipate, it would certainly hurt.

What is your projection? Right now I think their nominal GDP is 75% of America’s, or something like that.

Kenneth Rogoff

Yeah, in dollars—what we call market terms.

What’s your projection by 2030 and by 2040, the ratio?

Kenneth Rogoff

I didn’t realize it was as high as 75%. I thought it was a little lower. I was actually going to say 75% in 2030. At one point in 2024, it was around two-thirds, but it’s really volatile with the exchange rate. The dollar’s really high. When the dollar’s really high, it makes us look bigger.

I think they’ll gain about a percent a year on us, maybe. I don’t think they’re going to grow way faster than the United States.

Wait, that means you think they’ll never actually have a bigger economy than us?

Kenneth Rogoff

It’ll take a long time. We’re talking about the absolute size. They have 4 times as many people. There were these projections by Goldman Sachs and many others that we’d be like Canada is to the United States pretty soon. All these extrapolations, they were proven wrong.

That brings me to a big topic. A lot of people will look at some trend, whether it’s growth in something, AI, China—

Kenneth Rogoff

I was about to say. That’s a common trend in AI.

—and just project it into the future.

Kenneth Rogoff

Economists at least consider ourselves terrible at that. You go back and look at any of these commissions that were supposed to figure out what was going on. They happen periodically. Maybe Brookings puts one together, maybe the government does. My former colleague, the late Dick Cooper, had a whole list of these. So it is very hard to know.

But my gut instinct is that what’s happening to China is what’s happened to Japan. It’s what’s happened to Asia, what happened to the Soviet Union. We have a more dynamic economy. We’re not perfect. Maybe we’re screwing it up right now with all the tariff wars and deglobalization.

But we have this dynamism and creativity that other places—at least other large economies—just can’t replicate. They can build stuff. The French have better high-speed trains than we do.

I hope you don’t ride on the train from Boston to New York. It’s nicer than it could be, but it’s no high-speed train. You mentioned China. Oh my gosh, their high-speed trains are just incredible.

Kenneth Rogoff

They’re good at that. But the really creative stuff? I don’t want to say they don’t have any. There are some amazing Chinese companies.

But let me say that the U.S. is really good at it. We’ve kept that in our DNA. I think it’s very important to preserve it.

The 1% per year compression is actually an extremely bearish forecast. Even people who are pessimistic about China will say, “Oh, by 2040, they’ll be at 150% or 125% of U.S. nominal GDP.” They think it’ll be bigger, but only slightly bigger. The fact that you think even by 2040 they won’t have caught up is actually extremely bearish.

Kenneth Rogoff

No, I think they’re digging their way out of a crisis. Right now, we know their prices are falling. It’s not because they’re inventing stuff really fast. We know that interest rates are being pushed to zero. All these are signs that demand has been crushed and the economy’s not doing well.

Historically, they have given numbers which are accurate on average, as best as we can tell. I think that’s gotten less and less true in the Xi Jinping era.

Going back to the subject of your book, people who are trying to predict when and how China might invade or blockade Taiwan will look at satellite photos of different docks and see how many ships are there. They’ll look at military preparedness. From a monetary perspective, are there signs we could be looking for? For example, if they think a lot of their American-dominated assets will get sanctioned or they won’t have access to them, could we see them liquidating those assets? Would there be any sort of preparations that we could see on the monetary side to let us know they’re preparing for something big?

Kenneth Rogoff

I don’t think they’re going to do it suddenly. But, very crudely, on their reserves, they’re definitely moving more and more into gold. It doesn’t necessarily help to move into euros or Canadian dollars because those countries might side with us. But they’re doing what they can to diversify.

I don’t think they’ve diversified into crypto yet. I had a student do a paper on that. But who knows.

What they are doing very concretely is not just about what they’re holding. That’s the big fact everyone looks at. They officially hold $1 trillion in Treasuries. But the estimate a student of mine did, in a nice paper—and I think others agree with it—is that it’s more like $2 trillion. They hold a lot indirectly through proxies.

The other part of it is that the whole financial system runs through the United States—what we sometimes call the rails or the pipes of the system. Your bank gets a purchase, and my bank gets that I’m going to get a credit. How does that take place? How does it take place when we’re in different countries? The United States just disproportionately controls that.

That, they can’t live with. They could live without their $2 trillion for a little while. But they can’t live without being able to pay suppliers and other countries. So they’re working hard on developing their own payments mechanisms.

Russia actually did quite a bit in preparation for the invasion. We see China doing that. Maybe they’re selling Treasury bills; we don’t know exactly. I would advise that to them if I were a Chinese economist talking to them. But I don’t think it’s going to be something they’ll do suddenly.

Maybe Trump will bring down the markets and then there’s nothing to save. But they don’t want to be the ones to bring down the markets and cause a global crash.

What would the alternative rails that they’re trying to build look like? Are they buying oil from Iran in RMB? Will other countries they need things from accept that? In 2030, what is their goal?

Kenneth Rogoff

Absolutely. There are a lot of countries in Africa and Latin America—some of them are almost client states of China—that they can force. Iran, of course, sells a lot of its oil to China even when there are sanctions. They’re moving in that direction.

It’s not just about what you invoice the payment in. It’s how we acknowledge it, how we clear our books. That’s what they’re working on. It’s coming.

The Europeans are working on it too, by the way. Europe is not happy with the situation. They’re actually forming a central bank digital currency. It’s moving quite a bit faster than I thought it would. That’s actually one of the reasons they’re doing it: for international payments.

1. How the US broke Japan's economy

Let’s talk about Japan, which you also cover in the book, and their crisis. You blame U.S. pressure in advance of that crisis on the Japanese to raise the value of their currency, and the actions taken by the Bank of Japan. Zooming out, how much of the crisis was not caused by things like that, but just by the fact that high-tech manufacturing as a share of world output was becoming less important? There are demographic factors as well. So something like this was bound to happen to Japan, even if there wasn’t some big crisis that preceded it?

South Korea’s GDP per capita isn’t that high either, at least in comparison to the U.S. How much of this is due to actions taken by specific actors?

Kenneth Rogoff

South Korea had a crisis in 1983 and another in 1997. They haven’t been crisis-free, by the way. There are a lot of factors. The demographics would be the most obvious one. The rise of not just China but Korea and other competitors, too.

Japan invented a business model that a lot of countries have since duplicated. The model was export-led growth. Something people might not think about is that it creates competition. Most countries aren’t as big as the United States, and there aren’t as many different firms trying to do the same thing. Of course, we have trouble with competition here.

Famously, in Mexico at one time, there were only 2 telephone companies, 2 bread companies, and 2 TV companies. It’s very hard not to let monopolies sit and use their political power. So how do you get around that?

Japan did something that was really pretty innovative. Germany did it too, to some extent. In the export sector, you’re competing with the world, not just with domestic firms. That created innovation and creativity. Japan did really well with that.

But over time, others imitated it and started building the same things. So that’s part of it. The aging is part of it. But I think the financial crisis was a very big part of it.

What is the counterfactual? Suppose that the crisis hadn’t happened: how much wealthier is Japan today than it might have been otherwise?

Kenneth Rogoff

Oh, I think 50% wealthier per person—way wealthier. That’s where they started. It depends on which measure you use. But by market exchange rates, they were richer than the United States in the late 1980s. Even if you use the more complicated measures, they were richer than any European country—richer than Germany, France, and Italy. They’ve moved to the bottom of the rung now.

The financial crisis wasn’t the only thing. It’s a long story, but we effectively forced them to move faster to open up and deregulate than they were culturally and politically ready for. I give that as an example of something in the book where I changed my mind.

I had looked at that for a long time afterward. Going back to 2005—that’s long after the Japanese crisis—I would hear from people like Jiang Zemin, who was the president of China, whom I met: “We’re not going to let this happen to us. There’s no way.”

We were discussing how I thought maybe they shouldn’t have such a fixed exchange rate. He said, “That’s what the United States told Japan. Look what happened to Japan.”

I didn’t push back that much with someone like that. You talk to other people. But I heard that from many people. I used to think, how can that be? There’s this thing called the Plaza Accord in September 1985, where we pushed them to make their exchange rate more free.

But I used to say, “You did that in 1985.” Carmen Reinhart, my co-author on many things, and I date the crisis to 1992. That’s 7 years later. I continued to think that, but over the years, particularly recently, I’ve started to think I was wrong.

These things unfold slowly. Crises don’t happen overnight. Japan deregulated and it worked. But they didn’t know what they were doing. I think it was a huge mistake for Japan to agree.

I actually heard from someone who attended the 10th anniversary of the Plaza Accord, held in Tokyo. The person who had been head of the Bank of Japan in 1985 gave a speech to officials. He went like this and apologized, very symbolically: “I have ruined our country. I did this. I take responsibility.” He told me that, too, when he read my book.

Financial repression is bad. But financial liberalization needs to be done gradually. If you do it too quickly, you get a crisis. Many crises are caused by that.

As somebody who obviously doesn’t know the details, at a high level, how would you explain it to a novice? How could a country be 50% less wealthy than it otherwise might have been, simply from a financial crisis? Whatever they could’ve otherwise produced, why can they still not produce it? A country’s producing a bunch of things.

Why are they producing 50% less just because of a financial crisis a couple of decades ago?

Kenneth Rogoff

Their case is very unusual, although having a number like 10% or 20% is very typical. In fact, one of my professors at MIT was teaching us about the Great Depression. He said, “Here’s how to think about it: We were growing like this, then we get here and we go like this, and then we’re going like this. We never got this back.”

There are a lot of economic models with Solow catch-up.

Kenneth Rogoff

Yes, but what happened with a financial crisis—particularly in Japan—is that it blew up their business model. For example, maybe China wouldn’t have overtaken them so quickly if they’d been able to borrow more freely, if their financial markets were working better, and if they had been more adroit. Their consumption collapsed. Japan didn’t quite know how to deal with that.

We in the U.S. were much more brutal in what we allowed to happen than Japan, but we got out of it pretty quickly. I’m not sure we got back to where we were, but we got out of it very quickly. Japan has a very consensus-driven society. They don’t want anyone to be in bad shape, and their struggle with this held them back for a long time.

Maybe 50% is too high, and I should say 25% or 30%, but they would be in a lot better shape than they have been.

Just to put it into context, what do you think the counterfactual wealth of America looks like today without 2008?

Kenneth Rogoff

Boy, that’s a good question. I’m hesitant because I probably have some paper giving a number for that, and I might say the wrong thing. We certainly cumulatively lost a lot. It led to this political crisis that caused us to lose a lot more. I don’t know—probably 15% lower.

It’s a lot lower than it would be. We had this dynamic, which we’re living in right now. It’s still an echo of that financial crisis. Now, mind you, you’re asking about our national income. Inequality matters, and would we have done other things?

In some ways, the 2008–2009 crisis was a condemnation of the system, and people could see it. Maybe it led to some healthy cleansing, but I think it led to a lot more damage than healthy cleansing.

I think this updates me toward the view that financial crises are even worse than I think. It isn’t just this bad thing that happens and you recover. If there’s 15% lingering even after almost 20 years, then wow, that’s huge.

You’re losing a lot of cumulative growth. Look at Greece today or Portugal. You kind of get back to where you’re having a positive growth rate, but you’re not picking up.

Kenneth Rogoff

They’re very different from a normal recession. Actually, in a normal recession, you go down and then back up. The United States had thought it was immune to financial crises. We really hadn’t had one since 1933.

We had a different book that came out in 2009. I mostly write papers, but this was a book with Carmen Reinhart. It was called This Time Is Different. We had some papers published in advance. We said, “No, they’re different when you have a financial crisis. It lasts way longer. The slowdown is way worse.”

And we were mocked when we were saying that. I think The New York Times had a 2-page spread saying how ridiculous everyone thought this was. We could have been proven wrong, and maybe if we’d done things better, we would have. But it is the norm.

There are a few exceptions, like Sweden, which got out in a year or 2. But normally, they really are different from a normal recession.

2. America's inflation crisis is coming

You say in the book that you expect there to be another spike in inflation within the next decade, and also that the fiscal position of the United States doesn’t seem sustainable. If you go forward 10 or 20 years, when we do hit this, when the piper comes calling, what actually happens?

Is it going to be some acute crisis, like what happened in Greece? Or are we going to have some kind of Lost Decade like Japan? What will happen?

Kenneth Rogoff

Typically, you have a crisis of some sort when your debt is high and your political system is inflexible. We’ve checked those boxes. Then you get hit by a shock you weren’t ready for. You get caught on your back foot. It depends on what the shock is and how we react.

The way Japan reacted was through what we call financial repression: basically stuffing debt into every insurance company, pension fund, and bank. The central bank holds almost 100% of GDP in debt. We think we have a lot—I don’t actually know the number off the top of my head for the Fed, but I want to say around $7 trillion. Japan would have the equivalent of $30 trillion.

So they’ve done this. It’s not the only reason they haven’t grown, not by any means, but it’s not good for growth. That’s one option.

I think for the United States, that’s tough. We’re just a very market-driven system. If our financial system had that kind of pressure put on it, it would be worse than when Japan did it. And a lot of people lend to us. We can’t do that to them. We can’t force French insurance companies to hold U.S. debt. We can only force U.S. ones.

So I think the most likely thing will be inflation, which only lets off steam. Well, it’s like a default. And I’m not talking about hyperinflation. I’m talking about 10–20% inflation over a period. We just went through that. That actually knocked about 10% of GDP off our debt. We might need more next time.

So it lets some steam off, but if you’re still spending too much and you haven’t fixed anything, you’re back in the problem. That’s what’s going on now. We had some steam let off, but it wasn’t enough.

I think when it happens again, markets will be very unforgiving about it. They’ll look at us and say, “You are not to be trusted.” So it’ll raise the interest rate more, and our debt will build up faster.

I think at that point, there’s this saying about Americans attributed to Winston Churchill: We always do the right thing after we try everything else. I suspect we’ll try other things.

Just for the audience, there are 4 ways we could get out of the debt. We could default, which you don’t think is likely.

Kenneth Rogoff

But really good for my book.

Already, you timed this one so well. I’ll be shorting the market when your next one comes out. Financial repression. I guess you could actually cut the deficit. Or inflation. You’re saying if there’s another round of inflation, then after that—

Kenneth Rogoff

What everyone calls austerity. By the way, this word “austerity” that progressives use whenever you ignore debt building up and spend whatever you want—“austerity” is when you don’t do that.

I think Ezra Klein’s book Abundance actually makes the point that there are costs and benefits to a lot of things. This “austerity” language pretends there are no costs to having your debt be higher and only benefits.

So yes, that’s what everyone else has to do. We’ve gone longer than most without doing it.

If it’s going to be a financial crisis, and financial crises are this bad—

Kenneth Rogoff

Inflation crisis. A financial crisis is the private sector, and the public sector bails out the private sector. So, the government—we’re not going to default. We’re going to inflate, or do financial repression, or baby-steps austerity, or something. We’re not going to have a crisis like Greece had. That’s just wrong. But inflation’s not pleasant.

Why wouldn’t we?

Kenneth Rogoff

Because we can print money. We can honor our debts. We just never have to default. Greece was using the euro and didn’t have control. Japan was using its own currency, and it didn’t default. They had a financial crisis, not a debt crisis. They never defaulted on their government debt in that period.

I’m not sure if they ever did. I’m sorry—they did in World War II. Of course, Japan defaulted on its government debt in World War II. That’s an interesting story. But it was a financial crisis they had.

A financial crisis is what’s making your banking system not work, lending to innovators not work, and lending to dynamic companies not work. Ben Bernanke wrote a thought piece about this at the time. He didn’t really have numbers. He conjectured that that was why the Great Depression was so bad.

When Milton Friedman, one of the great economists of all time, looked at the Great Depression, he said, “You didn’t print enough money. You tightened the money supply too much.” And Ben came along 25 years later. He was a classmate of mine in graduate school. I had the office next to him at Princeton.

He came along and wrote this amazing paper. Again, it was just a thought piece, which is not a typical economics paper. He said, “If it was just that you didn’t print enough money, eventually wages and prices would adjust. Maybe it wouldn’t happen in a year, maybe it wouldn’t happen in 2 years, but the Depression took 10 years.”

How can that be? He made this conjecture. There’s been a lot of subsequent work showing it. Again, there’s a lot of debate about this, so let me be careful.

But I certainly view the weight of the evidence as saying financial crises are really bad, which has led us to the situation in the United States where we’ve gotten a little happy-go-lucky about bailing everyone out. I would describe Treasury and Federal Reserve policy today as, “When in doubt, bail it out.” That’s because they saw what happened. But as the financial sector grows, that will lead to a problem someday. It did, of course, in the Silicon Valley Bank case. It continues to have echoes of that. But I think an inflation crisis is more likely than a financial crisis, although these things are very hard to predict.

You say in the book that we didn’t outgrow our World War II debt. What happened instead was that financial repression after the war, and then the inflation of the 1970s, made our debt-to-GDP ratio fall. It should have been 70-something, but it ended up around 20-something instead.

Of course, we just had inflation recently. Do you think there’s some irrationality in the market for U.S. government debt already, given that we can forecast what’s going to happen here? They can read your book and see that inflation’s going to go up. They can look through history at what’s happened. Do you think there’s some irrationality in terms of what people are doing?

Kenneth Rogoff

I think, number one, they have too much faith in the independence of the Federal Reserve. The Fed’s been this amazing institution that’s evolved. It’s been the guardian of low inflation. We can argue about whether it’s the right inflation rate or not.

The Federal Reserve insists it’s very independent. The Supreme Court recently ruled that Trump couldn’t fire Powell, the head of the Fed. But I think they’re dreaming. There are so many ways Congress and the president could override the Fed, especially if they declare some kind of wartime or “war-on-pandemic” situation.

Though I wonder, from the politician’s perspective, maybe the independence of the Fed gives them a convenient way to pass the buck that they’re actually happy about. They can say, “Ah, I’d love to do this irresponsible thing, but I can’t because of the Fed. It’s out of my hands.”

Kenneth Rogoff

That’s for sure. That’s why Trump bashes the Fed. It’s not the only reason he does it. I think he actually disagrees with them. But he feels that bashing the Fed, if there’s a recession—which there might be—gives him someone to blame for not lowering interest rates.

It depends if we run into a world where interest rates start creeping up. Right now, the 10-year rate is around 4.5%. That’s the nominal rate. The inflation-indexed one is a little over 2%.

The 30-year rate is around 5%. I think those are going to drift up. And that makes mortgage rates go up, student loans go up, car loans go up, and business loans go up. It’s painful. The question is, at what point does that pain become real?

Kenneth Rogoff

As I mentioned, this would be catalyzed if we’re hit by a shock, where you can somewhat take back independence temporarily from the Fed. I think it’s easier to do than people think. Given that I think shocks are going to happen—maybe AGI brings a shock we don’t yet imagine—people trust in Fed independence too much.

Now, I love Fed independence. I actually wrote the first paper on why you should have an independent central bank, back when there were virtually no independent central banks. I was a pawn at the Federal Reserve. I’m talking my own book when I say it’s a great idea. I don’t mean my “book” book; I mean my human capital.

I like to say that the Federal Reserve fights for its independence every day. I hear senators say, “They’re idiots.” I hear people in Silicon Valley say, “They’re idiots. We should bring them under the Treasury.” I used to hear that just from progressives. But now I’ve heard that recently from some tech titans: “Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary, he’s smarter than Powell. Why don’t we let him run things?”

They could. It does seem like the Fed works really well as it exists now. It’s independent. Sure, there are people who criticize its actions, as you say. But on the whole, it seems like a reliable institution that makes smart calls. They can be wrong, of course, but it seems so much more competent than much of the rest of government.

If you wanted to replicate how the Fed works—if you wanted other parts of government to work that way—is there something we could do? Or is it more of a human capital problem than an independence problem? Bankers and economists are really smart. I don’t know if you could replicate that in the Department of Education or the Department of Agriculture.

Kenneth Rogoff

One of the things the Fed has is this simple barometer that everybody sees. They don’t really see it, but they have a feeling. They see gasoline prices; that’s probably how they decide what inflation is. But they have this simple barometer.

Mind you, particularly in recent years, progressives have wanted the Fed to solve inequality, social justice, and the environment. But they have one barometer that they kind of control over the long run—not in the short run, but over the long run. So that makes it a little easier to say, “You wanted us to have low inflation.”

Whereas so many other things the government does might be making everybody better off, but they’re making some people better off. Maybe some people aren’t better off at all. It suddenly becomes very political. Nobody elected the Fed, so it’s harder to make those decisions.

I’m obviously a technocrat, or I side with technocrats. My students are technocrats. I think way more things should be like that.

But if you wanted to do that, suppose you get called by the Pentagon tomorrow and they say, “We want to run the Pentagon like the Fed.” What do you tell them to do?

Kenneth Rogoff

I was going to say, the Pentagon? I’m not speaking about the current Pentagon, but just up till now. I haven’t looked closely, but it’s been run pretty darn well. The military’s pretty efficient. There are people who tell me, “Okay, Elon Musk can take a payload into space at 1/15 of what NASA does. Why don’t we let Elon Musk run the Pentagon?” There may be something to that.

I think, to some extent—and maybe I’m defending them too much—but you never know where the next blow is going to come from. It always looks like a lot of the stuff you’ve built up is wasted. But your enemy is looking at what you have. Where are you weak? Where are you strong? So I wouldn’t have picked the Pentagon as the obvious thing.

But let’s say crypto regulation. That would be a good example. Why don’t we have something more independent there? Instead, as you well know, it’s been overrun by politics. In fact, there’s this huge thing going on right now. I don’t know how it’s going to play out.

The Fed has been protected, though not as much as you’d think. But Trump got to the Supreme Court and was told he can fire the head of any agency. I assume, by inference, he can also fire anybody at any agency. I think that’s a terrible mistake.

We need to have independent agencies. You have an evaluation process. They answer to Congress. If they go off in the wrong direction, you try to fix it. But to just have everything switch every 4 years? That’s really very worrisome.

Before Trump—maybe for intrinsic reasons, maybe because of norms—it was really hard to fire people anyway. That didn’t produce remarkable competence across the government.

Let me try to consolidate some of the things you mentioned. Maybe it’s really important to structure more of the government like that. If you’re running a department, you have just one target, like the Fed’s 2% inflation target. That’s all you have to do. Don’t worry about anything else.

I do think it’s impressive that the Fed has avoided mission creep. It seems like every institution in the world falls into mission creep—companies, government departments…

Kenneth Rogoff

Oh, they haven’t avoided it. They’ve been under incredible pressures. Obviously, things have changed. But I talk about this a bit in my book.

You go through the working papers and research coming out of the various Federal Reserve banks, and it’s all about inequality, the environment, and social justice. You’d be strained to find a paper about monetary policy during that period, because they were under pressure.

Part of being independent is bending with the wind. But they’ve managed to keep their core competency—their core function of setting monetary policy—independent.

No, it’s been amazing.

Kenneth Rogoff

But it is a constant fight. You can go to a country like Turkey. I don’t know what the inflation rate is today, but it hovered up toward 100%. And Erdoğan—the president of Turkey—would fire the head of the central bank every year. Every time they tried to raise interest rates, he’d fire them. You can find other countries like that. So we’ve been lucky, but you can’t count on that continuing.

Apart from the political-pressure problems from the outside, you mentioned watching your younger colleagues, or younger economists, writing working papers at the Fed about these other issues, like inequality or climate change. From the inside, given what the younger people in this profession care about, do you expect the competence or the focus to just decline by default, given the new generation?

Kenneth Rogoff

No, this was a wake-up call. There was a blog that Hoover did. They looked at the most-used words in our big annual meetings. There’s this thing called the American Economic Association meetings; everybody goes. They took all the abstracts and titles from the last 15 years, and the word “inflation” had not appeared until this year.

But why are you optimistic about when they get in charge?

Kenneth Rogoff

There’s an intellectual market. This was a huge miss, and there’s a market for figuring it out. One of the good things about the American university system—at least in the sciences, and I’ll speak for economics—is that things drift off, but if something is way wrong—and they were certainly way wrong about inflation, I believe, and way wrong about interest rates and debt—then there’s some rebalancing. We have a very competitive system of publishing. We have a seminar system that’s just ruthless. There’s a debate around it. It’s not settled, and maybe I’m wrong and they’re right, but it’s definitely being debated now.

Whereas 10 years ago, I think I was like a lone voice in the wilderness, saying these things might happen again. I would teach inflation to my students. They’d sit there patiently. It was like I was teaching them the music of Fred Astaire or something. They’d go, “Okay, it’s the 21st century, the Internet; that can never happen.” Or I’d teach debt. If I had foreign students, they were all having problems, but the American students were like, “We can just do whatever we want.” But it’s changed.

Going back to the potential future problems, if we do go the financial-repression route and not the inflation route, how bad will that be? As you were saying, after World War II we had financial repression. But that was when we had the highest growth ever. On the other hand, China and Japan, it seems like a lot of their problems might be caused by the misallocation of capital that financial repression created. Do you have some intuition about how much we screw ourselves over with that route, as opposed to inflation?

Kenneth Rogoff

We’ll start with World War II, but it’s never just one thing, obviously. There were a lot of things. So with World War II, first of all, financial repression was easy. The financial markets had been destroyed by the Great Depression. World War II became something of a command-and-control economy.

There are a lot of interesting papers about World War II that show that Americans just worked really enthusiastically. There was real patriotism in the production. I’m not saying we’re not now, but back then they were able to fill factory jobs that we probably couldn’t even fill today. As we emerged from World War II, we had all the soldiers come home. That’s a huge growth lift. We didn’t manage it perfectly. We actually had quite a bit of inflation during that period.

The financial markets that you grew up in and that young people know today didn’t exist back then. The world has changed a lot.

Does that mean US growth would have been even higher after World War II if we had just kept the government debt or figured out some other way to deal with it and let financial markets develop earlier?

Kenneth Rogoff

Maybe. We didn’t have any financial crises for a long time because the markets were very repressed. Oftentimes, when you get a financial crisis, it’s exactly when somebody comes along and says, “I know, I can make us grow way faster. Let’s just take away all the rules and regulations overnight.” That happened in one country after another. It works until you blow up.

So you’d have to say that, by and large, it was managed rather well. We grew. The rest of the world grew. It took time for private markets to develop.

One thing I should’ve emphasized was that our debt was very high after World War II, about what it is now. But there was nothing else. There wasn’t all this private debt; that had all been defaulted on. I’m being slightly hyperbolic, but maybe it was 50% of GDP altogether. Everything else—state and local debt—had been defaulted on. Now, it’s bigger than the federal debt by a wide margin.

So it was a very different world, putting financial repression in place back then compared to now, when that’s a big part of our business models in the financial sector.

Just to make sure we’ve completed the concrete scenarios, basically your prediction is that there’ll be some crisis, some surge of inflation, then there’ll be austerity. And then what happens? Is growth really slow afterward because the government can’t spend as much? What do the next few decades look like in your world?

Kenneth Rogoff

I think it will be quite a wake-up call for Americans, having to adjust under difficult circumstances. Most likely, we get hit by a shock. We want to borrow a lot. Bond yields are rising faster than they did the other times we did this. And we’re not able to do as much.

It’s not the end of the world. During the European debt crisis from 2010 to 2012, most European countries raised their retirement ages. They didn’t do it right away. They did it 10 or 15 years out. There’s stuff you can do.

So I want to be careful here and say it’s not like the end of the world, but it’ll be pretty unpleasant. This will affect the entire world, since the global system is very dollar-centric. It won’t be good for our franchise, the dollar being so used everywhere. As other countries start using the dollar less, our interest rates will climb even higher.

I’m an academic. I’m not trying to push my ideas by being maximally hysterical. But hysterical is definitely within the realm of possibility here. What I’m saying is more likely than not, not that it’s definitely going to happen. We could have growth. We could have a whole lot of high-skill immigration. We could make changes. There are a lot of things that could go well.

On the growth thing, Europe’s growth has been pretty bad after 2010. Japan obviously has had pretty bad growth after their crisis. Why will we be in a different position if we do have this kind of crisis? Why will growth continue apace?

Kenneth Rogoff

No, it’s going to cause a pause in growth. The main reason debt crises happen is we don’t have an automated system of working it out. When the stock market crashes, it’s painful; you’re looking around for who got hurt. But when you have debt crises, we take 5 years, 10 years, to figure out who owes what. It’s that process of allocating the losses that causes problems.

That, by the way, is why so many people thought, “China’s fine. The president will just tell everyone what it is.” That turns out to be not as true as they thought.

3. Will AGI solve the US deficit?

Is it possible to believe both that AGI is near and that America’s fiscal position is untenable?

Kenneth Rogoff

What do you mean by saying AGI is coming?

Any job that can be done purely through computers is automated. So white-collar work, the work we do even, is automated within 20 years.

Kenneth Rogoff

Anytime you get a big productivity boost, it’s fantastic. If it comes quickly, yes, that can solve problems. I will say that historically, there have been lots of times when countries had good growth—even higher than their interest rates—and they still got into trouble because fiscal policy isn’t mechanical. It’s political. It’s about how much you spend, who wants what. It’s not an arithmetic question.

Let me say it another way. Nobody ever defaulted or had high inflation because of arithmetic—because they couldn’t pay, or couldn’t have called in someone who knew what to do. They do it because of political pressures. I think if AGI came that fast and that big, it would make the populism phenomenon we’re facing now seem like nothing.

If AI is going to be massively deflationary—if it makes all these goods so much cheaper—should we be printing a bunch of money to still stick to 2% inflation? Or does that not matter anymore?

Kenneth Rogoff

Well, we certainly can run monetary policy the same way. You don’t automatically get deflation just because some goods are going down. You can do things to increase demand so that there are upward pressures on final prices.

Even if the AI workers aren’t demanding anything, you can put in a lot of demand so firms charge a lot, not just for the services that AI is replacing but also for the raw minerals and materials that go in. Fundamentally, when you have productivity, it makes it easier for the monetary authorities—the Federal Reserve—to deliver low inflation and good growth. That’s what they’re trying to do. It makes their job easier. And I think it takes the pressure off them—somewhat—to inflate, because things are going pretty well. So there aren't the same pressures.

But should they be trying to fight the deflation at all, in that world? Because traditionally we need inflation to root out the rentiers and to fight downward wage rigidity. But now the AIs have all the jobs, so we don’t need to worry about that. There are a bunch of biases humans have that we need inflation to correct for. Do we even need that in a world with AI?

Kenneth Rogoff

Okay, that is a very good point. Frankly, Keynes founded modern macroeconomics. He was an incredible Renaissance person, having both sides of the brain. One of his insights that just transformed things was this.

Before Keynes, we used what we now call general equilibrium models: demand and supply, prices moving to keep everything in line. But Keynes was looking at the Great Depression and said, “Prices should be coming down. But they’re not. Why aren't they?” That’s really a cornerstone.

At the end of the day, it’s mostly human behavior. It’s mostly workers. So if you have these docile AI workers—they’re not workers, they’re just firms—and if you have firms that are willing to let prices fall, then certainly you can do that. We’re still going to have some human workers? I don't know.

But here’s a question on what monetary policy should be. Do you think interest rates are going to go up or down? When we had deflation last time—from demand-deflation, like after the financial crisis and the pandemic—interest rates went down. My intuition here is that interest rates would need to go up. I mean real interest rates, real inflation-adjusted interest rates. And then, deflation isn’t such a problem. You just don’t let the interest rates go up as much. Last time, interest rates went to basically zero. That’s a whole other line of discussion.

Kenneth Rogoff

They felt they couldn’t lower them into significantly negative territory. So they were paralyzed. There was this deflation, or at least too-low inflation. Monetary authorities thought they knew how to create inflation, but that’s always been by cutting interest rates lower. When they hit a bottom, they don’t. I have a whole book about negative interest rates, and that’s a whole other thing.

4. Why interest rates will go up

If we’re imagining real interest rates going up, then it’s not much of a technical problem. You just let the interest rates rise a little less so you’re not getting deflation. Do you expect interest rates to go up? Because one factor is that you want to invest in the future—the future has so much more potential. Another is that maybe you want to consume more now, because you know you’re going to be wealthier in the future anyway. You might as well start spending as much as you can now.

Kenneth Rogoff

I think AGI and AI are upward pressures on interest rates for lots of crude reasons. One is the huge energy needs. Traditionally, when you did a lot of investment, it raised wages. But it’s possible—there are economists like Daron Acemoglu who’ve shown it can go both ways, and it’s not difficult to show that—if you're really just substituting for workers, it’s making capital more valuable; you just invest even more. The pressures on monetary policy will depend a little bit on that.

In principle, it makes life easier. If it did push the interest rate down to zero, there are interesting questions around that, but maybe your audience might not be as fascinated by them as I am.

Let’s talk about it a little bit. If we expect interest rates to go up because of AI, what should the government be doing right now to be ready for that? Should they be locking in 100-year bonds at the current interest rates since they’re only going up from here?

Kenneth Rogoff

I’m going to get to that. But first, just where we are. I follow interest rates today all the time. Maybe a lot of people who listen to you don’t. But let’s talk about inflation-adjusted interest rates.

There’s a 10-year bond that’s indexed to the inflation rate, issued by our Treasury. Inflation-indexed debt is only about 10% of our total debt. There are tax considerations—it’s not perfect—but it’s a pretty good measure of what we call the real interest rate. It had gone to −1 at one point after the pandemic. It averaged 0 for about 10 years, from 2012 to 2021. And it’s higher now.

That is, for a macroeconomist, the biggest question in the world, because it affects asset prices, it affects risk, and it affects volatility. I regard it as just a normalization. I think it was likely to happen.

If you go around and talk to some of my younger colleagues, or folks at other places, there’s quite a debate about that. A lot of people think, “We’re getting old, we’re not inventing anything...” I know you’ve just been arguing against that, and good for you.

I tend to think interest rates are more likely to go up than down, going forward. I’m talking about these long-term interest rates. The Federal Reserve just sets the overnight interest rate; these long-term interest rates are set by markets, and I think they’re more likely to go up.

But I think AGI is only a piece of it. Debt is rising everywhere. There’s the remilitarization of much of the world. There’s a need to deal with climate change. Eventually, if we’re not dealing with it, then we’re dealing with climate disasters. There’s growing populism, geopolitical fracturing, many things. I tend to think interest rates are going to go up, but not just for the good reason that we’ve gotten more creative and that everything’s going to be better.

5. US equities will underperform

You've said in the book that you expect a rebalancing from U.S. equities to foreign equities. U.S. equities have outpaced foreign stocks for the last couple of decades. You say you expect this to change or that there will be some rebalancing. What causes that?

Kenneth Rogoff

What I say very concretely is that when the dollar is really high, you should expect the euro to go up. I feel strongly about that. My first important paper was about exchange rates. That’s why the book’s about exchange rates. When Japan’s really weak or when the dollar’s really strong—it’s very hard to predict exchange rates—but I think the euro will do well.

There’s a lot of room to catch up in Europe. I actually think I’m nuanced in what I say in the book. Trump hadn’t been elected yet, but I say Europe seems to be under pressure to re-militarize. I was aware that Harris was probably going to cut the U.S. defense budget, so that would put pressure on them.

Re-militarizing would actually be good for the euro. It would be good for technology in Europe. It would give them more geopolitical power in the system.

Now, just so your listeners can calibrate this, my first book was a very mathematical one, Foundations of International Macroeconomics. In theory, you should diversify. You shouldn’t put all your money in the United States.

I did a video with Zbigniew Brzezinski, Mika Brzezinski’s father. For those who don’t know, he was Carter’s Kissinger. I did a video with him that Merrill Lynch produced. It was about why international diversification could be good. What they got me to say was very, very limited. I feel quite fine about what I said.

I wasn’t doing any consulting at the time, just academic work. I didn’t do speeches, I didn’t do consulting. I talked to central banks a bit, but I didn’t do anything for money. But I did get paid for that. It circulated 500,000 copies of it.

A lot of my friends teased me and said I would’ve made a lot more money if I hadn’t followed my own advice. I can think of plenty of other examples like that. But yes, my instinct is that—this idea that our U.S. premium should just keep getting bigger and bigger—these things have some regression to the mean. Maybe not with AI all being in the U.S., I don’t know.

Is it that you’re predicting the S&P 500 keeps growing at 8%, but foreign equities do even better?

Kenneth Rogoff

I’m just going to safely say foreign equities do better than dollar equities.

But not because the growth in U.S. equities slows down—it’s just that foreign equities do even better?

Kenneth Rogoff

Look, you have a lot of friends who spend all their time doing this. I wouldn’t pretend to. I hold a very neutral portfolio because I talk to policymakers and world leaders even on occasion.

I don’t want to be someone who’s talking about regulating Bitcoin and owning a lot of Bitcoin, to pick a random example.

So I wouldn’t regard myself as great at this. But yes, I think there’s a case for international diversification, particularly into Europe at this point, because they have so much potential catch-up. Just as in California, where you’re from, there’s a little bit of dim awareness that it might be overregulated and you might want to do things differently, I feel that’s happening in Europe.

If you look internationally, if you’d been betting on catch-up, I wonder how you’d backtest it. There’s some intuition there that if you’re poor and you’re further from the frontier, it makes sense that it would be easier for you to catch up. But there’s another intuition that if you’ve been persistently behind the frontier, there must be some deep endogenous reason.

Kenneth Rogoff

You’re absolutely right. For example, Asia has a lot more governance problems on the whole. There’s a reason that their price-earnings ratios are lower, because you don’t trust the governance.

You’re right. That’s fair, and a lot of people are just betting on that.

Kenneth Rogoff

But I don’t think Europe is so hopeless that it can’t pull it together. I can make a comparison. I’m a basketball fan. The Boston Celtics just got crushed by the Knicks, just before we’re taping this. Part of it is because our star, Jayson Tatum, was injured.

You may not have gotten any better—Europe in this case—but if somebody’s hobbling the United States, which I do think is going on to some extent now, you do better.

Is there some institutional reform we could make that would get us out of this political equilibrium we’re stuck in? Both parties, when they’re in power, are incentivized to increase the debt, and there’s no institutional check on that proclivity.

Kenneth Rogoff

There have been a lot of people who’ve tried this, for example, by having what are called fiscal councils. I did a paper once with Julia Pollak, who’s a brilliant economist, when she was an undergraduate. That was quite a while ago. A number of countries experimented with fiscal councils, but it hasn’t worked.

The country that’s done the most with this is probably the United Kingdom. George Osborne, when he was Chancellor, set up this fiscal authority. The big thing they did is they made predictions so the government doesn’t get to make up different predictions. You don’t necessarily have to go by their numbers, but they get to say whatever they think.

Our CBO does not get to do that quite the same. Our Congressional Budget Office is very good, but they are constrained to believe what Congress tells them. If Congress says, “We’re putting in this tax cut, but it’s going to go away after 10 years,” or “We’re doing this policy, it’s all going to change,” then they’re forced to use those parameters.

The UK version is more independent. There are lots of complaints about it, but that’s a very poor man’s fiscal authority—just somebody who says, “This is what your deficit looks like.” It’s the same thing as our CBO, but with more independence. It helps.

But I think it has to go to our electoral system, right? Our campaign financing. Do we have term limits? You think that would help?

Kenneth Rogoff

I think, if anything, if you’re longer in office, you might have more of a long-term incentive. To the extent that a lot of the deficit problems are caused by populism, I don’t know how much campaign finance would help.

Maybe you’re right. I don’t have a magical solution to this.

Kenneth Rogoff

It’s all over the world. Nobody’s finding a particularly great solution to it. The only encouraging thing is that these things go in waves. So maybe this one will end. But we’re certainly in a really difficult situation right now.

Somebody asked me, “If you were advising a Republican president or something, what would you do? What problem would you face?” The biggest problem is that in a few years there’s going to be a Democratic president. They’re going to do exactly the opposite of what you wanted to do. It’s the same thing for Democratic presidents.

How do you have some continuity? How do you have policies put in place that the public can rely on?

We’ve done well in the United States in some ways because our government’s been kind of weak and hasn’t been doing stuff. The private sector can work around it. I’m not saying it’s perfect. There are lots of things we should do. But look, this is out of my pay grade, so to speak.

You’re the former Chief Economist of the IMF!

Kenneth Rogoff

All right, but that’s economics. These are very political questions. Brexit’s an example of democracy gone amok. What a dumb idea. I don’t know if Brexit was right or wrong. I feel like we’ll know in 50 years. But you shouldn’t be able to do it with a simple majority vote. You should need a two-thirds vote, or something like that.

There’s a whole government department here with people specializing in what we should do.

Actually, I think there are experiments. Washington State experimented with different voting choices. Maine did. There are these ideas out there, but we’re a long way from converging on anything.

If you think people are underweighting how big the debt issue is, are you especially long on countries that have a low debt-to-GDP ratio, like Australia or Norway?

Kenneth Rogoff

It’s not the only thing going on in the world. Your debt is just one thing. Countries like Australia and Canada, for example, are what we call commodity exporters. They know that sometimes the sun shines and sometimes it’s a dark winter. They don’t quite sell oil, but they sell some coal, natural gas, and some oil. They understand things move around and that they need to save for a rainy day.

Norway is in a whole other league. But yes, there are lots of factors to whether a country will do well. The lower-debt countries have less of a problem.

But Canada and Australia face very volatile income streams because of commodities, so they tend to be more nervous about debt. By the way, they also have a lot of housing debt. In Canada, for example, that’s been a big problem.

But I’m bullish on the United States. Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying everyone should leave the United States and go to Canada, although my wife thinks that sometimes, but for other reasons.

When I was playing chess in the late 1960s, I was living by myself in Europe. Nixon got elected. I felt about Nixon the way I think a lot of people in your generation, or at least millennials, feel about Trump. I didn’t want to come back to the United States. So there are a lot of people who talk that way. But I think the United States is great.

Countries that are smaller, that aren’t the reserve currency, that don’t have access to these deep pockets of domestic and foreign borrowing—and all of those countries fit into that framework—they need to be more careful.

6. The erosion of dollar dominance

This “exorbitant privilege,” as you talk about it, is it possible that one way in which it’s bad for us is that it allows, or incentivizes us, to take on more debt than it’s wise to? And especially if this isn’t a permanent advantage we have.

When you’re at the top, you take out this cheap debt. Over time, you lose your reserve status, or it weakens at least, and you have to refinance that debt at higher interest rates. So in the short term, you’re incentivizing this behavior, which is not sustainable in the long run.

Is there a political economy explanation for why that might be bad for us?

Kenneth Rogoff

I’ve heard that argument, but I basically think it’s great for us. It’s not just the government. It’s all of us who borrow less. Do we wish we were paying higher interest rates? Probably most people who are getting a mortgage right now feel like our interest rates are plenty high. They don’t need to see them higher.

I think with the exorbitant privilege, there are some drawbacks we don’t need to get into. But it’s basically incredibly fantastic if you owe $37 trillion, as our government does, to be paying 0.5% to 1% less. We’re talking about hundreds of billions of dollars.

There’s also our ability to see what’s going on everywhere. A lot of what our spying does is using our exorbitant privilege and the dollar network. Sanctions.

As I mentioned, I was in my teens at the end of the 1960s, when I didn’t want to come back. One reason I didn’t want to come back was the Vietnam War was pretty terrifying. I had many friends get drafted. Their brains got fried by heroin, even if they didn’t get killed.

And then there are sanctions. I’m not saying that we’ve solved all our wars with sanctions. But make no mistake: We have used that in place of military intervention a few times. So that’s been great.

I think losing that, and not appreciating how important that is, is a terrible blunder that we might be making right now.

This is a very naive question. I know you address it at length in your book. I’ll ask the question in the most straightforward way, and then you can explain what’s going on. How should I think about the fact that we are basically giving the rest of the world pieces of paper and we’re getting real goods and services in exchange?

Sure, at a high level, you can say that they’re getting this liquidity, or they’re getting this network, and that’s what makes it worth it. But I don’t know: are we fundamentally getting away with something?

Kenneth Rogoff

Just to note, the United Kingdom is not the reserve currency. They’re not the dominant currency. They used to be, 100 years ago. They look a lot like us now, with big current account deficits. That’s actually why Trump was able to strike a deal with them, because they weren’t really running a surplus against us, anyway. They’re over-financialized, even more than we are.

The core of the benefit we get is that we borrow by issuing safe assets—if you want to call our debt safe—and we invest in risky stuff. Charles Kindleberger wrote one of the great books on crises. I had him as a professor at MIT. He called us bankers to the world. He said, “Yep, we’re running this deficit, they’re holding a lot of our Treasury bills, but we are making money hand over fist.”

It’s the same thing as the equity premium, where you hold stocks and it’s not always, but on average, better than holding bonds. So that’s been very good. You have the fact that the dollar is very liquid, and the markets are very liquid.

Say you’re a Silicon Valley firm and you’re big enough to issue debt internationally. I don’t know if any Silicon Valley firms ever issue debt, but if you did, people would buy it because it’s in dollars. If you’re the same firm in France, forget it. They don’t want to hold euros.

Even if you promise to pay in dollars, they’re not happy about it because your income isn’t in dollars. So it’s been fantastic. This is something that’s been debated. Stephen Miran, who was a Harvard student, is the head of Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers. Very smart guy.

He’s made this clever argument that because everybody loves our currency, it makes us less competitive in everything else. It partly hollowed out our manufacturing, and that’s terrible. There’s a little bit of truth to that. First of all, the dollar goes like this, so it’s not always high.

Second, I mentioned the United Kingdom is kind of in the same boat. We’re good at a lot of things. We’re good at tech. Tech makes the dollar stronger, make no mistake. We’re good at biotech and agriculture. We’re good at a lot of other things that make the dollar high.

And if you’re good at these things, it’s harder to be good at manufacturing. It bids up the cost of everything. On the whole, we’re performing this banking function. That’s really the big thing. It’s been going on since the ’50s and ’60s. That’s the core of our so-called exorbitant privilege.

There’s a really interesting book by Charles Mann. I think it’s called 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. It’s about how, during the Ming Dynasty in 17th-century China, they kept issuing different paper currencies, and it was super unstable. People in China wanted a reliable medium of exchange.

So tens of thousands of tons of silver from the New World, from the Spanish, would be exchanged for enormous amounts of real goods exported from China. So from the Spanish perspective, they’re getting shiploads and shiploads of real goods, and all they’re giving up is this medium of exchange. I don’t know how analogous that is to the current situation.

There are countries like Ecuador and others that dollarize. They literally use the dollar, and they need dollars. We’re able to have them hold dollars. It’s not silver, but we print it, and they pay very low interest rates. They’re holding Treasury bills, not physical dollars. Yeah, it’s fantastic for us. We definitely pay less on our debt because of that.

That’s a fascinating example you bring up. The Chinese actually invented the printing press. They invented paper currency way before the Europeans. But then, what do you know, they kept printing a lot of it and had a lot of inflation.

I hadn’t read that book, but it’s a great example. I knew they were using silver, but that number is bigger than I had heard. Final question: a big part of your book discusses the different countries that seemed, at different times, to be real competitors to America.

You talk about the Soviet Union, Japan, and China today. We’ve discussed why they didn’t pan out. We can go into the details on any one of those examples, but in the big picture, is there some explanation that generalizes across all these examples of why America has been so competitive? Or why it’s been so hard to displace?

Kenneth Rogoff

It’s not just that we’ve stayed on top—we’ve just gone like this. Remember, in the 1970s, Europe actually peeled away from the dollar bloc. But the rest of the world started globalizing. China globalized. Eventually, the Soviet Union did, too, and the dollar just colonized all these places.

They were all holding dollar debt, using dollars. It’s much bigger than even the British pound was when the sun never set on the British Empire. So it’s been amazing and surprising to people like myself. If you read what everyone was saying at the time, it was just that it kept going up—that our share of everything kept getting bigger and bigger.

Definitely, to some extent, we’ve been lucky. We talked about Japan. I think China made a big mistake by sticking to the dollar so long. Europe should have delayed bringing Greece into the euro, because their crisis wouldn’t have been so bad.

So we’ve been fortunate with blunders by our opposition. We’ve done some good things. But I think the thing Americans forget is that we have been lucky a lot of times. I quote a chess player—the great Bent Larsen, who was number 2 to Bobby Fischer when I was playing.

He was asked, “Would you rather be lucky or good in a chess game?” And he said, “Both.” So I think Americans forget. They know we’re good, and we are good. We’ve talked about dynamism, this secret sauce that we’ve had so far. But I think we’ve also been lucky. If you ran it all again, it didn’t have to go the same way.

It’s a very scary kind of luck. If it’s so easy for these other countries to make some mistake that causes them to totally fall behind, it should update you in favor of the idea that, in general, it’s easy for a country to get itself in a rut.

It’s like the Fermi paradox. The fact that you don’t see other alien civilizations is actually very scary, because it suggests that there’s some kind of filter which makes it really hard to keep your civilization going.

Kenneth Rogoff

I hope not, but we’ll see. It’s certainly been amazing how the dollar’s done and how the US has done. I hope we continue, but we are doing a lot of things right now.

I don’t think Trump is the cause of the dollar being in gentle decline. That’s just wrong. I think it would’ve happened with Harris winning. But he is the president at the moment, and things like Liberation Day—I’ve talked to tech people who think it’s just brilliant.

I understand that. We can debate it. I’m happy to debate it with them. We look at the rule of law. Okay, I’m sitting at Harvard University. Naturally, it feels that way. But we also talked about the president being able to remove all the independent agencies.

It used to be that if you were a foreign investor and you invested in the United States, you thought you’d get your money back. Maybe the stock would’ve gone down. Maybe the real estate you bought would’ve gone down. But you’d get paid.

I think we were more exceptional than most about that. That’s in doubt now. There’s no question. The book’s about a lot of things besides exorbitant privilege—the whole arc of the US. But when I was telling people about the book, I’d say, “I don’t know. I’m looking at the numbers, I’m looking at what China’s doing, I’m reading about Europe and their central bank digital currency. I think we’re going downhill.”

I showed it to academics, I showed it to financial people, I showed it to tech people. They said, “You’re nuts.” They didn’t want to think about it. I don’t know if I’m right. But I think it’s worth thinking about.

When I was in China, I met up with some venture capitalists there, and they were quite depressed in general. Even founders say it’s hard to raise money. I was asking them why, and they said investors don’t want to invest because even if you invest in the next Alibaba, who’s to say the government doesn’t cancel the IPO? They’re in trouble.

Kenneth Rogoff

Yeah. I think Europe has a bright future in this context, as the team that doesn’t have as many injured players. But China—it’s not going to be forever, but I think for 5 or 10 years they’re going to stay in trouble.

Okay. Thank you so much for sitting down with me and also answering all my questions. I’m sure there are many misconceptions and naive questions and so forth. I appreciate your patience and you educating me on this topic.

Kenneth Rogoff

No, it’s an honor to be on your famous podcast. I heard from so many young people when I told them I was talking to you. They were like, “You’re with Dwarkesh? Just fly back from here! Do whatever you need to do!” So I’m glad you were able to come here. It’s really been interesting, and I’m glad to learn more about everything you’re doing.

The honor’s mine. It was great to be able to travel here and speak with you.