02/29/2024 - Let’s close up shop and go home

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CARRIE NORDLUND: Hello and welcome to Mark and Carrie from the Watson Institute at Brown University. Hello there. How are you?

MARK BLYTH: I'm fine. I'm Mark Blyth and I'm not at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. I am in my basement because I misread the instructions on where we were meant to be today. So hello from my basement. So anyway, what's been going on in the world? That's what we do, isn't it? Come on, Carrie. Hit me with it. What's going on? What are you-- I love this one. Some people like to say this one when they do these kind of talk show things or live talk show events. They go, so what's top of mind for you, Carrie?

CARRIE NORDLUND: Well, talk about not listening to instructions, and that is the recent report from the prosecutor. I mean, this stuff feels like it's so long ago but it's not really, about Biden had classified documents and whether they were going to pursue the case, and you fell asleep, everyone's falling asleep at this moment. Came back with the report. And in the report was the sizzling line of that Biden is a well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory, which also makes a good title of a book.

And then so the Democrats were like, we forgot he was old. And then, of course, started to talk about how he was old again and like is someone going to take his place and all the thought pieces and the pundits are like, he's got to step aside, and all that jazz. It seemed to get wiped out the front page of the paper once Trump did his NATO like, we're not going to-- if I become president, we're not going to protect NATO unless you pay your dues sort of stuff. And that set everyone's hair on fire from the Munich Security Conference. So--

MARK BLYTH: It's funny. I mean, something also happened last week or the week before or this week. I can't even remember when. Was the whole sort of impeach Biden thing fell apart when they turned out that the star witness was basically a serial liar and possible Russian agent, right?

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yes.

MARK BLYTH: And it's almost as if the news cycle has literally become an eight-hour thing because all the things you just mentioned, so the first one is like an independent prosecutor comes out and says, look, I can't prosecute him because basically he's a daft old man. That's huge. And then that just disappears.

And then as you say, Trump comes along and says, I'm going to encourage Russia who is the people we defend against by the way in NATO. It's kind of the anti-NATO. I'm going to encourage the anti-NATO to attack our friends unless they keep up their dues, which is commentary worthy at least. And everyone went mental for like 12 hours and then stopped.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yeah.

MARK BLYTH: And we seem to like run on this incredibly short and shorter and shorter and shorter attention span theater for everything to do with this election. What's going on? Why does nothing stick? Why is nothing actually a story that goes-- even sort of the idea that you're going to replace a sitting president because of his age concerns, that's a big thing and it's sort of like, yeah, we're really concerned with this and then sort of like, look, that dog has a fluffy tail. Quick. Run.

CARRIE NORDLUND: True that we have no attention span whatsoever. And yet it's the same persistent storylines. Trump is all this baggage and Biden is old, and then we just circle back to that and some with a few different details. So you're right that we have no attention span, like the bright shiny thing we get distracted by. But then we also it's the same storylines and you kind of wish that it would change and people try to stir the pot, Biden should step down, so-and-so should come forward. But then it still goes back to the same old thing. So I don't know what that says about us, that we're really boring, that we're not creative as a humanity. I'm not sure.

MARK BLYTH: Or possibly none of this stuff matters. I mean, Biden, unless he dies before November, he's running. Trump, unless he dies or goes to jail before November, he's running. Everybody kind of knows it. Everything else is priced in. It's all just noise. Little example of that. So we just had that Michigan by-election thing, right?

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yeah.

MARK BLYTH: 13% of people said that I'd rather have someone else or I'm undecided or whatever the category was, right?

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yeah.

MARK BLYTH: But apparently 11% said the same thing about Obama. Now this whole thing was meant to be a referendum on Biden because there's lots of Muslim people who live in Michigan and they're all clearly upset with him and their key voters in a swing state, and it seems that he's 2% worse off than Obama was who didn't do anything to do with Gaza, much like this. So what should we take from this? Is there something there or is this just noise as well?

CARRIE NORDLUND: That's interesting. I didn't realize the Obama comparison of what percentage he had received. I mean, if we just take it for what it is that the uncommitted votes in Michigan coming from those who are really angry at the administration for their stand on Israel-Gaza and they want a cease fire today and they don't want the US to be involved with Israel anymore, period, then certainly Biden has a problem.

But that point of reference, of course, like it was lost in the buzz of today's news. And so maybe it's not as relevant as the newspapers are screaming at us this morning about. So then it's all noise and we should just like close up shop and go home. I mean, that's also kind of bleak.

MARK BLYTH: Let's jump forward a little bit. How does this look for the whole sort of Senate map? We talk about Trump coming in but we forget about the House and the Senate. So what's your feel on this? Let's imagine Trump gets in. Does he win the House? Does he win the Senate?

CARRIE NORDLUND: Well, this is-- thank you for taking me up for this. I mean, so there are three branches of government and the site we're going to talk about the second branch of government, which is Congress. So the House and the Senate, right now, if you look at the House and you're just like it really is a circus right now because of the special election. I think, but I haven't confirmed, that the Republican majority is now at three seats because there's still some vacancies that are still to be determined, but the Speaker of the House has a very slim majority if we even want to call it that. And the Senate map, which a lot of people said was really favoring Republicans, now looks like it's in play for Democrats. So--

MARK BLYTH: So why is that? What's shifted?

CARRIE NORDLUND: I mean, of course, the Democrats everything has to go their way on the Senate, but you have these candidates in Montana and in Ohio, the current Democratic senators, and they look like they have a slight edge over the Republicans because the Republicans are putting forth people who are not viable candidates for mainstream general statewide elections. So the primary system is just putting forward these kind of fringe candidates.

MARK BLYTH: Fringe candidates as we like to call them, our elected leaders.

CARRIE NORDLUND: That's right.

MARK BLYTH: All right. Sticking with all things US, I'm just going to basically battle you with questions today--

CARRIE NORDLUND: I know.

MARK BLYTH: So don't worry, Carrie. You're on the stump. Let's go. So next up, the Supreme Court. What's been going on there? Because we had all this excitement, all this ferment about Trump and the ballot and Colorado and Maine and whatever it was. And then it finally goes there and what's happening?

CARRIE NORDLUND: I mean, our third branch of government. The court is deeply skeptical about the ruling from the Colorado Supreme Court. So I mean, I heard just snippets from the oral argument and it looks like it could be an 8 to 1 or even 9 to 1 decision to keep Trump on the ballot. There's just the justices were just really concerned about the sort of nationalization of what that looks like and was there really power of the courts to decide who was on the ballot and who was not?

And then just to tee up a few more of the cases as we head deeper into the spring and then the end of the court, lots of exciting stuff: guns, abortion, administrative power of the federal government. Can the federal government actually create any policy or legislation or can states just do really do whatever they want? So that's a lot of exciting stuff from the third branch of government.

MARK BLYTH: OK. So it seems that SCOTUS is scooting along. OK. So anyway, Carrie, I don't know if you're thinking about IVF but you're probably not thinking about it in Alabama at this moment in time.

CARRIE NORDLUND: That's right. Yeah.

MARK BLYTH: Can I just say for a minute? This is one of these moments where sort of like the European side of me goes, come on. And it's like-- and everybody else in the rest of the world kind of like looks at America and goes, really? I mean, like you would really do this? Like what do you think about-- and I saw this bit of an interview with whoever it was, leading politician donor, and they were like, yes, it's all about protecting kids and this is why we do this.

And it goes, yeah, but what you're going to do is you'll have less kids because this means that you've criminalized basically people having kids. And it was just the look in his face like, really? Did we do that? Shit. And now there's like spinning around like trying to figure out a way out of it. But I mean, it's just a brilliant example of just sort of like an ideology just gone bonkers.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Completely. I think that was Senator Tuberville too because he was like we want people to have more kids. And the reporter was like, actually, this means they'll have less. And he's like, oh.

MARK BLYTH: Yeah, that's exactly what it was. It was, oh.

CARRIE NORDLUND: OK, you're like, good one there. I mean, it's a weird case when you cite VeggieTales, the cartoon in your judicial decision. Republicans have walked back from this. Even Trump took a, quote unquote, "moderate" stance on this. But I think if we think about the election and the impact on it, it shows how the Republicans have twisted themselves into knots around the dismantling of Roe v. Wade and how this is such an important issue.

This is still a mobilization issue and that this just keeps on the sort of drip drip. And if we think about the voters where Trump is vulnerable, college-educated suburban women, I mean, this is the sort of thing that just could potentially move them to voting for Biden, question mark, staying at home and maybe just not voting for Trump.

MARK BLYTH: Or at least paying attention for eight hours before forgetting about it.

CARRIE NORDLUND: That's a really good point. Yes.

MARK BLYTH: So let's get back into the Trump now owes loads of people $500 million and is barred from New York and all this sort of stuff, right?

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yeah.

MARK BLYTH: So I'm going to pitch you something and see what you think because somebody sent me a link to this and there's a sort of financial analyst makes this claim. And I can't remember the guy's name but I should attribute that this is not my thing. So here's the story. $500 million, no problem because I'm about to get $4 billion.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yes.

MARK BLYTH: So here's how it's going to work. Do you remember that laughable thing that everybody laughed at called Truth Social?

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yes.

MARK BLYTH: Right. You notice how even though you can go back on Twitter-- he hasn't.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Correct. OK. Yeah, I'm with you.

MARK BLYTH: And it's 100% certainty that he's going to basically get the nomination, right?

CARRIE NORDLUND: OK. Yeah.

MARK BLYTH: And when he was on Twitter, he had 100 million followers.

CARRIE NORDLUND: OK, still with you.

MARK BLYTH: So what happens just when he gets the nomination and it's all locked up? He then takes Truth Social public and people are able to buy shares in it.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Oh my. OK.

MARK BLYTH: Estimate his cash hoarding on it, according to this guy that I read, about $4 billion. $500 million, chump change.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Is that valuable with just one person being on it?

MARK BLYTH: Well, I mean, you got to remember, these days $4 billion is not a lot of money.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yeah.

MARK BLYTH: It is for one person. But for a social media company with 100 million followers, no, it's not.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yeah. Wow.

MARK BLYTH: Isn't that good-- everyone thinks-- everyone thinks this guy is dumb as a box of hammer, right?

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yeah.

MARK BLYTH: It's kind of distraction stuff. This is going on in the background. And what are we paying attention to? The sneakers.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yeah, the gold sneakers.

MARK BLYTH: And everyone's like, oh my God. He's so desperate. Who's going to buy those sneakers? They're so ugly. Whatever. It's like, it doesn't matter. This is all distraction. This is look over here. I'm about to do this huge media deal and crush it.

CARRIE NORDLUND: You just like this is when I just want to rail at the system of it. Takes money to make money. And you just think the little guy who's getting crushed at the supermarket and then there's $4 billion for this social media thing that's just-- there's not even-- there's not even a newspaper. It's just words on an electronic page.

MARK BLYTH: Exactly. Amazing, isn't it? So I have no idea if that's true, but it does sound very plausible to me and puts the sneakers into sort of like a different category of stuff, doesn't it?

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yes. Yes. It does. So I don't know if you saw Biden eating an ice cream cone when he was in Michigan, but I was so worried that ice cream cone was going to fall as the reporters were like-- and then it like misses mouth and then he'd be even older. But in any case, at that moment, it didn't. The ice cream cone held, everybody. He said that his deputy national security advisor, security advisor said that he thought there would be a peace or at least a ceasefire by the weekend and--

MARK BLYTH: No. Just no. I don't see that at all. I mean, we're talking about Israel-Gaza now. I mean, the only thing keeping Benjamin Netanyahu in power is a forever war. Why is it going-- why is it going to stop? And the idea that sort of like his major priority are the hostages, well, they've been at it for months now. There's still 100 hostages there. The hostage families themselves know that this guy's basically selling them down the line. So yeah, I mean, I don't think that that's the case at all.

No, unfortunately, the slaughter continues. And if they go basically full on into the last southern enclave where you've got 1.2 million people and they're meant to evacuate to where? I mean, have you seen the pictures of northern Gaza? It's just rubble.

CARRIE NORDLUND: I know.

MARK BLYTH: Like where are they going to go? So this is just-- it's still sort of continually awful. And there seems to be no way at all of changing Israeli direction on this. And as we've spoken about before, it's like essentially you've already got sort of a kill ratio of the two populations from the original incursion into Israel of 1,200 people to now about 28,000 I believe it is on the other side. If you go into the South, you could probably effectively double this by the end of the war.

You might kill every single Hamas person you can find but you're going to create a legion of new ones. So I just don't see how this ends well unless the end goal really is the expulsion of the Palestinian population. But then the Egyptians are on the other side building walls to make sure that that doesn't happen. So I mean, they're just caught between two terrible, terrible forces. And of course, as far as they're concerned, this is their home. This is where they live. This is where they have their lives and their families, and they don't want to move.

And they're being, let's say, pushed and pulled in every possible direction. As to the direction as to where this goes, I think ceasefire is a great idea whose time will never come, unfortunately.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Could they do-- OK, so let me switch-- let me start asking you questions. Could they do a cease fire that is like a long-term cease fire without saying it's the end of anything? Like does Netanyahu, is he still able--

MARK BLYTH: Then Netanyahu goes up for election and then he's out in his arse.

CARRIE NORDLUND: OK, so there's no different framing that he could use to keep him in power but allow for it to end.

MARK BLYTH: I mean, I suppose you could do that, but you have so many different constituencies in the Israeli parliament. I mean, you have such a low threshold of representation in the parliament, this is why you have all these extreme fringe parties, all of which have been cobbled together in the coalition, many of whom are direct sort of like get them out. This is the policy that they will explicitly focus on. So it's incredibly hard to imagine that coalition doing anything other than continuing the war. But unfortunately, it seems as if the war has become an end in and of itself.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yeah. Let me do a thought experiment with you here for a second, and that's around the role of America and Europe, I think, in terms of thinking about international relations and soft power and that these two entities, and especially Europe being much closer geographically, needs to think about their particular role in this while also protecting their borders with increasingly more Americans, and I'm actually not sure about the European side being much more isolationist.

MARK BLYTH: I mean, if you look at Ukraine as the comparator, I mean, what you're seeing is that European populations are also just, in many cases, Germany, for example, just as skeptical as Americans. And the overwhelming tide of support for Ukraine simply has ebbed and flowed and sort of collapsed in many places. And you see this in terms of now that the Americans are unable to supply the way that they would want to, most of this has fallen on the Germans.

The Germans-- we are switching topic we're now talking about Ukraine, of course, but the Germans basically had this decision to send these long range cruise missiles. They weren't going to do it because they knew that that would hit Russia. Most recently, Macron, the French President, had said, why don't we just do a tripwire thing? We'll just put our troops there. And like, what are you going to do? You're actually going to like shoot at NATO's troops? And of course, the Germans were like, yes, that's exactly what he would do. And we have absolutely no capacity to back this up.

So they're between their own rock and a hard place, one that they've sort of done themselves whereby they totally misunderstood the forces at play. So the idea was that Russia was basically Spain economically with nukes, which isn't true at all because it doesn't matter what your exchange rate personal-- your GDP on exchange rate matters, you're relative to us. What matters is how many bombs, guns, and tanks they can make. And Russia can make almost as much as anybody else in the world. So that's the problem.

The defense stocks and the defense industries of Europe have been sort of like run down to practically nothing. Getting them up and running is going to take five years. Just two years just to rebuild the stocks. So they're in no position to do anything, all of which leaves Russia basically sitting in the catbird seat. So they're waiting to see what happens with the election. They're pretty confident that Trump wants to see a deal rather than a continuation of support, and they might be right on that, along with many Republicans. Let's not forget the Carlson interview and all this sort of stuff.

So there's a very strong possibility that Europe here will have no longer have strong American support for something it's thrown its weight behind that was only possible if the Americans threw their weight behind it. Once they take their way out of it, the Europeans are like, we have to deal with this now? Crap. Like we spent 1.6% of GDP on defense and most of that goes for wages. So yeah, they're in no position to do this whatsoever.

I mean I think the bigger picture thing that you're talking about is essentially is there a sort of a new isolationism everywhere? And I think that there is. And I think this is something else that people who are very much sort of the establishment in both Europe and the United States. It's still very much transatlanticist NATO-focused view of the world. And I remember when Biden came in, I think we might have even said this in one of our podcasts, does this type of ideology, do these types of connections outlast this guy?

Because what happened was the whole lot got torn up when Trump one came in. And then when Trump left office, at that point, the Europeans went, we don't actually have to look after ourselves. The Americans are back. Woo-hoo. Yeah, but it's as long as Blinken and Biden are there. What happens if they're not?

CARRIE NORDLUND: The echoes of the policies still remain even if the person in charge is different, and especially while they're waiting to see whether or not Trump comes back or not. I was reading this thing, and when you're talking about munitions factories, I was shocked that it takes so long for them to build-- to make bullets. I mean, because Amazon delivers me my socks in one day. You just kind of think, all this just happens overnight. But just the infrastructure of everything that it takes and the length of time was surprising to me in my-- from this perspective.

MARK BLYTH: Well, this is where the sort of the Republican critique of European defense spending really stings hard, which is, I mean, most of the expenditure is basically wages, salaries, upkeep, and basic maintenance. There's very little actual CapEx, if you want to put it that way, capital expenditure on buying new equipment, all that sort of stuff, which is why Germany was going to spend $100 billion. And what do you get for it? You get like 60 new tanks and like 50 helicopters. I mean, this stuff costs a fortune.

And you haven't made it for years. You've allowed your stocks to run down and your factories to atrophy, and you don't even like this stuff. You don't really want to do it. You're not really into doing this stuff at all. So the highest in Europe that's on spending on defense I think is Poland with about 3.4%, 3.6%. And they consider themselves to be on the front against Russia. If Ukraine falls, they're next. They're busy buying hundreds of tanks from the North Korea and South Koreans, I should say, and really just unilaterally defending themselves because they just don't have any faith that the Germans or the French got anything to back this up.

Even the Brits who have historically had the 2% target, I mean, we just have these totally ridiculous show projects. So we have an aircraft carrier, one missile and it's over. Billions. Why do we need this? Then there was the test of the trident nuclear deterrent last week. I don't know if you caught this one, that basically we took our ship out and stuck a missile on it, thankfully without a nuclear warhead. It was meant to fly 3,000 miles and plop off the coast of Africa. We launched it off of Florida and it landed just outside the submarine outside of Florida.

CARRIE NORDLUND: No.

MARK BLYTH: Yeah, for real. It doesn't even work.

CARRIE NORDLUND: So it didn't--

MARK BLYTH: So half this stuff doesn't work. Like the Bundeswehr, the German army, their kit's broken. And meanwhile, the Russians are like, OK, so we blow through 20,000 tanks. We'll make 20,000 more. And we can do this because the sanctions are basically not working despite the fact that you go to every seminar and every university and every campus in the United States and it's like, the sanctions are working. It's like, no, they're not.

Just look at the bilateral trade between Russia and places like Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, and then look at their countries current accounts and then look at what they're doing with places like Germany and England and other places. So when the Russians need to buy some kit to dart up their missiles, they can't buy it directly from England. No, but somebody in Moldova can, and then it can get shipped through a third party. John Authers, the economic journalist, has been all over this recently. And just looking at the charts, you just see there's like exports out of Kazakhstan going to Russia just going through the roof. It's like, I wonder what all that is?

CARRIE NORDLUND: I mean, so basically-- so the threat of a World War III, we're going to fight with hatchets or something because now--

MARK BLYTH: Well, one side will have tanks and the rest of us will have sort of like iPhones.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yeah. Yeah. And 50-page white papers to talk about why what they're doing is bad.

MARK BLYTH: Yes, exactly.

CARRIE NORDLUND: That's just fascinating that the power and the mechanics behind it, like this stuff is just kind of busted.

MARK BLYTH: Well, when you consider the fact that despite all the sanctions and all the rest of it, the Russian economy is expected to grow between 2% and 2 and 1/2% this year, which is pretty much where the US is. Meanwhile, Europe once again is mired in a self-- how can I put it? Self-designed recession because while all this is going on, of course, they're all freaking out about their budgets again and now it's back to like austerity budgets everywhere.

It's like, OK, so how are you going to do your green transition and your defense expenditure and balance your budget at the same time? You're not. So which one are you going to do? You're going to do the one that the grandparents like. You're going to balance the budget because it makes you feel safe. Probably not the right choice.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yeah. Speaking of that, now-- OK, I'm not caught up on this, Blyth, so you got to take it slow with me here for a second. What is the status of the election in the UK? Is it being called? Is it not being called?

MARK BLYTH: Well, it's not being called. And it's kind of weird that it's one of those things where you're like with a patient in a hospice and it's just the question of when rather than if. And things have just broken down, parliamentary discourse, everything. All these Tory MPs know that they're going to be out of a job so when the leadership tells them to do something, they're like, the hell with you. I'm not doing that, whatever. And Labor's just sitting on the sidelines just watching them implode and have a 30-point lead.

Now the thing that's worrying about this-- it was a really good piece in The Guardian by a couple of political scientists, Tom O'Grady and a guy whose name escapes me now. And basically said there's a real danger here that if labor comes in and they don't actually go, OK, now we're in. Things are really bad. We need to do lots of stuff. Let's mobilize resources. Let's build houses. Let's do this, whatever. Then if they come in and just go, well, we can't afford to do anything. Thanks very much for voting for us. Then they're going to be very much like the SPD and the coalition in Germany just now.

So a couple of years ago, they come in, it's the greens and they're going to do the green transition, it's the SPD, and they're going to do more on this, whatever. And then a couple of bad things happen, namely basically Ukraine, et cetera. But that then wakes up the whole defense establishment. We're going to have to do things, blah, blah, blah. And guess what happens? They all start fighting amongst themselves. They can't afford anything. They stop doing anything. And then all their votes collapse.

So Labor has this problem whereby they haven't said they're going to do anything. And unless they come in and actually are seen to make a real attempt to do something different, they're going to be out for another 10 years. It's just going to be a total lost opportunity.

CARRIE NORDLUND: But if they come in, will they have the-- will they have some sort of wind at their back to actually move stuff along or--

MARK BLYTH: They're going to have an enormous-- it's this weird form of politics where they're going to have one of the largest electoral majorities in history and they're going to come in and say, well, there's no money and we can't do anything. Thanks for voting for us.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Oh, Lord.

MARK BLYTH: It's like, well, what was the majority for then?

CARRIE NORDLUND: And so it's just maintaining the status quo.

MARK BLYTH: I mean, this is too much to get into in the podcast, but, I mean, there's crazy stuff that we do just now. The Bank of England along with the Fed controls interest rates, not by buying and selling bonds that we used to do, what's called open market operations. They have these things called basically payment on reserves. So I will give you 4% if you just chuck your money at the bank rather than lend it to someone. And that basically controls credit and the system. I'm being very crude but that's it.

Now these payments on reserves also have to take account of inflation. So when there's like higher inflation, what you're seeing at banks is don't bother taking any risk. Just park your money with us and I'll give you 4% or 5%. The payments out from the Treasury out to these banks are totaling in the tens of billions of pounds. And the government is like, we don't have any money. Yeah, you're handing it to banks for showing up.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Because the thought is the banks will lend the money to humans, to consumers?

MARK BLYTH: No, no. They want them not-- when they want them not to lend to humans, then basically they pay the money for just parking the reserves at the Central Bank. And that used to be unremunerated. Now it's remunerated. So in other words, I'm a bank. I don't need to take risk. I don't need to like investigate. I'll just park it at the Central Bank and you'll pay me money. And it's billions of pounds. And you're like, what is going on? This is the worst type of like just give me to the city of London I've ever seen.

CARRIE NORDLUND: And the bank is doing all sorts of stuff with the money, like all the, I don't know, investment and--

MARK BLYTH: No, they're not doing anything. It's just reserves is how you control interest rates. That's all it is.

CARRIE NORDLUND: They're just holding it.

MARK BLYTH: No, it's totally bonkers. I mean, look it up if you're interested in it. Basically it's interest on reserves. It's just really weird. There's a whole bunch of other stuff as well. They're undoing QE. Remember that one from the financial crisis and afterwards, quantitative easing? That was when you buy lots of bonds and flood the money with-- the market with money and hopefully people will buy things. They don't, it just pushes up house prices.

And so now they're undoing that because they've got this big balance sheet filled with bonds. They want to back out in the market. So you send this back out into the market. Well, what are you doing now? Well, then you're taking in that cash. Well, you're taking in that cash at the same time that you're paying interest on reserves. How is this helping? It's not helping anyone. So the government's like, we don't have any money, and it's like, well, possibly because you're just handing it out to banks. What are you doing?

CARRIE NORDLUND: I mean, to me who is just Joe consumer right now, I'm like what? That is nuts. And this is why a dozen of eggs cost like $100. I mean, I know it's probably like tangentially so, but like it has some sort of effect on wages and consumer prices and all that stuff in some way that I don't quite understand but--

MARK BLYTH: It's certainly-- I mean, whether it has a direct inflation effect or not, that's debatable, but probably not. But yeah, I mean, it's tied up in this thing of sort of like there's this like behind the curtain all these people are playing all these games that makes people trust things even less and less. And then when they find out sort of like interest on reserves, basically, banks get paid just for showing up with cash. I don't get paid for showing up with cash. I've got a savings account at a local bank here. I literally get paid like-- I must be about-- the real rate of return on this must be about 0.2%.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yeah.

MARK BLYTH: I mean, it's like-- anyway, what can I tell you?

CARRIE NORDLUND: Here's an advertisement and then a bridge to our lighter fare is that Apple has their credit card and then if you set up a savings account with them, you get like 3%, which is like gigantic in terms of the savings--

MARK BLYTH: I have that. I have that card and it's 4 and 1/2%.

CARRIE NORDLUND: It's 4 and 1/2%.

MARK BLYTH: Oh, yeah.

CARRIE NORDLUND: But still it's-- I know there's a boondoggle in there. I just don't know--

MARK BLYTH: No, there isn't. It's just that their cost of capital is so low. They're sitting on so much cash they don't need to act like a bank. They don't need to go borrow somebody else's money to lend out to someone else and sit in the middle. They just have cash so they just-- what do we do with this cash? I don't know. Why don't we just run a credit card.

Goldman Sachs were running it for them and they weren't making any money out of it because it's just so cheap for them to do it. So they've backed out and somebody else is going to run it now. But I mean, it's great. I mean, I got 4 and 1/2% for showing up. It's almost like I'm going to the Central Bank.

CARRIE NORDLUND: It's like you're the Bank of England. Are you going to use that money to buy the VR headset?

MARK BLYTH: No. I'm not. Absolutely not. Because we already have an Oculus 2 and that got used for about 10 days and has been sitting gathering dust ever since. So the thing about headsets, I don't know if you've ever had any experience with these things, is after wearing it for an hour, you're like, get this thing off my face. It doesn't matter how good the experience is.

CARRIE NORDLUND: No, that's interesting because some of the reviews were saying that humans we just-- we don't want to have our peripheral vision cut off like from the dinosaurs or the mastodons or whatever. We want to be able to see to the sides, and that does that. Plus, it's a pain and it's like a thing a goggles on your head and that's heavy.

MARK BLYTH: I mean, even the Oculus, it doesn't weigh that much. But unless you get a special supporting headdress that has a kind of counterweight at the back, you literally can't wear it for like an hour. It's crazy. So anyway, I think all that's nonsense. I mean, it's just--

CARRIE NORDLUND: You don't think it's the future.

MARK BLYTH: Oh, God. No, the whole sort of like Meta thing and all the rest of it, like this is, again, another example the billionaire paradox that was spoken about before. What's the billionaire paradox? They have so much money they never know when they've failed because you can burn through $2 billion and you've got $20 left. And Zuckerberg's this guy, he'll never fail because there's never an end to how much money you can chuck at a project. So it's always just a question of time, et cetera, et cetera.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Well, actually a couple of my friends, they said-- one of my friends said that they almost cried when they tried on the Apple headset because it was just so-- and it wasn't that they were in a different world, just the ability of them being able to see. And I've not tried them on so this is just totally anecdotal, but I was kind of surprised that my friend was as emotional as he was, but you're just shrugging.

MARK BLYTH: Maybe there's an immersive experience there that I haven't experienced yet, but it's not-- I'm too old.

CARRIE NORDLUND: You're a well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.

MARK BLYTH: That's exactly. That is true. I am Joe Biden. Wow.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yeah.

MARK BLYTH: So in closing, tell me about Beyonce and country music in a way that isn't about like country music stations being racist because that's obviously trite and not interesting. To me, what's interesting about this, and I'd love you to tell me something about it, is this fascination with sort of like somebody who's not like a white dude from the South or a white woman from the South singing country, happens to be Black in this case, but whatever. And that's a thing. I mean, country's like one of the most popular genres across the world. People don't realize this. In Glasgow, there's a Grand Ole Opry for God's sake.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Is there?

MARK BLYTH: Yeah, seriously. I mean, it's not very grand and it's pretty old but it is an opry. So there's this sort of thing of like, Beyonce. So is this kind of like it's just because Beyonce did it or is it just this weird amnesia that we have about country music being one of the most popular genres across the world?

CARRIE NORDLUND: Well, I think it's Beyonce, period, and she said it. I mean, Beyonce, whatever she does is kind of news. She announced it at the Super Bowl with the commercial. But I also think you're right in that country music, I think, has really been dominated by white guys. And so it's a bit-- for her to have this big album.

MARK BLYTH: But I mean, is that-- you don't have to think of Willie Nelson to think of country. I mean, you can think of the effect that that had on folk rock and all this sort of stuff that came out in the Twenty Tens, Mumford & Son, et cetera. There's a huge-- I just find it weird the way that people think about country as this kind of very narrow US thing, and it's not. It's actually a very expansive genre. I just find it very weird.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Well, and that Beyonce is crossing genres. OK, we didn't even talk about the Taylor Swift/Joe Biden conspiracy, that 1 and 5 Americans believe that they're in cahoots together to elect Biden.

MARK BLYTH: Well, they are. Isn't it obvious?

CARRIE NORDLUND: I mean, I don't even know. Is it really conspiracy?

MARK BLYTH: I'm not entirely sure how you would find evidence for this. It's sort of like, look, she's somebody who hasn't endorsed Trump, so clearly she's working with Biden. I'm not sure how that works.

CARRIE NORDLUND: And she did endorse Biden last time around. But in any case, it is interesting. Your point about country music is really-- is a broad heading for music. And I mean, just as someone who listens to totally probably garbage music, it does seem like it's much smaller than what it actually is. So I think that was part of it.

MARK BLYTH: Anyway, I just found it weird. It's like reading the news and everyone's getting bent out of shape over this and I'm like, really? I mean, loads of people play country. Oh, well.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yes. I'm so fascinated by the Scots being into Grand Ole Opry.

MARK BLYTH: Yeah, look it up. Look at Grand Ole Opry, Glasgow. Look it up.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yeah. Yeah. Well, on that note--

MARK BLYTH: I think we've come to our time.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Great to see you.

MARK BLYTH: You too.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Thank you for listening.

MARK BLYTH: Bye, folks.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Talk to you soon. Bye.

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