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Gillian Tett

lines on the record: 74
first: 2023-11-01
most recent: 2023-11-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Or based on natural language processing models, which essentially operate not by pre-writing code, but by essentially mimicking humans, by observing them on massive scale, that shift has been driven by about 200 people. So there's about 200 people who are really the key players in this space right now in the West. I'm leaving outside China. As it happens, the UK has played a key role in actually generating some of those 200 people. Some like Jeff Hinton, who was at King's in Cambridge, is called the godfather of AI. He'd been critical to Google's development in that field. Some like Demos Josebis, who created Deep Mind, again, is critical. So you've got quite a few Brits in there, although a lot of them have migrated to the US. But it's literally only 200 people.”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When they're going to meet physically next week is Bletchley Park. Because, of course, they're having the UK AI Summit, although actually there won't be, you know, there'll be quite a lot of tech representation there, but not across the board. One of the very odd things about next week's summit is you have the big tech companies represented big time, but actually very few of the British AI companies represented there. So that's another oddity. But it indicates how the global engines of growth are developing right now. If you ask me what can government do about AI, one of the problems is that what's happened in the AI sphere in the last year, which is really a shift from what people call symbolic systems of AI, which write code and rules about how AI is going to operate preemptively as opposed to statistical systems of AI like ChatGPT,”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right now, of innovation and onshoring, manufacturing revival, the IRA, all of those things are really driving a lot of growth in the US, plus they arguably tackle their banking problem. The most part, you know, a more supportive fiscal stance right now.”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As an advantage. What exactly is going to be the strength of the British economy? And that's one question I have going forward. In terms of the Europe versus the US, why has Europe underperformed? Well, it's not just a recent thing. It's been underperforming for years. One of the most shocking statistics that I'd urge anyone to look at if they have time on their hands or are paid up nerd like me is the companies which dominate the league table of the top 100 companies in the world. And the number of those that are American is shocking and the degree to which that has expanded in the last 10 years is shocking. And Britain is barely nowhere. You know, Europe is barely anywhere. And the US economy is an absolute motor.”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is there potential for growth in the UK economy? Absolutely, of course there is. And there are sectors of the UK economy which are quite encouraging right now. One of the problems, though, of course, is a high rates. Another problem is the falling productivity. And another problem is the fact that the UK has a lot of debt. And then on top of that, you have this little thing called Brexit, which I know is wildly controversial. I don't want to get too derailed by that. But the reality is that I think the impact of Brexit was concealed for quite a long time by COVID and the fact that all the other supply chains were basically being reconfigured and we were dealing with other shocks. For me, the really big question in the future for the UK is in a world where we're no longer a convenient quasi-offshore entry point for the European market, what exactly do we have as a USP?”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'll be very surprised. I think they're going to play for time and sit on their hands for a while and pray for a miracle. Probably sums up Rishi's the next approach as well.”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I've learned in writing articles for the FT over the years that we have to always write as if our mother's reading it and the mother doesn't know anything about economics, that's kind of theory or the father. But there's two ways you can judge interest rates. There's the official rate set by the Bank of England and there's the rate set in the markets by investors. They sort of move in tandem, but not always. And one thing has happened recently is that the rate set in the market by investors has shot up at the long end, i.e. for 10 years because people think that either the central banks are going to have to raise rates in the future or inflation is going to be high, or they think that no one's going to want to buy those bonds because people don't trust the government.”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm suggesting they have a very, very nasty choice to make. Andy Haldane, who was previously chief economist at the Bank of England and is writing columns for the FT, he suggested, for example, that what the central bank should do is simply say they're going to take a holiday from the 2% target for a period of time and just essentially ignore it. And potentially, if not keep rates stable, then cut them to keep growth high. I think there are many, many people out there who would agree right now. But the problem is for the central banks to do that, they're terrified that if they admit in public they're backing away from 2% at all, then basically, you know, the markets will lose all confidence in what they're doing. And you'll get a very nasty reaction that basically drives up market rates separately from policy rates. It's worth stressing just, you know, again, an apologies to those of you who are economists for whom this is so obvious.”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Than we did 50 years ago because we're much more efficient in how we use oil and we have different sources of energy, renewables, etc. So it's not as bad as it was 50 years ago, but it's still very hard to see inflation falling in a world where petrol prices are going up.”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tacitly say we're going to ignore 2%. And that's kind of what's happening right now. It's one reason again why the yields are going up. Or they basically crush growth and keep jacking up rates for a long time. But last thing I'll say on oil and what Middle East issue is doing right now, you know, the one reason why markers have been on edge is because last time we had a full-blown Middle East crisis that led to the oil shock of 1973. And essentially you had a tripling of oil prices in a very short space of time that sparked an inflationary spiral and a wage inflation spiral. And that's obviously what people are scared about. Now, the good news is that that's very unlikely to happen like 50 years ago because the intensity of oil usage has changed radically. Today, we get 3.5 times more growth out of one barrel of oil.”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I know this is dead geeky for those of you who aren't economists, but if you measure that in the UK context, you're probably talking about even higher. Do you really think anybody is going to cheer that on at all, apart from a few pensioners who are living off their savings and hoping that the savings rates goes up with that? The challenge with central banks right now is that they either”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If it comes to the tube scent target, which is what central banks still claim that they're chasing, central banks are in a horrific situation right now. I think personally it would be extremely hard to bring inflation down to their target without raising rates to a point where they crush demand so dramatically that it sparks, if not an economic depression, then a political reaction. And in fact, you know, in the last 48 hours data has come out from the Fed and others which show that if you use the Fed, if you use what's called the Taylor rule models as to what level of rates you'd have to have to basically bring US inflation down to 2%, remember US inflation right now is running at 3.7%. So you're only talking about a 1.7 percentage point difference of bringing it down. To do that, you'd have to raise rates from 5%.”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The problem with what's happened in the last few years is that starting with COVID, that wasn't a demand issue, that was a supply issue, the production of goods, the provision of services was what was basically fluctuating. And central bankers have no tools to deal with supply-side problems. And historically, they haven't analyzed them much either. And people thought, well, it's just COVID. And then you lurch into Russia's brutal invasion of Ukraine.”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right, yeah. So actually, quite a lot of you, okay, but when I started talking about demand cycles and supply cycles, most of central banking and most economic analysis of inflation for the last few decades has been based primarily on a vision about demand cycles. And central banks were driven by this idea that if you raise rates and crush demand, then inflation goes down. And if you lower rates, inflation goes up because demand goes up.”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the fact that the UK still has an inflation rate of, what, 6-7% is hardly encouraging at all. And the fact that anyone thinks that's good news shows just how dreadful it was last year. So that's the first point to make. The real challenge of inflation right now, in my view, is that Who are the audience? I should check this first. How many people in the audience have studied economics or consider themselves to be an economist?”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I love the word brass tacks, by the way. One of the big challenges moving back from America being here is reminding myself of all these phrases which are totally normal in the UK and mean nothing to anybody else”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And what it found was that you would cut global growth by 7% points on a baseline scenario or possibly up to 12 percentage points by those global value chains falling apart. Now, I don't think it's going to happen, but it indicates a degree to which we do actually have an interconnected system still.”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Though is a global economy that remains very interconnected both through supply chains and through the internet and through financial markets to quite a remarkable degree. And to give a tiny illustration of this In the last 30 years, there's been an explosion of what people call global value chains, which basically was America and Europe buying goods from Chinese factories. And one of the remarkable things that happened two weeks ago at the meeting of the IMF in Marrakesh was that for the first time ever, the IMF modeled in great detail what would happen if the world was to break apart into two blocks in a new Cold War scenario which didn't trade with each other anymore. And it used by way of mental exercise the voting blocks at the United Nations during the Russian invasion of Ukraine.”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, obviously one of the things the IMF report stressed is that there are very big divergences and one of the great unexpected stories of the last year is that the US has outperformed all expectations and Europe has, as usual, kind of muddled along. The UK has been the worst performing G7 economy. And China has not been dazzling at all. And China has big economic challenges ahead. So yes, on one level, the idea of there being a common global economy is ridiculous. But on the other level, one of the things that's fascinating today is that even at a time when globalization is under attack rhetorically and it's under attack in practical terms because of rising protectionism and geopolitical stress, what you've also”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Going forward. So the IMS outlook is actually pretty darn boring. You know, we've gone from 3.5 to 3 to 2.9 as opposed to 3.8. The average person would go, well, what? Who minds? And for the UK, by the way, they've gone from upgrading it from a slight recession to a very low pace of growth. But in practical terms, trying to work out where we're going is no longer found just in the numbers that the IMF has tracked traditionally.”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is not so much what's in the tools, but what you've left out. Because any model is only as good as the parameters you put into that model. And the story of the last decade is that almost everything that has been traditionally left out of the models, like medical risk pandemics, which economists were not incorporating two decades ago, like environmental risk, which was at best a footnote, like technological change, like social upheaval, like what they call cutely geopolitical stress, better known as war, all of those issues which were outside the models traditionally have now become more important than what's actually in the model. And so as we look forward, we're going to have to be very careful about how we use a lot of the traditional tools.”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Inflation expectations. Now that. Half of you may But that is the way that traditionally econom And economic Have looked Where the global economy There are three That are With that right now. The Is that for most of the last 15 years Banks If not Game in town than the main game in town in terms of shaping where interest rates were. That Is now changing, and we”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To it Going to happen to the global economy. And I've worked at the FT. Now for 30 years, which makes me officially very According to my daught”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To an intellig It's great to be with you, Johnny. I've been living in a Years and have just Lit Up the role So Bit like a new”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT