YouSaid · the spoken record

Ken Rogoff

lines on the record: 113
first: 2025-06-12
most recent: 2025-06-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Kidding me on this topic. 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 You're withdrawal. Just, you know, fly back from here. Do whatever you need to do. So I'm glad you were able to come here. And no, it's really been really interesting. And I'm glad to learn more about everything you're doing.”
2025-06-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · "China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin." — Ken Rogoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh no, they're in trouble. I think Europe has a bright future in this context of being the team that doesn't have as many injured players. But yeah, China isn't going to be forever, but I think five or ten years that they're going to stay in trouble.”
2025-06-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · "China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin." — Ken Rogoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Than most about that. And, you know, it's in doubt now. There's not any question. When I was telling people about the book, and the book's about a lot of things besides exorbitant and privilege, the whole arc of the U.S., but I was telling them, 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. And I showed it to academics. I showed it to financial people. 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 we're thinking about it.”
2025-06-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · "China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin." — Ken Rogoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, I hope not, but we'll see. But it's certainly been amazing how the dollar is done and how the U.S. is done. And I hope we continue. We're 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 have happened with Harris winning. But he is the president at the moment, and things like liberation day. And I've talked to tech people who think it's just brilliant. I understand that. Okay, 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 also, we talked about getting rid of having the president be able to get rid of all the independent agencies. Used to be if you were a foreign investor, you invest in the United States, you thought you'd get your money back. Maybe the stock would have gone down. Maybe the real estate you bought would have gone down. But you get paid. And I think we were more exceptional.”
2025-06-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · "China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin." — Ken Rogoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think we've been fortunate by blunders, by our opposition. We've done some good things. But I think Americans forget is we have been lucky at a lot of times. I worry our luck is wearing thin. So I quote a chess player, the great Ben Larson, who is the number two to Bobby Fisher when I was playing. And he was asked, would you rather be lucky or good in a chess game? And he said, both. And I think Americans forget they know we're good, and we are good. We've talked about the dynamism, this secret sauce that we have 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.”
2025-06-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · "China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin." — Ken Rogoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's not just that we've stayed on top, we've just gone like this. We have, remember, Know in the 1970s, Europe actually peeled away from the dollar block, but the rest of the world started globalizing, China globalized eventually the Soviet Union. And the dollar just colonized. That went much bigger than even the British pound was when the sun never sat on the British Empire. And so it's been amazing and surprising, I think, to people like myself if you read what everyone was saying at the time was just that it kept going up, that our share of everything kept getting bigger and bigger. And I think definitely to some extent we've been lucky. We talked about Japan. I think China made a big mistake with sticking to the dollar so long. Europe should have delayed bringing Greece into the euro because their crisis wouldn't have been so bad.”
2025-06-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · "China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin." — Ken Rogoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pay less on our debt because of that. And that's a fascinating example you bring up. Actually, the Chinese invented the printing press. They invented paper currency way before the Europeans. But then, you know, what do you know? They kept printing a lot of it and had a lot of inflation. And I actually hadn't read that book. And that's a great example. I knew they were using silver, but I didn't that number's bigger than I knew that I'd heard.”
2025-06-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · "China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin." — Ken Rogoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Their country is like Ecuador and others that dollarize. They literally use the dollar and they need the dollars. And we're able to have them hold dollars Not silver, but we print it and they pay very low interest rates. They're holding treasury bills, not holding dollars. And it's fantastic for us. We definitely.”
2025-06-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · "China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin." — Ken Rogoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It makes us less competitive in everything else. It's partly hollowed out our manufacturing, and that's terrible. I was like a little bit of truth to that. First of all, the dollar goes like this. So it's not always high. Second of all, I mentioned the United Kingdom's 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. We're good at agriculture. We're good at a lot of things that make the dollar high. And if you're good at these other things, it's harder to be good in manufacturing. It bids up the cost of everything and the price. So, you know, on the whole, we're performing this banking function. That's really the big thing. This has gone on for really in the 50s, the 60s. It's gone on for a long time. And that's the core of our.”
2025-06-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · "China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin." — Ken Rogoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's been very good having the fact the dollars use very liquid, the markets. So you're, let's just say Silicon Valley firm, but big enough to issue debt internationally. I don't know if any Silicon Valley firms ever issued debt. But if you did, you know, some firm and you're issuing debt, people will buy it because it's in dollars. If you're the same firm in France, forget it. They don't want to hold euros. And even if you promise to pay in dollars, they're not happy about it because your income's not in dollars. So it's been fantastic. This is something that's been debated. Steve Moran, who was a Harvard student, Harvard PhD, he has made an argument. It's quite clever. He's the head of Trump's Council of Economic Advisors. He's a very smart guy. He's made this very clever argument that because everybody loves our currency.”
2025-06-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · "China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin." — Ken Rogoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The core of the benefit we get is actually that we borrow safe assets, if you want to call our debts safe, and we invest in risky stuff. And that's Charles Kendallberger who 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. We are making money hand over fist. It's sort of the same thing as the equity premium, where you hold stocks not always, but on average, it's better than holding bonds.”
2025-06-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · "China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin." — Ken Rogoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So just to note, the United Kingdom's not the reserve currency. They're not the dominant currency. It used to be 100 years ago. They're not. And they look a lot like us with big current account deficits. They're one of the countries. That's why Trump was able to strike a deal with them because they weren't really running a surplus against us anyway. They're overfinancialized even much more than we are.”
2025-06-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · "China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin." — Ken Rogoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We solved all our wars with sanctions, but no mistake. We have used that in place of military intervention a few times, so that's been great. And I think losing that and not appreciating how important that is is a terrible blunder that we might be making right now.”
2025-06-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · "China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin." — Ken Rogoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the adorb and 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 half a percent to a percent less. We're talking hundreds of billions of dollars. 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, I mentioned, you know, I was in my teens at the end of the 1960s. 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. Sanctions, I'm not saying that.”
2025-06-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · "China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin." — Ken Rogoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, 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 borrow less. And do we wish we were paying higher interest rates? I mean, 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.”
2025-06-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · "China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin." — Ken Rogoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Canada, for example, that's been a big problem. But I'm bullish on the United States. I mean, don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying, you know, everyone should leave the United States and go to Canada. Although my wife thinks that sometimes, but for other reasons. When I have to mention, when I was playing chess in the late 1960s, I was living by myself in Europe. And Nixon got elected. And I felt about Nixon the way I think a lot of people in your generation, or at least the millennials, think about Trump. And I didn't want to come back to the United States. So there are a lot of people who talk about that, but I think the United States is great. But I think countries which are smaller, they're not the reserve currency. They don't have access to these deep pockets of domestic and foreign borrowers and all those countries fit into that framework.”
2025-06-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · "China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin." — Ken Rogoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was not the only thing going on in the world that your dad is just one thing. Countries like certainly Australia and Canada examples, they are what we call commodity exports. They know that sometimes the sun shines and sometimes it's a dark winter. They know they don't quite sell oil, but they sell some coal natural gas and some oil. They know things move around. They know they need to save for a rainy day Norway's just like in a whole nother league. Yeah, I mean, there's lots of factors to whether a country is going to do well and the lower debt countries have less of a problem. But Canada, Australia are commodity exporters and face very volatile income streams. So they tend to be more nervous about debt. By the way, they have a lot of housing debt.”
2025-06-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · "China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin." — Ken Rogoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, but that's for the no, I mean, these are very political, I mean, I think Brexit's an example of democracy gone amuk. What a dumb idea. Maybe I won't say, I don't know if Brexit was right or wrong. Okay, I'd be like, well, no, 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 are a lot of whole government departments here with people specializing in what we should do. And actually, I think there are experiments. Washington State experimented with different voting choices. Maine did. There are these ideas out there, but we're sort of a long ways from converging on anything.”
2025-06-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · "China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin." — Ken Rogoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Somebody asked me if you were a Republican president or something, what would you do? What problem would you face? And 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 want it to do. That's the same thing for the 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. And the private sector can kind of work around it. I'm not saying it's perfect. There are lots of things we should do. But look, this is, you know, out of my paycheck, so to speak. You're the former chief economist of the”
2025-06-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · "China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin." — Ken Rogoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe paying financial help. I don't know. Maybe you're right. I don't have a magical solution to this. All over the world Nobody's finding a particular great solution to it. The only encouraging thing is these things go in waves. And so maybe this one will end. But we're certainly in a really difficult situation right now where”
2025-06-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · "China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin." — Ken Rogoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But they are constrained to believe what Congress tells them. Congress says, we're putting in this tax hug, but it's going to go away after 10 years, or we're doing this policy. It's all going to change. They're forced to use some of the parameters, whereas the one in the UK is more independent. You know, there are lots of complaints about it, but that's a very poor man's fiscal authority, just somebody that says, this is what your deficit looks like. The same things as our congressional budget office does, 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?”
2025-06-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · "China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin." — Ken Rogoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Been a lot of people tried this with, for example, having what are called fiscal councils And I did a paper once with Julia Pollock, who's a brilliant economist. You can look her up when she was an undergraduate about fiscal councils. That was quite a while ago. And a number of countries experimented with it, but it hasn't worked. The country which has done the most with this is probably the United Kingdom. George Osborne, when he was Chancellor, set up this fiscal authority where the big thing they did. Was they made predictions. So the government doesn't get to make different predictions. And you don't also have to go by their predictions, but they got to say whatever they think. Our CBO does not get to do that quite the same. Our Congressional Budget Office, they're very good.”
2025-06-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · "China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin." — Ken Rogoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. So, for example, Asia has a lot more governance problems, I would say on the whole. And there's a reason that their price earnings ratios are lower because you don't trust the governance. You're right. You're right. I mean, so that's fair. I mean, a lot of people are just betting on that, but I think Europe's not so hopeless that it can't pull it together. I make the 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 our star, Jason Tatum, was injured. Well, you may not have gotten any better Europe, but if somebody's hobbling the United States, and I do think that's going on to some extent now, you know, you do better”
2025-06-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · "China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin." — Ken Rogoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I made a look. You have a lot of friends who spend all their time doing this and I wouldn't pretend to. I hold a very neutral portfolio because I talk to policymakers and world leaders even on occasion and I don't want to be someone who's talking about regulating Bitcoin and owning a lot of Bitcoin not to pick a random example. And so I wouldn't regard myself as great at this. I mean, I just, you know, but yes, I think there's a case for international diversification, particularly into Europe at this point because They have so much potential to catch up. There's just as in, I think, California where you're from, there's a little bit of dim awareness that it might be over-regulated and you might do things differently. I feel that's happening in Europe.”
2025-06-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · "China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin." — Ken Rogoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lot of my friends teased me and said, You would have made a lot more money if you just hadn't followed your own advice. So, you know, and I could think of plenty of other examples like that. But yeah, my instinct is that, you know, this idea that what is it, our U.S. premium just should get bigger and bigger and bigger, these things have some regression to mean. Maybe not with AI, all being in the U.S. Is it”
2025-06-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · "China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin." — Ken Rogoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very mathematical book called Foundations of International Macroeconomics. And in theory, you should diversify. You shouldn't put all your money in the United States. And I did a video with Big New Brzezinski, Miko Brzezinski's father for people who don't know who he is, but he was Carter's Kissinger. I did a video with him that Merrill Lynch produced, and it was about why international diversification could be good. And I don't think I mean to say was very, very limited. I feel quite fine about what I said. I wasn't doing any consulting at the time. I just did 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 this. It circulated half a million copies of it, of this.”
2025-06-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · "China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin." — Ken Rogoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Books about exchange rates and when Japan's really weak or when the dollar is really strong, very hard to predict exchange rates, but then it is. So I think the euro will do well. There's a lot of room to catch up in Europe. So I actually think I'm kind of nuanced in what I say in the book because Trump hadn't been elected yet. But I say if Europe seems to be under pressure to remilitarize, I was aware that Harris was probably going to cut the U.S. defense budget, so that would put pressure on them, remilitarizing 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. But yeah, I do. Now, I have to say, just so your listeners can calibrate this, I once, you know, my first book was a”
2025-06-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · "China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin." — Ken Rogoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what I think I say very concretely is that when the dollar is really high, you should expect the euro to go up. And I feel strongly about that. Like when my first important paper was about exchange rates, that's why the”
2025-06-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · "China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin." — Ken Rogoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Long term interest rates, not what the Federal Reserve does, it just sets the overnight interest rate, the market setting, these long-term interest rates. I think they're more likely to go up. But I think AGI is only a piece of it, I think, that the debts rising everywhere, the remilitarization of a lot of the world needing to deal with climate change eventually. If we're not dealing with climate change, we're dealing with climate disasters, 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 everything's going to be better”
2025-06-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · "China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin." — Ken Rogoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Interest rate. And it had gone to like minus one at one point after the pandemic at average zero for about 10 years between 2012 and 2021. And it's higher now. And that is, for a macroeconomist, the biggest question in the world because it affects asset prices, it affects risk, it affects volatility. So the question I regard as just a normalization, I think that's something that was likely to happen. If you were to go around, talk to my younger colleagues or other places, there's quite a debate about that. There's a lot of people who think we're getting old, we're not inventing anything. I know you're just debating against that and good for you, but I tend to think interest rates are more likely to go up than down going forward. And I'm talking about these.”
2025-06-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · "China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin." — Ken Rogoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I'm going to get to it, but just where we are, I had been arguing interest rates today. I mean, I follow this all the time and maybe a lot of people who listen to don't, but inflation adjusted interest rates. And I want to pick there's a 10-year bond that's indexed to the inflation rate that our treasury issues. Inflation index is only about 10% of our total debt. But, you know, it's not, there's tax stuff and it's not perfect, but it's like a pretty good measure of what we call the real.”
2025-06-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · "China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin." — Ken Rogoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think AGI and AI are upward pressures on interest rates. So lots of crude reasons. The huge energy needs I should have asked you about that first, you know, having to provide all the energy needs. And also, as you say, traditionally when you did a lot of investment, it raised wages, but it's possible, and there's economists like Daran Asimoglu have shown it can go both ways. It's not difficult to show it can go both ways. If you're really just substituting for workers, it's making capital more valuable. You just even invest more. So with what the pressures on monetary policy a little bit depend on that, in principle, it makes life easier. If it did push things down, the interest rate down to zero, there are interesting questions around that, but maybe your audience might not be that fascinated by them as I am.”
2025-06-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · "China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin." — Ken Rogoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Interest rates went to zero basically And it's a whole nother line of discussion, but they felt they couldn't lower them into significant negative territory. So they're sort of paralyzed. There's this deflation or too low inflation. Monetary authorities thought they knew how to create inflation, but that's always been by cutting interest rates lower. When they've hit a bottom, they don't. I have a whole book about negative interest rights, but a whole other thing. But if we're imagining interest rates to go up, it's not much of a technical real interest rates, inflation. It's not much of a technical problem. You just let the interest rates go up a little less so that you're not getting deflation.”
2025-06-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · "China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin." — Ken Rogoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they're not. And why aren't they? And that's really a cornerstone. And 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 that are willing to let the prices fall. You certainly can do that. We're going to still have some human workers. I don't know. I guess a question on what monetary policy should be is, do you think interest rates are going to go up or down? When we had deflation last time from this demand deflation, which is what happened after the financial crisis and the pandemic, interest rates went down. I mean, my intuition here is that interest rates would be needing to go up real interest rates, real inflation interest rates. Deflation is not such a problem. You just don't need to let them go up as much. When we were in the”
2025-06-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · "China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin." — Ken Rogoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, that is a very good point. Frankly, Keynes founded modern macroeconomics, and he was an incredible renaissance person, just having sort of both sides of the brain. And one of these insights he had that just transform things before we just used these what we call general equilibrium models, demand, supply, prices moved to keep them into line. And Keynes was looking at the Great Depression and he said prices should be coming down.”
2025-06-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · "China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin." — Ken Rogoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We certainly can run monetary policy the same way, so you don't automatically get deflation just because some goods are going down. You can do things to increase demand so that their upward pressures on the final prices, even if the AI workers are not demanding anything, you can put a lot of demand. So the firms charge a lot. And not just for the services that AI is replacing, their raw minerals and all the materials that go in. You know, 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 good. And so there aren't the same pressures”
2025-06-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · "China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin." — Ken Rogoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, anytime you get a big productivity boost, it's fantastic and it becomes quickly. And yes, that can solve problems. I will say that historically there have been lots of times when countries have had good growth, even higher than their interest rate, and they still get into trouble because fiscal policy is not mechanical. It's political. I mean, how much do you spend? Who wants what? It's not an arithmetic question. Let me say this another way. Nobody ever defaulted or had high inflation because of arithmetic because they couldn't pay because you couldn't have called in someone to know what to do. They do it because of these political pressures. And if I think if AGI came that fast and that big, it would make the populism phenomenon that we're facing now seem like nothing.”
2025-06-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · "China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin." — Ken Rogoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it's going to cause a pause in growth. I mean, The main reason debt crises happen is we don't have an automated system of working it out. Like when the stock market crashes, okay, it's painful, but you're looking around for who got hurt. But when you have debt crashes, we take five years, ten years to figure out who owes what. It's that process of allocating the losses that Causes problems. And that, by the way, is why so many people thought China is fine. You know, the president will just tell everyone what it is. And that turns out to be not as true as they thought.”
2025-06-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · "China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin." — Ken Rogoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The dollar being so used everywhere, well, maybe first, but as other countries use it less, our interest rates will be even higher. So I'm an academic and I'm not particularly looking to put my ideas forward by being maximally hysterical. But hysterical is definitely in the realm of possibility here, and nothing's in the, I mean, what I say is more likely than not, actually not that it's not definitely going to happen. We could have growth, we could have a whole lot of high-skill immigration. We could Make changes. There are lots of things that could go well. On the”
2025-06-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · "China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin." — Ken Rogoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think it'll be quite a wake up call for Americans and having to do an adjustment under difficult circumstances. Most likely, we just got hit by a shock. We'd like to borrow a lot. The bonds are going up faster than they did the other times we did. And we're not able to do as much. It's not the end of the world. During the European debt crisis that happened 2010 to 2012 mostly. The Europeans raised their retirement agents, almost everybody. They didn't do it right away. They did it like 10 and 15 years out. And there's stuff you can do. So I want to be careful to say it's not like the end of the world, but pretty unpleasant. I think it will go across the whole world because the world's very dollar-centric. I think it will not be good for our franchise.”
2025-06-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · "China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin." — Ken Rogoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now it's bigger than the federal debt by a wide margin. So it's sort of a different world to putting in financial repression now when that's a big part of our business models, the financial sector.”
2025-06-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · "China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin." — Ken Rogoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe. I mean, we didn't have any financial crises for a long time because they were very repressed. And 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, and it works until you blow up. So, I mean, 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. I mean, a thing I should have emphasized are 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. There wasn't, I'm slightly being hyperbolic and maybe it was 50% of GDP altogether, everything else. Locke state and local debt had been defaulted on.”
2025-06-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · "China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin." — Ken Rogoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Financial markets as you grew up in, as young people know them today, they didn't exist back then. But the world has changed a lot”
2025-06-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · "China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin." — Ken Rogoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We'll start with World War II, but it's never just one thing, obviously. There are a lot of things. So 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. And I will say there's a lot of interesting papers about World War II that Americans just work really enthusiastically. I mean, there was real patriotism in the production. I'm not saying we're not now, but they were able to have people fill these factory jobs that we probably can't even fill today. So as we emerge from World War II, we had all the soldiers came home. That's a huge growth lift. And we didn't manage it perfectly. We actually had quite a bit of inflation during that period. But it was so...”
2025-06-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · "China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin." — Ken Rogoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they'd sit there patiently. And it was like I was teaching them, you know, the music of Freda Stair or something. And they go, okay, that 21st century, the internet, you know, can never happen, or I teach debt. And if I have foreign students, they're all having problems. I mean, so they raise, but the Americans, we can just do whatever we want, you know, and but it's changed.”
2025-06-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · "China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin." — Ken Rogoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, but you know, there's an intellectual market. This was a huge miss. And there's an intellectual market for figuring it out. So one of the good things about the American economic university system, at least in the sciences, I'll speak about economics, is that, okay, you know, things drift off, but if it's way wrong and they were certainly way wrong about inflation, I believe way wrong about interest rates and debt. There's some rebalancing. And we have a very... Competitive system of publishing. We have a seminar system that's just ruthless. So, you know, there's a debate around it. It's not settled, and maybe I'm wrong, and they're right, but it's definitely getting debated. Whereas 10 years ago, I think I was like a lone voice in the wilderness saying that these things might happen again. I would teach inflation to my students.”
2025-06-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · "China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin." — Ken Rogoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no. I mean, this was a wake up call. So there was a paper at, maybe it was a blog at Hoover of looking at the most used words in our big annual meetings. There's this thing called the American Economic Association meetings. Everybody goes and they took all the abstracts and the titles for 15 years. And the word inflation had not appeared until this year.”
2025-06-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · "China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin." — Ken Rogoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know what the inflation rate is today, but it hovered up towards 100%. And they just, you know, Erdogan, he's the president of Turkey, would be firing the head of the central bank every year. But you can't count on that continuing.”
2025-06-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · "China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin." — Ken Rogoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or they haven't avoided it. I mean, they were under incredible pressures. It's changed, but I talk about this a little also in my book, that you go through the working papers and the research at the various Federal Reserves. And it's all about inequality, environment, social justice, you'd be strained to find papers about monetary policy during that period because they're under pressure. So part of being independent is bending with the wind. But they've managed to keep their core competency, their core setting monetary policy independent. No, it's been amazing, but it's a constant fight. You can go to a country like Turkey where”
2025-06-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · "China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin." — Ken Rogoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What you well know what's happened. It's been overrun by politics. In fact, we have this, there's this huge thing going on right now. I don't know how it's going to play out where the Fed's been protected, though not as much as you think, but Trump's got to the Supreme Court and been told he can fire the head of any agency. And I assume by inference he can also fire anybody at any agency. So it's just, I think that's a terrible mistake. I mean, I think we need to have independent agencies. And you have an evaluation project. They answer to Congress. They go off in the wrong direction, you try to fix it. But to just have everything switch every four years before”
2025-06-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · "China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin." — Ken Rogoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source