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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“I think to some extent, and maybe I'm defending them too much, but you never know where the next blow is going to come from. It always looks like a lot of your stuff's wasted. You built up, but your enemy's looking at what you have. Where are you weak? Where are you strong? So I wouldn't have picked them as the obvious thing, but let's say crypto regulation would be a good example of why don't we have something more independent. Instead, it's”
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
“Well, I was going to say the Pentagon, I'm not speaking of the current Pentagon, but let's just up till now, I haven't looked closely. That's been run pretty darn well. I mean, it's the military's pretty efficient. There are people who tell me, okay, Elon Musk can take a payload into space at 15% of, or maybe it's 1 15th of what Nassau does. Why don't we let Elon Musk run the Pentagon? And there may be something to 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
“But they have one barometer that they kind of control over the long run, not in the short run, but over the long run. So that makes it a little easier to say you wanted us to have low inflation. Whereas so many other things the government does is they might be making everybody better off, but they're making some people more better off. Maybe some people are not better off. And it suddenly becomes very political. Nobody elected the Fed. It's harder to make those decisions. I'm obviously a technocrat, you know, or aside with technocrats, my students are technocrats. I think way more things should be like 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
“Well, one of the things the Fed has is a simple barometer that everybody sees. They don't really see it, but they have a feeling. They see gasoline prices. It's probably how they decide what inflation is. They have just this simple barometer. Mind you, particularly in recent years, progressives have wanted them to solve inequality, social justice, the environment.”
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
“back when there were virtually no independent central banks. I was a pawn at the Federal Reserve. I'm talking my book to say it's a great idea. I don't mean my book book, but my human capital. But it's, you know, I like to say that the Federal Reserve fights for its independence every day. And I hear senators and people like that say they're idiots. I hear people in Silicon Valley tell me they're idiots. And, you know, we should bring them under the treasury. I used to hear that just from progressives. And now I heard that recently from some tech titans that Scott Besson, he's the Treasury Secretary, smarter than Powell. Why don't we let him run things, et cetera? They could.”
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
“A little over 2%. The 30 year rate's around 5%. I think those are going to drift up. And that makes mortgage rates go up. It makes student loans go up. It makes car loans go up. Business loans go up. And it's painful. And there's sort of a question at what point that pain starts being real. And then particularly, I mentioned, I thought this would be catalyzed if we're hit by a shock where you can somewhat take back independence temporarily from the Fed. But I think it's easier to do than people think. And given that I think shocks are going to happen, maybe AGI will bring us a shock that we don't imagine that people trust that too much. I mean, Fed independence, I love. I actually wrote the first paper on that of why you should have an independent central bank.”
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
“That's for sure. So that's why Trump bashes the Fed was not the only reason he does, but he bashes the Fed. I think he actually disagrees with them, but he feels bashing the Fed if there is a recession, which. There might be. He'll blame the Fed for not lowering interest rates. It sort of depends if we run into this world where interest rates start creeping up. 10 year rate right now, I didn't look in the last minutes, but around four and a half percent, that's not indexed. The index one's about.”
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
“People are doing? I think number one is they have too much faith in the independence of the Federal Reserve. So the Federal Reserve's been this amazing institution that has evolved. It has been sort of the guardian of having, we can argue about if it's the right inflation or not, but having low inflation. And the Federal Reserve insists it's very independent. The Supreme Court recently ruled Trump couldn't fire Powell. He's the head of the Fed. I think they're dreaming that there are so many ways Congress and the president could override the Fed. Particularly if they declare there's some kind of wartime or war on pandemic situation.”
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
“Has led us to the situation in the United States where we've gotten a little happy-go-lucky about bailing everyone out, I would describe Treasury Federal Reserve policy today as when in doubt bail it out because they saw what happened. But as your financial sector grows, I mean, that will lead to a problem someday. It did, of course, in the Silicon Valley Bank. And continues to have echoes of that. But I think an inflation crisis is more likely than a financial crisis, although these things are very hard to predict.”
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
“You tighten the money supply too much and Ben came along 50 years later or something, 25 years later. He was a classmate of mine in graduate school and I had the office next to him at Princeton. And he came along and wrote this amazing paper, again, just sort of a thought piece, which is not a typical economics paper, where he said, if it was just you didn't print enough money, eventually wages and prices would adjust. Yeah, maybe it wouldn't happen in a year. Maybe it wouldn't happen in two years. But the depression took 10 years. How can that be? And he made this conjecture that there's been a lot of subsequent work showing, again, there's debate about this. Let me be careful. But I certainly view the weight of evidence saying financial crises are really 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
“They had a financial crisis, not a debt crisis. So they never defaulted on their government debt. In that period, I'm not sure if they ever did. Oh, yeah, no, I'm sorry. They did in World War II, of course. Japan defaulted on its government debt in World War II. That's an interesting story. But no, it was a financial crisis I had. So financial crisis is making your banking system not work, lending to innovators not work, lending to dynamic companies not work. Ben Bernanke really wrote at the time sort of a thought piece about this. He didn't really have numbers. He conjectured that was why the Great Depression was so bad. Milton Friedman, one of the great economists of all time, looked at the Great Depression. He said, you didn't print enough money.”
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
“Because we can print money. I mean, we can honor our debts. We just never have to default. Greece was using the euro and didn't have control.”
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
“Inflation crisis. So whether there'll be a financial crisis is the private sector. And the public sector bails out the private sector. So the government, we're not going to default. We're going to inflate or do financial repression or You know, baby steps, austerity, you know, something. We're not going to have a crisis like Greece had it. That's just wrong. But inflation's not pleasant.”
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
“Be a what everyone calls austerity, which, by the way, this word austerity, the progressives use whenever you just ignore debt building up and spend whatever you want and austerities when you don't do that. I mean, I think... I think Ezra Klein's book actually makes abundance, makes the point that there are costs and benefits to a lot of things. And this austerity language is pretending there are no costs to having your debt be higher. There are only benefits. So, yes, that's what everyone else has to do. And we've gone longer than most without doing 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
“But I think when it happens again, markets will be very unforgiving about it. They will look at us and say, you are not to be trusted. And so it'll raise the interest rate more. Our debt will build up faster. And I think at that point, there's this saying about Americans that's attributed to Winston Churchill, we always do the right thing after we try everything else. And I suspect we will try other things. Yeah.”
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 the most likely thing will be inflation, which only lets off steam because inflation sort of pulls the, it's like a default. I'm not talking about hyperinflation. I mean 10, 20% inflation over a period. We just went through that. That actually knocked about 10% of GDP off our debt. We might need more next time. So it lets some steam off. But if you're still spending too much and you haven't fixed anything, you're back in the problem. That's what's going on now. We had some steam let off, but it wasn't enough.”
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
“Typically, you have a crisis of some sort when your debt is high, your political system, your politics are inflexible. We've checked those boxes. And you get hit by a shock. You weren't ready for. You got caught on your back foot. It depends on what the shock is. It depends on how we react. The way Japan reacted was they used what we call financial repression. We can't do that to them. We can't force French insurance companies to hold U.S. debt. We can just force U.S. ones.”
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 we were mocked when we were saying that I think the New York Times had a two page spread saying how ridiculous everyone thought, you know, this was, we could have proved wrong, and maybe if we'd done things better, you know, we would have. But it is the norm. There's a few exceptions like Sweden got out in a year or two. But normally they really are different than a normal recession.”
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, look at Greece today or Portugal. You kind of get back to her having a positive growth rate, but you're not picking up. They're very different than a normal recession. And actually, in a normal recession, you go down and then back up. The United States had thought it was immune to financial crises. We really hadn't had one since 1933. And a different book that came out in 2009, I mostly write papers, but this was a book with Carmen Reinhardt. It was called This Time is Different, where we had some papers publish in advance. And we said, no, they're different when you have a financial crisis. It lasts way longer. The slowdown is way worse.”
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's still an echo of that financial crisis. Now, mind you, you're asking about our national income inequality matters. And, you know, would we have done other things? And I don't want to, in some ways, the The 2008 2009 crisis was a condemnation of the system and people could see it and maybe led to some healthy cleansing. But I think it led to a lot more damage than healthy cleansing.”
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 cumulatively lost a lot, and it led to this political crisis that caused us to lose a lot more. So, I don't know, probably 15% lower, a lot, a lot, a lot, lower than it would be because we had all this dynamic, which we're living in 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
“Boy, that's a good question. And I'm hesitant to, because I probably have some paper giving a number for that. I might say the wrong thing.”
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, yeah, yes, yes, but what happens with the financial crisis, particularly in Japan, is it sort of blew up their business model. So for example, maybe China wouldn't have overtaken them so quickly if they had been able to borrow and their financial markets were working better and they were more adroit. Their consumption collapsed, and Japan didn't quite know how to deal with it. We were much more brutal in what we allowed to happen than Japan, but we got out of it pretty quickly. I don't quite know where we got back to where we were, but we got out very quickly. They have a very consensus society. They don't want anyone, you know, to be in bad shape. And their struggle with this, I think, held them back for a long time. Okay, maybe 50%'s too much and I should say 25 or 30%, but a lot better shape. Than they happen”
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
“Well, their case is very unusual. Although having a number like 10% or 20% is very typical. In fact, one of my professors at MIT was teaching us the Great Depression. And he said, here's how to think about the Great Depression. We were going like this. It's hard to do without a Blackboard. But then he says, you know, then we get here. We go like this, and then we're going like this. We never got this back. you know, that happened during there's a lot of economic growth.”
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 again, I thought, you know, I mean, he told that to you when he read my book. And yeah, financial repression's bad, but financial liberalization needs to be done gradually. And if you do it too quickly, you get a crisis. That's many crises caused by 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
“And I used to say, well, you did that in 1985. I mean, the crisis happened. Reinhardt and Carmen Reinhardt, my co-author on many things. We date the crisis in 1992. It's seven years later. And I think I continue to think that. But, you know, I would say over the years, and particularly in recent years, I'm thinking I was wrong. These things unfold slowly. Crises don't happen overnight. They deregulate it and it worked, but they didn't know what they were doing. And I think this was a huge mistake by Japan to agree. The person who was the head of the Bank of Japan, and I apologize, I'm 70 here with all that. I'm forgetting the name exactly. So the head in 1985. And he gave the speech to officials, and he went like this and apologized very symbolically. I have ruined our country. I did this. I take responsibility.”
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 would hear from Zhang Xiaomin, who's the president of China that I met. We're not going to let this happen to us. There's no way. You know, we were discussing, I thought maybe they shouldn't have such a fixed exchange rate. And I said, well, that's what the United States said to Japan. And look what happened to Japan. And I didn't push back that much to someone like that. talk to other people, but I heard that from many people. I used to think, you know, well, how can that be? Because all of these things, there's this thing called the plaza court in September 1985, where we push them to make their exchange rate more.”
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
“Were richer than any European country, than Germany, than France, than Italy. They've moved to the bottom of the rung now. And I think the financial crisis, okay, it wasn't the only thing. But it's a long story, but I think we effectively force them to move faster, to open up and deregulate than culturally and politically they were ready to. And I give that as an example of something in the book where I changed my mind, where I had looked at that for a long time afterwards because, you know, going back to 2005, that's long after the Japanese crisis.”
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, I think 50% wealthier per person. I think way wealthier. That's where they started. I mean, it depends on which measure you use by the market exchange rates. They were richer than the United States, late 1980s. And even if you use the more complicated measure”
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, sort of famously in Mexico sometime, there were two or one telephone companies, two bread companies, two taco companies. It's very hard not to let monopolies sit use their political power. So how do you get around that? And the thing that Japan did that was really pretty innovative, Germany did it, I think, to some extent also, was in the export sector, you are competing with the world, not just with other companies. And that creates this innovation, this creativity. And Japan did really well with that, but over time others imitated it and sort of took, were building some of the things that they were building. So that's part of it, the aging's part of it, but I think the financial crisis is a very big part of 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
“I mean, South Korea has had a crisis in 1983 and 1997. I mean, they haven't been crisis free, by the way, that they're. Well, there are a lot of factors. The demographics would be the most obvious one. The rise of China, the rise of not just China, Korea, other competitors. So Japan invented this business model. I think a lot of countries have duplicated the business model was export led growth. And the thing that maybe most people wouldn't think about in that is it creates competition. Most countries aren't as big as the United States, and there aren't as many different firms trying to do the same thing. And of course, we have trouble with competition here.”
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
“Well, so absolutely, there are a lot of countries in Africa, Latin America. Some of them are almost client states of China that they can force. But they sell around, of course, sells, you know, like a lot of its oil to China, even when there's sanctions. And they're moving in that direction. It's not just about what you invoice, the payment in. It's how do we acknowledge it? How do we clear our books? That's what they're working on. And it's coming. I mean, the Europeans are working on it too, by the way. Europe is not happy with the situation. They're actually... Forming a central bank digital currency that's moving quite a bit faster than I thought it would be. And that's actually one of the reasons that they're doing it for international payments.”
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
“Know maybe Trump will bring down the markets and then there's nothing to save, but they don't want to be the ones to bring down the markets and to cause a global crash.”
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
“Purchase and my bank gets that I'm going to get a credit. How does that take place? How does it take place and we're in different countries? United States just disproportionately controls that. And that they can't live with. They could live without their $2 trillion for a little while, but they can't live without being able to pay suppliers and countries. So they're working hard on developing their own payments mechanisms. Russia actually did quite a bit in preparation for the invasion. And we see China doing that. Maybe they're selling treasury bills. We don't know, you know, exactly. I would advise that to them, you know, if I were a Chinese economist talking to them. But I don't think it's going to be something they'll do suddenly because”
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 think they're going to do it suddenly, but just on very crudely on their reserves, they're definitely moving more and more into gold. Don't help necessarily to move into euro or Canadian dollars because they might side with us, but they're doing what they can to diversify. I don't think they've diversified into They are doing very concretely is not just what are they holding. That's the big fact everybody looks at. They officially hold a trillion dollars in treasury reserves. The estimate a student of mine did in a nice paper, and I think others agree with, is more like $2 trillion. They hold a lot indirectly through proxies. But the other part of it is just the whole financial system runs through the United States. What we sometimes call the rails or the pipes of the system. So your bank gets 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
“I think they're digging their way out of a crisis. The idea right now we know their prices are falling. And it's not because they're inventing stuff really fast. We know that interest rates are being pushed to zero. All these symbols of there's a demand's been crushed and the economy is not doing well. So I would say historically they have given numbers which are accurate on average as best as we can tell. I think that's gotten less and less true in the Xi Jinping era.”
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
“Ride on the train from Boston to New York. I mean, it's nicer than it could be, but it's no high-speed train. You mentioned China. Oh my gosh, their high-speed trains are just incredible. They're good at that, but the really creative stuff, I don't want to say, I mean, there's some amazing Chinese companies, but let me say the US is a really good at it. And we've kept that in our DNA. And I think that's very important to preserve 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
“And I think economists at least consider ourselves terrible at that when you go back and look at any of these commissions that were supposed to figure out what was going on. And they happen periodically. Maybe Brookings institution puts one together. Maybe the government does. And it's just my former colleague, the late Dick Cooper, had a whole list of these. So it is very hard to know. But my gut instinct is what's happening to China is what's happened to Japan, what's happened to Asia, what happened to the Soviet Union, where we have a more dynamic economy. We're not perfect. Like, and maybe we're screwing it up right now with all the tariff wars and the globalization. But we have this dynamism and creativity that other places, at least other large economies, just can't replicate. They can build stuff. I mean, the French have better high-speed trains than we do. I hope you don't.”
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 at least in the long, long time. So we're talking about the absolute size. They have four times as many people. But yeah, I mean, there were these projections by Goldman Sachs, by many others that we'd be like Canada is to the United States pretty soon. And I think like all these extrapolations that Proves wrong, which brings me to, I think, a big topic, which is a lot of people will look at some trend, whether it's, you know, growth in something, AI, China, and then just, you know, projected into the future.”
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 they'll gain about a percent a year on us, maybe. I don't think they're going to grow away faster than the United States.”
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 didn't realize it was as high as 75%. I thought it was a little lower. Actually, you can look at it very round. I was actually going to say 75% in 20. I mean, it said one point in 2024 is around two-thirds. But it's really volatile with the exchange rate. The dollar's really high. So when the dollar is really high, it makes us, you know, look bigger.”
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 I mean, I think one of the mistakes we're making about trying to build everything ourselves let our allies do some of this. The Koreans are really good at building ships. That's another place we could be importing from. You're right about the soldiers. They're paid much less. They have a lot of advantages in a conflict against us. way ahead in your department, tech. And that is our advantage at the moment if that were to dissipate, it would certainly hurt.”
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, so I mean, in the book I'm talking about your geopolitical power, where if you're going to give money to somebody, what's it worth and how much they can use it? No, but you're absolutely right. I mean, they just crush us and shipbuilding. It's partly because they build commercial ships and there's a lot of symbiosis between commercial and military. I think they're 50% of the global shipbuilding market. For us to build a new aircraft carrier takes years and years and years, incredible expense”
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
“That's the only thing they really let people save, and you could either save in a bank account, which you got a crummy interest rate or a house. They're going down. So people are cutting back. They can dig their way out. There's no magic bullet to make them grow at 5%, which is, by the way, the official number, but I don't think they're anywhere near that. I mean, there's no simple thing, but Investment and consumption.”
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
“16 also. The ticket to getting people to spend more is to provide more security than they have. So first of all, there's nothing like our social security system. You need to say if your old age, there's nothing like our health system. If you work at one of the big state-owned factories, they give you healthcare. But otherwise, you know, you're on your own. They're not allowed to invest abroad. I mean, they're not allowed, I mean, they have, it goes in waves, but they're not allowed to put their money abroad. So they're trying to be careful about all of that and not do things suddenly. There's nothing to do overnight, but fundamentally, if you're looking at China and say, what's wrong? It's that the consumer isn't spending enough. And what's happening right now is worse because housing prices are collapsing”
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
“Well, what everyone's told them forever is their saving rate and investment radar astounding. You know, it was higher before, but it's still maybe 45% or something their consumption rate. Ours is pushing 70. European countries are a little more temperate, but they're in the low 60s. Their consumption is very low. They have some wealthy people that you saw when you go to the marquee cities. But a lot of China is living on like $200 a month kind of incomes. You could give them money. You could let them consume instead of exporting it. They've been very reluctant to do that. I mean, so you could do things to encourage consumption. You could actually even just changing their exchange rate policy to allow it to appreciate more at times would make imports more or less expensive. They have been very reluctant to do that. That's what everyone tells them. That's certainly what I said in 2000.”
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 so they're having to reorient. And I mean, people just aren't that flexible. It's like when AI comes and puts everybody out of jobs, when construction jobs are gone and when all these indirect things are gone, it's not that easy to move everyone.”
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
“Assembly as a tourist site. No, it's very much that feeling. And the young people don't want to live there. I have a lot of young people here as students and I run into people. They don't want to live in these towns. And the jobs aren't there. I can't criticize them for trying that. If you'd ask me in 2005, Should we try to encourage people to go out to the Rochesters and the Liverpools and the Wren Francis? I would say yes. You know, there's too much in the big cities. There's overcrowding. Look what happened to San Paulo. Look what happened to Mumbai. But I would have been wrong. I mean, that these forces are very powerful. So a lot of their growth in what they call their GDP is this stuff”
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 again, I wasn't running things if you try to change, if things seem to be working and you try to change things, you get thrown out, it's not easy to be in those shoes”
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 have invested like crazy I've been to a few and I've studied the data on a lot they're you know have amazing roads amazing real estate amazing housing but the feel of death you know in those cities and so they were very good at building stuff that the Russia was very the Soviet Union was very good at building cement factories and steel plants and railroads but that they've run to the they've run that's run their course and they have other stuff green energy ai electric vehicles but believe it or not that stuff's still tiny compared to infrastructure and real estate's a third of the economy by some measures so i think i think they're they're in a lot of trouble now in china and they let it go on too long”
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