YouSaid · the spoken record

Kenneth Rogoff

lines on the record: 73
first: 2025-04-30
most recent: 2025-04-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“But I have a lot of things I'm excited about. Part of what was so great about the book is I had sort of, I would describe a mini renaissance in my research and I'm able, at least I feel that way. I mean, I don't know if the rest of the world thinks that, but it gives me joy sort of to have some confidence about some of the ideas. Although, as you say, there's much more to it.”
2025-04-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Kenneth Rogoff on Monetary Moves, Fiscal Gambits, and Classical Chess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I have a lot, you know, like any academic, I already have my neck of projects, some of them, frankly, you know, grow out of the book. I think people forgotten about political economy. They just think, you know, if the central bank says the inflation rate's 2% on average, it'll be 2% and we go home. And I worked on that early in my life. I wrote the first paper on why you should have an independent central bank. And I'm working on it again. Admittedly with some very talented young people, including Marina Halleck at Yale and Pierre Yarrett, who's at Columbia, but now actually on the Council of Economic Advisors, and just thinking that, no, the political pressures are important. So that's an important topic. I'm also working on China as an area I've been working on for a long time. So I have some thoughts about comparing China and Japan, for example.”
2025-04-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Kenneth Rogoff on Monetary Moves, Fiscal Gambits, and Classical Chess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love that idea, and yeah, it creates some randomness in what initial positions you get. But I love that idea. I mean, that sounds much better to me. I would much shoot it. I have to say as a player, I played like that because I was very isolated in the United States. I wasn't following all the opening innovations. So I played all kinds of openings to be unpredictable.”
2025-04-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Kenneth Rogoff on Monetary Moves, Fiscal Gambits, and Classical Chess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, we're on the same page on that, but on the other hand, you mentioned Gukesh, and the computers have just dominate the preparation. That's why Carlson stopped. He didn't want to spend all the time.”
2025-04-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Kenneth Rogoff on Monetary Moves, Fiscal Gambits, and Classical Chess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm with you, Tyler. I mean, I take joy from classical chess. I love watching a beautiful classical chess game. I can relate to it. I mean, I'm hardwired to think about it. And Fisher Random Chess, I mean, it's a little bit like looking at problems. I respect chess problems, but the positions are often weird and improbable. I just have trouble relating to Fisher Random Chess. I hope I change. I'm just speaking from my age, but I'm so invested in classical chess. I love classical chess. I think about classical chess all the time. I don't know. What's your, why don't you like it?”
2025-04-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Kenneth Rogoff on Monetary Moves, Fiscal Gambits, and Classical Chess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I didn't even know that he played it at the time. I mean, he played a lot of things. I didn't know he was playing that. And, you know, so I knew where the pieces go. I didn't, I mean, I knew what I was trying to do and where the pieces go. And at one point, he made an overly aggressive move that just was a big mistake. And I saw it. And I got a winning advantage. It wasn't easy winning advantage. I'm convinced that if he had continued the game, he would have won, but at some point he had a choice of repeating moves, and he was losing. And so, you know, he just repeated moves. I'm not saying I would have won. I think I would have lost if he kept playing, but it just happened. I did a 10,000, 20,000 times more, I don't think it would happen.”
2025-04-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Kenneth Rogoff on Monetary Moves, Fiscal Gambits, and Classical Chess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, sort of what I tell people is if you were a professional golfer once and you play three holes with somebody, anything can happen, you know, the law of large numbers. But, you know, going more into it, he let me have white. We played Arui Lopez Spanish opening. Which he had been playing all the time. He played a variation. I looked, I hadn't prepared. I mean, it's just what he was playing all the time.”
2025-04-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Kenneth Rogoff on Monetary Moves, Fiscal Gambits, and Classical Chess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's an interesting question. It's funny because I've seen him write about Karpov, who I did play. He said, I don't know how Karpov does it. He just knows where to put the pieces. He just knows where everything goes. And he's not having to calculate like I do. And between his great nemesis was Carpath. And between the two of them, he was the calculator. And Karpov was no slouch, but Kasparov was better. I think maybe as Gary gets older, you know, I mean, your comparative advantage as a calculator is probably at your peak at a younger age. And Gary, you know, developed other tools. But he was really good at both. But I would have put Casper Op as a calculator, like a fierce calculator.”
2025-04-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Kenneth Rogoff on Monetary Moves, Fiscal Gambits, and Classical Chess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it's part of the legend. I mean, he was amazing. I played against really all the top players then, with the exception of Spassky. And, you know, they were all phenomenal, but they weren't all equally good calculators. So the best calculator I ever played was actually a Yugoslav player reach second or third named Lubievich. And he beat me. I don't know. I was 16 years old. to try to salvage some ego I said well what did you What if I did this? What were you going to do? And I showed him my best. I thought it was just like a great variation. I don't remember how long 10 moves. And he goes, mm-hmm. Yeah, but then I do this. Actually, it's this. And he goes, something 15 moves. I never played Fisher. He wrote an article about me once, as you know, but I never played him. But of course, I could well imagine it would be the same. But I'm not trying.”
2025-04-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Kenneth Rogoff on Monetary Moves, Fiscal Gambits, and Classical Chess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, Gary Kasfarov was do fool and same as Carlson. I mean, I don't know. But he was a staff. He was way above everybody in his generation. He did not have the prep that the Russians had. He worked on his own. He was not working with a team. The Russians had all this communication and coaches and everything. And by the way, you know, I was representing the U.S. and the World Junior Championships and things like that. It was a big disadvantage that you didn't have a train or a coach, you know, organizing information. Fisher was doing that at the highest level. So he must have been by far the best cover the board player then.”
2025-04-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Kenneth Rogoff on Monetary Moves, Fiscal Gambits, and Classical Chess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So he locked himself in a room for three months and did nothing but study rook endings and got to be very good. He got a hotel, he told us about it, got a hotel room with no view. And then, you know, certainly some of the ideas he showed, I still think about it. I won a game and he went over it with me against Steve Spencer. It was the last game of the tournament, which I won. And he showed me his ideas. hadn't thought of any of them. You know, it was just his fertile, I don't know if they were better, to be completely honest than what I played. I mean, of course, he's much better than me. But, I mean, just the imagination of there was this, then we're talking about unmove four, unmove five of just things that wouldn't occur to me.”
2025-04-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Kenneth Rogoff on Monetary Moves, Fiscal Gambits, and Classical Chess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, he was amazing. First of all, when I met him, he came every day to the 1969 U.S. Junior Championship over 10 days, and he sat and he analyzed with us. And the first thing, we just thought, what's he doing with us? Why is he wasting his time with us? We just thought he was so generous. But obviously, you know, his absolute intensity, his commitment. I don't know if you remember, it's hard to imagine, but he actually used to be weak at rook endings, weak for somebody like that.”
2025-04-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Kenneth Rogoff on Monetary Moves, Fiscal Gambits, and Classical Chess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He could absolutely, I mean, Anand and Kramnek were amazing and he could absolutely do that. I mean, he's close to having done it if he'll have a much more difficult challenger next time, I would suspect. I mean, Ding is an Uber talent, the person he beat, but clearly had all sorts of mental problems in the match. I mean, he's been depressed, and you could see him sort of losing it in some games”
2025-04-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Kenneth Rogoff on Monetary Moves, Fiscal Gambits, and Classical Chess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, be fantastic. Yeah, yeah. Okay, I thought you were asking a different question. No, the next, not the current.”
2025-04-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Kenneth Rogoff on Monetary Moves, Fiscal Gambits, and Classical Chess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's not even nearly first now even among others. I mean, there's a number of Indian players who are very good. I wouldn't put him ahead of Nakamura or Caruana, much less Carlson, but he's ambitious. He's talented. I wish him the best. I mean, it's wonderful that he won. But, I mean, he's got a long ways to go to beat Kasparov Fisher Carlson. fabulous for chess if he does that. I don't see it yet, do you?”
2025-04-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Kenneth Rogoff on Monetary Moves, Fiscal Gambits, and Classical Chess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it's counting the interest payments on the IMF. And yeah, I mean. He inherited this big debt. They're paying the interest, it's a very low interest on the big debt. And I don't know how that's ultimately going to get resolved. I mean, they have a lot of problems ahead. But, you know, there's a lot of strength in Argentina if they can grow again. I don't want to sound, you know, panglossian about Argentina, but goodness, they had inflation of 200% when he took over. The economy was in free fall. Look, you know, there's no magic wand you can wave over the last 80, 90 years of Argentina and make everything right.”
2025-04-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Kenneth Rogoff on Monetary Moves, Fiscal Gambits, and Classical Chess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I hope so. I think he's the best chance that Argentina's had in a long time, which is fair to say, a very low bar. The thing that he's done that I have not seen before is balancing the budget. If you're a big borrower and you keep defaulting sort of a starting point is figuring out how not to have to borrow money, he's managed to do that. I mean, I don't know that all his libertarian visions necessarily will come to pass. No, he's provided some stability, bringing inflation down, but I mean, it's so, Argentina, as you know, was one of the richest countries in the world by any measure at the turn of the 20th century, you know, in 1900. Now, they're lower middle income country. Their per capita incomes below Brazil, which is hard to get your head wrapped around. So, I mean, I think there are many reasons.”
2025-04-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Kenneth Rogoff on Monetary Moves, Fiscal Gambits, and Classical Chess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know it's still the case that those countries have hardly been models of dynamism, Germany and the Netherlands, you're right, they've been able to keep people more partly because they're not English speaking. But again, a lot of the difference in how we've done as our tech sector, that's been a lot of the innovation going through the economy. And I don't want to sound Our numbers would look like theirs.”
2025-04-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Kenneth Rogoff on Monetary Moves, Fiscal Gambits, and Classical Chess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, it's been a generalized problem in Europe, although you think they'd been doing better. I think part of it is this sucking sound of the United States with the brain drain that we have. You and I both know about deep mind, British company ends up in California. And I think there are many examples like that where when something goes well, the U.S. sucks them off. Probably they have this profound problem of the North and the South. The South is rich and the North is poor, and they just have not been able to figure that out. So, you know, if you go to London, they're doing great and they're still doing great. But they've had trouble finding jobs that the manufacturing jobs are going. They haven't figured out how to substitute for them. The U.S. is at the tech revolution. I mean, if you took that away,”
2025-04-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Kenneth Rogoff on Monetary Moves, Fiscal Gambits, and Classical Chess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it seems to be that the banks are prevented from undoing it, that we have some of these regulations, for example, that just restrict the size of your balance sheet. And the banks used to just be able to freely borrow and lend and undo things. So you'd borrow in one currency, lend in the other currency. That's how you'd undo it. But there's just been a range of puzzles like that. And of course, The biggest puzzle is productivity. Like if I go to a country like the UK, how do we get productivity? And exchange rates are still a puzzle. I mean, you asked a question about it before, but we don't have a good fully satisfactory explanation of them.”
2025-04-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Kenneth Rogoff on Monetary Moves, Fiscal Gambits, and Classical Chess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lot of debate about that. There are people who say it shouldn't be 2%, it should be 4%. People it should be 0%. I think that's a big question.”
2025-04-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Kenneth Rogoff on Monetary Moves, Fiscal Gambits, and Classical Chess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Boy, that's a really good thing because I think about research questions all the time. It's certainly been very surprising to me of how much bank regulation has created all these arbitrage issues across things that didn't exist. Like, I'm not sure that's completely unresolved, but when I was doing my book with Maury Obsfeld, we thought of what we call covered interest parity as just, you know, something that holds like, you know, law. In other words, if you borrow in one country and you borrow in another country, but do some kind of forward contract on do it, you get the same interest rate. It's not true anymore. And I think there's just a range of these puzzles that have come up since the crisis. I suppose another one would be, you know, what kind of inflation rate do we really want to have?”
2025-04-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Kenneth Rogoff on Monetary Moves, Fiscal Gambits, and Classical Chess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, if you look at inflation expectations, they moved a little bit. I mean, I'm talking about the professional, the consumer ones moved a little more, but consider what just happened, that inflation expectations didn't move more. It's remarkable. And to come back to the earlier point about solving our debt, if we ever have an inflation, I don't think that's going to happen again when we have a second inflation, that time the credibility is really going to be shot.”
2025-04-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Kenneth Rogoff on Monetary Moves, Fiscal Gambits, and Classical Chess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think it is a big puzzle. It's the first thing to say. I mean, I'm not going to claim I thought that was going to be painless bringing the inflation rate down. I don't think I was out there quite a Larry Summers level banging on the table, you know, saying that there had to be a big recession. I certainly do not buy the idea was all supply shocks. That's just nonsense. So there are these people who say, oh, is just the supply chain, the shipping lanes were closed and all that stuff. And as soon as the supply chains were back, inflation was down. Excuse me, the supply chain problems make the price go up when they go away. The price should come down. It did not. And so there clearly was, you know, even in countries which didn't do as much macro stimulus as we did. They did a lot. And they all, of course, kept their monetary policy easy. But yeah, I mean, the credibility is remarkable.”
2025-04-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Kenneth Rogoff on Monetary Moves, Fiscal Gambits, and Classical Chess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not necessarily the US, maybe in 50 years. To be fair, Europe's talking about it, but they're talking about what we call a wholesale CBDC, which is among the banks, and that's a completely different animal.”
2025-04-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Kenneth Rogoff on Monetary Moves, Fiscal Gambits, and Classical Chess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me put it this way. I don't think we should be the first to try this. Right now, we're on top. I mean, I kind of think we Pete, but that's another question. We're winning. Why do you want to change the rules of the game when we're winning? Because it's not about the currency. It's about Treasury bills. It's about the interest payment. It's about market clearing. And also, we're so big we probably are more likely headed towards having competitive stablecoins, which are regulated, which have some kind of lender of last resort than a CBDC. I'm skeptical about that. And you put yourself in a position where one screw up can paralyze everything. And it wouldn't be good if we had five stablecoins and one of them had a problem. But I tend to think that's something for Latvia or Singapore to try.”
2025-04-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Kenneth Rogoff on Monetary Moves, Fiscal Gambits, and Classical Chess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We don't have much say over that. I mean, we do now with bank, you already have that the case to some extent with bank accounts. And you can mitigate the problem. You can't eliminate it. I mean, that's generally true of cryptocurrency. Try to regulate it, you can't completely eliminate it. I mean, probably a lot of sanctions evasion is being done with stablecoins and cryptocurrency. And clearly we have not been able to touch that.”
2025-04-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Kenneth Rogoff on Monetary Moves, Fiscal Gambits, and Classical Chess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, absolutely. So in the same book, I said we need to regulate cryptocurrency. And there are different kinds of stablecoins, and it's not clear where it's ending up in the long run. But I think stablecoins eventually have to have some kind of parallel revealability to what bank accounts have, not necessarily exactly the same. But I know that's where we're headed. I think the regulators are pretty favorable to stablecoins, actually, on the whole, but not if they're being used to evade taxes and all kinds of regulations.”
2025-04-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Kenneth Rogoff on Monetary Moves, Fiscal Gambits, and Classical Chess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, again, I'm getting rid of the large denomination notes and not straightforwardly the others. And so, yeah, no, we don't want to over. I absolutely agree there's government excesses, the questions, you know, do we have, you know, we have drugs that help people after an operation and we want to have them, but does it want to mean we want to have them freely floating in the economy? And also we can phase out $100 bills and $50 bills and we can change our mind later and decide that we overdid it. I don't think we would. I think, you know, continue to go in that direction. But it's a matter of costs and benefits.”
2025-04-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Kenneth Rogoff on Monetary Moves, Fiscal Gambits, and Classical Chess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I do think about that, but the questions why we need $100 bills for that, you can pay your nanny with 20s and they'll be perfectly happy because after the $100 bills are harder to work with, you know, for them. So, no, I think you want to have ways that you can evade the law up to a point. I mean, marijuana is now legal in most places. And maybe the whole culture and society wouldn't have evolved if we didn't have a cash economy that could pay for that. So again, I think it's a question of calibration, regulation, you know, where you want to put things.”
2025-04-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Kenneth Rogoff on Monetary Moves, Fiscal Gambits, and Classical Chess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Point of view, making money by saying, hey, people love these hundred dollar bills and not figuring out that they're using them not to pay taxes. I've argued that that's penny-wise and pound foolish. And yeah, that's sort of the core of the argument.”
2025-04-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Kenneth Rogoff on Monetary Moves, Fiscal Gambits, and Classical Chess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're right, you have to travel 150 kilometers to get to an ATM machine, but it's not completely phased out by any means. I mean, it's still there. So first of all, we've had enough inflation that the $100 bill is now a $75 bill, I'll say to start with. But most of the world's currency is held in these large denomination notes. I mean, I've done further work, very little of its use in transactions. I think most of it is in the underground economy. It's used, it's not necessarily nefarious. There's drug dealing, human smuggling and everything, human trafficking. But I think the large majority of it is tax evasion. I mean, lots of people do that. Okay, I mean, I'm not trying to be holier than thou and, you know, just say everybody does that as evil. But I'm looking from the government.”
2025-04-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Kenneth Rogoff on Monetary Moves, Fiscal Gambits, and Classical Chess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so there's another, I'm going to just translate it a little bit from my model, one that Alberto, my late colleague Alberto Alcina, did and a number of others that said part of the reason debt keeps piling up is we have the liberal party, the conservative party. When the liberal parties in power, they know that debt is bad, but they know they can spend now. And they know they might not control it in the future. So they spend a lot and they borrow. When the conservatives are in power, they cut taxes and build up the debt. I think that's a very powerful, very, very powerful theory of part of why debt bills up is whoever's in power says, don't pay any attention to it. And of course, I think we end up where we are now.”
2025-04-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Kenneth Rogoff on Monetary Moves, Fiscal Gambits, and Classical Chess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There have been a lot of papers on it. I mean, I don't think there's any question. Every politician in the world, if they have the power, tries to goose up the economy before it happens. I think empirically it's overwhelming that it's true. The question is, why does it fool anyone? Everybody should understand why that's going on. And without going to details, that paper was about the paradox that I know you're just making things look good. I know you're hiding something from me so that you're exaggerating how long this can go on, how much it's costing. But I'm going to vote for you anyway. And so, you know, that's what that paper was. It looked at as a signaling model that's getting really wonky.”
2025-04-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Kenneth Rogoff on Monetary Moves, Fiscal Gambits, and Classical Chess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It does raise productivity, but the usual thing about demographics is there are less people to work with the machines, and therefore the return on the machines is lower and the interest rate goes down. But if the people are being substituted for, which is new, I mean, we've always found a way to reinsert ourselves. You won't necessarily, even in a theoretical model like Samuelson's or Solo's, get that effect.”
2025-04-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Kenneth Rogoff on Monetary Moves, Fiscal Gambits, and Classical Chess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there are many variables where assuming there's going to be some reversion to mean is just a pretty good thing to have in the back of your head. You know, you know Carmen Reinhardt and I had this book this time is different very much on the theme of people just looking at five years or 10 years and think, oh, it's just great. It's just going to go like this. And I think the real interest rates, an example, I would say the low inflations, another example. My students for a long time just didn't believe there'd ever be inflation again. I would teach it, they would fall asleep. I mean, I remember asking a question even to someone who was a research assistant at a big central bank. Explain this to me about inflation. And she said, my generation doesn't ever expect to think about inflation. We don't have it. Let me just give you examples of this. So, no, I would suspect we will have high religious.”
2025-04-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Kenneth Rogoff on Monetary Moves, Fiscal Gambits, and Classical Chess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, first of all, if it's population growth and productivity alone, then you're losing tax dollars at the same time you're paying less interest. But it turns out those variables don't work so well over a longer period. I have a paper in the American Economic Review just last August about this. If you look over longer time periods, just because economists think that those should be the dominant variables, it doesn't turn out to work that well. And all this stuff, there have been a lot of papers by economists looking at the decline. It's going the real interest rate going down, demographics going down, productivity going down looks great. If you look at a longer period, there's no there there. I mean, it just doesn't stand up. So I think there are other factors having to do with liquidity, default risk, changing nature of the production function, globalization.”
2025-04-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Kenneth Rogoff on Monetary Moves, Fiscal Gambits, and Classical Chess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Inflation. And I'm looking at the long term. They've come up, and they're not super high, but they're more like they were in the early 2000s. And I think a reasonable projection is they're going to stay around the level they are now.”
2025-04-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Kenneth Rogoff on Monetary Moves, Fiscal Gambits, and Classical Chess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think there's any question. It's that the AI revolution turns out to just work magically much better than we, you know, anyone imagine that people like me quietly acquiesce to just getting transfers from the government instead of having jobs. And we just continue to have a high income and the robot income pays for everything. I mean, AI is absolutely the thing which is most likely, you know, some kind of technological change. You know, other than that, the problems in our politics, it's in our DNA. We're convinced that, you know, we're immortals and we can just do whatever we want. You go around Washington and whatever they say, I think that's what they think. And again, this key thing is that real interest rates, the interest rate adjusted for expected.”
2025-04-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Kenneth Rogoff on Monetary Moves, Fiscal Gambits, and Classical Chess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is not the norm. There's repression to mean. You know what? It's happened. And suddenly the interest payments start piling up. I think they've gone at least doubled over the last few years. They're on quickly on their way to tripling, going up to a trillion dollars. And so suddenly it's more than our defense spending. That's the most important macro change in the world that real interest rates appear to have regressed more towards long-term trend.”
2025-04-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Kenneth Rogoff on Monetary Moves, Fiscal Gambits, and Classical Chess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think this time it'll be, so last time we probably had a bonus 10% inflation over the 2% target cumulatively, maybe 12%. I think this time it'll be on more in the order cumulatively over the 2% target 20%, 25%. I mean, there's going to be an adjustment. I don't think the debt is going to be the sole contribution to that. There are many factors you have to impinge on Federal Reserve independence. Probably there'll be some shock, you know, which will justify it. I don't know how it's going to play out, but I think I know that for years people have said the U.S. debt is unsustainable, but it hasn't come to Ruse because we've lived through this post-financial crisis, post-pandemic era of very, very low and negative real interest rates.”
2025-04-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Kenneth Rogoff on Monetary Moves, Fiscal Gambits, and Classical Chess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it could be, it could happen much sooner. I mean, on the other hand, it's hard to know what's going through Trump's head. So I presumed he was going to blow up the deficit like everybody else.”
2025-04-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Kenneth Rogoff on Monetary Moves, Fiscal Gambits, and Classical Chess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have any due respects to Doge? They're not that many things to cut in the United States compared to many other countries. So I don't know what the choice will be. I mean, I probably won't be here and you might not be either when we're making the choices. I think we'll both be here.”
2025-04-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Kenneth Rogoff on Monetary Moves, Fiscal Gambits, and Classical Chess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is a darn good question. I mean, looking way forward, I would just say we're on an unsustainable path. We will continue to have our debt balloon. And eventually, not necessarily in a planned or coherent way, I think we're going to have another big inflation soon, next five to seven years. That's maybe sooner with what's going on. And that's going to bring it down just like it did under Biden. It brought the debt down. But then the markets are, you know, fool me once, shame on you, you know, fool me twice. No, we're raising the interest rate. And then we'll have to, you know, make choices. I mean, I think in the United States, a lot of the choices, I'm sorry to say it probably point towards higher taxation because we're hardly running a welfare state. It's not all due respects, and I'm not sure.”
2025-04-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Kenneth Rogoff on Monetary Moves, Fiscal Gambits, and Classical Chess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we all face. But yeah, I know the demographics is a problem in every country in Italy, as you say, is much far, far ahead of the United States on the demographics. I mean, an interesting fact is they spend a mind-numbing 15% of GDP on old age pensions and support now. I mean, we're half that, you know, all in. And 15% of GDP. And so, yeah, they have a lot of constraints and their tax rates are very high. They're not corrupt like in Pakistan, but it's not Sweden either. I mean, it's got a lot of problems.”
2025-04-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Kenneth Rogoff on Monetary Moves, Fiscal Gambits, and Classical Chess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Out of side the Danish company, that's what Zampic, there are things like Hermes, you know, Prada, sort of lifestyle superpower stuff. No, I think this is absolutely an existential crisis. It may lead to them becoming more cohesive. It may lead to them becoming more of a geopolitical power. But yes, they're going to have to make choices, which they haven't had to make.”
2025-04-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Kenneth Rogoff on Monetary Moves, Fiscal Gambits, and Classical Chess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, many of the European countries actually tighten their pension systems a lot during the European crisis. They set it in place to take place 10 or 15 years later. Not France. Yeah, I do. I think this is a real existential challenge to the French state. I mean, maybe they'll take over as the tech capital of the world. Maybe they'll, you know, find ways to solve their problems, but they've been free riding off the United States. There's no question about that. And now they have to spend more. I'm not praising Trump's policies. Let's not conflate those two things. But yes, I think they're going to find they're going to be, they have taxes are very, very high in Europe. In fact, so much so that there's no question it holds back a lot of investment. Europe has very few world beaters in terms of tech, finance. They're the biggest companies.”
2025-04-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Kenneth Rogoff on Monetary Moves, Fiscal Gambits, and Classical Chess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do you think that's because they're diversifying? No, it's because they're being ordered to do that. So they have a lot of financial repression already. They don't have dynamic capital markets for a lot of reasons. And obviously they need to remilitarize now. You know, Germany has a lot of fiscal space, so they can go all out. But especially now that interest rates are real interest rates are hitting a higher level, they're going to have to do it. But I think they're going to find they have to give things up in order to do it because the interest rates aren't zero anymore.”
2025-04-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Kenneth Rogoff on Monetary Moves, Fiscal Gambits, and Classical Chess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, they did it big time after the European debt crisis. So just a simple fact about that is it used to be that Say Italian debt was held in Germany, Spanish debt was held in Germany, spread all over. Now the vast majority of the Italian banks are holding all the Italian bank debt. Spanish banks are holding all the Spanish debt.”
2025-04-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Kenneth Rogoff on Monetary Moves, Fiscal Gambits, and Classical Chess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've done that already. And they've done it in a big way. It's hurt their financial intermediation. So it makes lending less efficient. And that's part of why their growth has suffered. So they've done a good job doing a slow becoming sclerotic slowly. But I hardly think we would want to imitate them, especially if we intend to compete with China.”
2025-04-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Kenneth Rogoff on Monetary Moves, Fiscal Gambits, and Classical Chess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source