Zack Polanski: I Am A Populist, Farage IS NOT.

Comments · 5.1K

• TH

  @The_Howling_Dark · 9 months ago (edited)

  If only Rory had applied this much scrutiny to the economics of George “history degree” Osborne. We’d have avoided the last 15 years of misery,

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• LA

  @lambrotheodoros1 · 10 months ago (edited)

  I wish Rory would query “the numbers” as much and as persistently with others as he does with Zack.

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• SN

  @SnarlTernIcon · 10 months ago

  Everyone on this podcast kept repeating “£100bn a year on debt interest” as if it’s all traditional government borrowing.<br>But neither Rory nor Alastair mentioned the real driver of that number, and they both know exactly what it is.<br><br>A large share of that “interest” isn’t gilt coupons at all.<br>It’s the interest the Bank of England pays on the QE reserve balances created during the 2008 banking crisis, the 2020 COVID shock, and the 2022 gilt market intervention.<br><br>When rates were near zero, those reserves cost next to nothing.<br>Now they earn Bank Rate (5%+), so the Bank pays tens of billions a year to commercial banks on money the BoE itself created.<br>Because the Treasury indemnified QE, those payments show up in the public finances as “debt interest”.<br><br>In plain English:<br>we are paying interest on the QE reserves that were created to stabilise markets and absorb losses.<br>That is a policy choice, not an iron law of economics.<br><br>And here’s the irony nobody on this podcast said out loud:<br>Margaret Thatcher would never have accepted this.<br>Her whole “shopkeeper’s economics” argument was built on markets bearing their own risks.<br>But there is nothing “market” about a system where the state props up asset prices, socialises losses through the central bank, and then pays commercial banks a guaranteed income stream on the reserves used to do it.<br><br>Zack didn’t explain it cleanly, but he was pointing to the right place.<br>What’s genuinely radical is pretending the whole £100bn is unavoidable, when a huge part of it is really the state paying rent to the very financial system it bailed out.

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• SA

  @SaraKhan-os4yr · 9 months ago

  Never seen Rory get this upset about any politicians enabling a genocide or breaking international. In fact I’ve not seen him this upset about any politicians attacks on disabilities or children in poverty. Performative outrage.

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• LO

  @Lock5-o7o · 10 months ago

  I&apos;ve noticed Rory frequently gets exercised with guests who in any way challenge Britain&apos;s class system. He&apos;s very concerned about capital flight but doesn&apos;t seem at all put out by the fact that working people in the UK require food banks to survive. I agree, Polanski could have done better as regards the economic details, he needs to work on that. What I think Rory and Alastair are missing, is that the public want to vote for someone who they believe has integrity. It&apos;s not about their economic nous, necessarily. Otherwise all our politicians would be economists and bankers. He seems like a good person with genuine convictions and integrity, and that&apos;s worth a lot. That&apos;s what matters. A lot of Rory&apos;s Tory friends &apos;understand&apos; the economics he&apos;s talking about, and look at what they produced.

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• MI

  @Mina_loves_music · 10 months ago (edited)

  Gary Stevenson has a postgraduate masters in economics and worked for a think tank. Richard Murphy is professor of Accounting at the University of Sheffield. <br>You can teach Zac the numbers, and he’ll learn them, but you can’t teach people like Starmer, Reeves or Farage values like integrity.

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• DA

  @dansplans86 · 10 months ago

  I don’t necessarily agree with either interviewer but it was a nice change to see Zack really put through his paces instead of breezing through as usual. Gives me more respect for him, and I don’t mind that he doesn’t have all of the detailed answers. Most of them don’t but they also avoid situations like this that could expose them. Credit to Zack for bringing so open

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• KA

  @kasgraham6348 · 9 months ago

  It&apos;s worth noting that these Bank of England papers agree with the model Polanski uses to describe how the economy works:<br><br>&quot;Money creation in the modern economy” by Michael McLeay, Amar Radia and Ryland Thomas of the Bank’s Monetary Analysis Directorate.<br><br>&quot;Banks are not intermediaries of loanable funds - and why this matters - Working Paper No. 529” by Zoltan Jakab and Michael Kumhof<br><br>The authors are all senior economists working for the BoE, except for Zoltan Jakab who&apos;s a senior economist at the IMF, and Amar Radia is a former accountant, a mathematician and entrepreneur. (pdfs of these papers are on the BoE website - easy to find)

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• HA

  @Han-fm7m · 9 months ago

  Rorys economic plan “just do more of the same please”

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• DO

  @dominicrippon5792 · 9 months ago (edited)

  Given that Rory recently interviewed Gary Stevenson, who told him about his masters in economics, I was disappointed to see Rory asserting that he merely held an undergraduate degree. If Zack had pointed this out, Rory would have been in trouble

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• OC

  @octarinehk · 9 months ago

  How’re all these mainstream economists doing, Rory?

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• DR

  @DrugiZane1 · 9 months ago

  Gary Stevenson has an MPhil in economics from Oxford... There is his graduate level degree Roderick

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