Ann Pettifor

The key thing happened in 1971 when effectively the JP Morgans of this world persuaded governments to lift any management of capital flows or, you know, of the regulatory book.

And we did.

We obliged the financial system.

They can't believe their luck.

Nor can drug dealers.

If you're running county lines and you're looting young men, vulnerable young men of all their money,

and you want to transfer it back to Colombia, nobody's going to stop you.

And we sit around and don't worry about that.

Sorry, I get really het up about these things.

Yeah, so we love to talk about the politics of this stuff, you know, and I'm saying talk about the economics of it because the economics is highly political.

So after the war, Keynes and a bunch of economists at Bretton Woods had sat down.

It was really interesting.

Roosevelt refused to allow any Wall Street bank

to attend the Bretton Woods Conference.

It was only economists from the North and the South, actually.

45, they looked back at the 1930s when they had these vast bubbles, when they had the 1929 crash, which was followed by a catastrophic world war, never mind unemployment, etc., etc.,

And they thought, you know, that was crazy.

We must never do that again.

So they sit around the table and they say, we've got to manage capital flows.

We've got to manage this trade.