Gary Stevenson

I think it is pretty certain it's going to be bad for the economy, bad for living standards.

Interest rates have risen, not enormously, but like pretty significantly since the beginning of the war because inflation is going to rise and central banks are going to rise base rates.

And yet once again, we are seeing the repetition of this like COVID dynamic of interest rates are going up, the economy is going down, living standards are falling, and yet asset prices are not falling and maybe even increasing.

What's causing that?

So I am going to put forward an argument as to what has been really causing the aggressive increases in asset prices throughout the world in the last

18 years, but especially during the last five or six years since COVID.

And I will, to sort of support my argument, add that I have consistently correctly predicted that these asset prices would rise.

So if you can watch the first video on this channel that I did in 2020, at the very beginning of COVID, predicting it would cause a massive increase in asset prices.

I did a video about two years ago, two and a half years ago, predicting that we would see

further aggressive increases in asset prices, even though interest rates are high and rising.

And I made tons of money on these predictions.

So I'd like to think that, you know, I have a little bit of a right to speak on these things.

In my opinion, what has been under discussed and under understood as a driver of these asset prices is deficits and distribution.

So in a sense here, I'm repeating

an argument that I made at the beginning of COVID, which is

when the government runs a deficit or in essence really anybody runs a deficit somebody accumulates money and this is basically an intrinsic part of our monetary system but the way it basically works is like this you know if i borrow a ton of money and then give that money away somebody has to have more money now quite simply i think this is

something which is unfortunately not well understood and it's one of the reasons why we are in this

mess so i think the clearest sort of way to understand this is to look at covid itself because i think it's just such a clear example of this happening which is at the very beginning of covid we knew that governments were going to run very long-term lockdowns we knew that governments were going to have to subsidize people's wages and we knew that the the way that governments were going to fund that

was to essentially borrow or in some cases print we can argue the details borrow or print an enormous amount of money and give that money out um and you know i'm not necessarily opposed to that policy but it's important to recognize that when governments do this when governments run very big deficits some group of society must accumulate money and when the deficit is enormously big and the deficits in covert were just like

like mind-blowingly big in the UK it was like twenty thousand pounds per adult I think in the US it was like something more like forty or forty thousand dollars per adult crazily huge amounts of money when the government runs enormous enormous deficits