Gerald Butts
speaker
1,669 appearances
11 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 15 Sep
Gerald Butts’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 11 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 3.
Appearances
If you don't have a strategy.
afraid, be afraid.
Well, I think it's really difficult, Peter, uh, for sure.
And one of the th I'll make a plug from my day job at Eurasia Group back when the current or the past inflation cycle started, we looked at what happens historically to governments if they happen to have the misfortune of governing through a period of extraordinary inflation.
And it turned out this is geeky, but I'll explain it in a second that you were
Two standard deviations more likely to lose the next election if you went to the polls within 18 months of inflation's peak.
In other words, it didn't matter whether you were a social democrat in Finland or a conservative in Great Britain or whatever the heck uh Yair Bolsonaro was in Brazil.
It didn't really matter what side of the ideological spectrum you were on.
If you happened to govern through inflation and go to the polls before it abated, you were in very serious trouble.
And of course I'm conflating two terms there, affl inflation and affordability, because I think the inflation uh cycle that we've just come out of in uh well basically globally has reminded people of what a real affordability crisis looks like.
Now there are there are different things that accentuate
Whether it's more or less severe in any given country in Canada, we have a particular generational problem in the housing market that has made affordability that much more difficult.
And of course, it hit uh households, homeowners, pocketbooks very directly as uh the the Bank of Canada had to increase interest rates in order to fight that inflationary cycle.
So Canadian
uh families got hit doubly hard, um, or at least in in two different directions.
One on what is usually the most important um element of your monthly budget, which is your mortgage payment, right?
And that makes it really difficult for the government to deal with.
And it's whether it's this government, the last government, some future government, uh, in those moments when inflation drives
drives up prices on everything, but in particular on housing, food and energy, there's very little the government can do.
Well I I'm
Showing 341–360 of 1,669 · page 18 of 84
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