John Cassidy
speaker
41 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
John Cassidy’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
America's always been dominated by the capitalists. They've always owned all the media. There's never been a proper left-wing movement here to take them on. So, I've got a bit of sympathy for that. I've got a bit of sympathy for both views on that. I'm sort of agnostic as to which one is sort of wins. I mean, I grew up in the sort of British, English, British Keynesian tradition.
John Maynard Keynes.
Keynesian to me means, the phrase I use in the book is managed capitalism. It's a capitalist system, but you manage it in various ways. Number one, the original crux of Keynesianism, you need the government to boost demand in times of slumps. So Keynesian stimulus policies. But it's not just that. Keynesianism also involved capitalism.
a whole series of sort of attempts to manage the financial sector, for example. It was a social bargain, basically. The capitalists were allowed to continue to own companies. There's still quite a lot of inequality. But in return, there were this whole set of social guarantees on employment insurance, National Health Service, which Bismarck started first of all, but then was put into effect.
But you're describing as more European than American. That is. But even in the U.S., even in the U.S., The New Deal was a form of managed capitalism. The reason why I've become more sympathetic to the Marxist or ultra-left view in less than 30 years or so is because that managed capitalism is basically disintegrated, not completely disintegrated, but it's been massively on the defensive.
Yeah, I mean, there's a whole... The car worker in Detroit if he's put on a level playing field with the car worker in India or China who earns, you know, a tenth of the salary, really can't compete. Now, in the car industry, governments have always intervened. The car industry is always seen as too important to leave to the market. But, you know, the clothing industry, for example,
US used to have a huge textile industry that basically went away in the 80s and 90s. And then China came along, the China shock in the early 00s. And that was, you know, that's basically an unprecedented shock. And economists, a lot of American economists, you know, took a long time to recognize that.
But even the people who supported unrestricted free trade, I think now recognize that the China shock, you know, was huge and did a lot of damage there. to industrial areas and, you know, has given a boost to populism, including Trumpian populism.
So the man himself, why is he so anti-free trade and pro-protection? It seems to go back to the 80s in Japan and when Japanese car companies were first coming in here. I think he just sees it in terms of a sort of businessman that... you know, we're giving them our valuable markets and that's always bad. You know, it's like letting a rival casino set up next to his. He shouldn't be allowed.
Beyond him, there's always been this debate about, you know, how far protectionism is, um, Justified. I mean, America in its early decade, century, was a protectionist country. The argument is that when you don't have an industry and you're trying to build it up, you are justified in providing temporary protection for yourself. That doesn't justify slapping tariffs on everything.
Trump's argument seems to be that all trade is bad. He's not just saying, you know, we have to counter unfair trade or we have to defend our infant industries such as they are.
No, no. I mean, that was the basis of his... It's just emotional. It seems to be. It's instinctual, I would say, on his part.
Even though the MAGA movement... portrays itself as you know a movement for workers and a lot of the foot soldiers are you know around the country um it's still a republican party and a republican party is still a party of business
And I didn't think it was going to be sustainable to have a Republican government introducing blanket tariffs because it damages so many businesses and the markets are going to hate it. I think he thought he could take some pain, but when it came to it, it didn't. I mean, that's the great irony here. The Chinese have shown that, you know, they're willing to take more pain than we are.
they can withstand a tariff war because they're a single-party totalitarian state.
Public opinion is not particularly highly rated. And Xi doesn't really care about the stock market that much either. If Trump is going to tariff all America's major trading partners, this gives China an opportunity to sort of make... you know, in outreaches to Europe and Asia and the global south and sort of replace the US in various parts of the world.
Peter Robinson Is it Bannon or Besson, I guess it would be the... Peter Robinson The Treasury Secretary. Peter Robinson The Treasury Secretary now is the sort of, you know, the representative of Wall Street, although he hasn't been doing, until recently, he wasn't doing a great job even defending Wall Street's interests. Peter Robinson I think Trump is always going to end up straddling the two.
I think he emotionally and instinctually is very much on the Bannon ultra-protectionism, economic nationalism side of things. But I think as we've seen in the last few weeks with the whole tariff fiasco, There isn't a political coalition inside the Republican Party to support that over the long term. And Trump himself is not willing to take the political heat that comes along with that.
Once the stock market starts crashing or falling sharply, once the bankers start calling up and saying, Mr. President, the bond market's going berserk, you have to do something. Once the opinion poll numbers start falling, he backs off.
Right. I'm afraid it looks like to me we're going, we're sort of condemned to just continuing chaos with him sort of rotating between the two wings. And I think all we can, all we guaranteed is more instability and chaos.
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