Lord Jim O'Neill

speaker

446 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 5 Aug

Lord Jim O'Neill’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

The Rest Is Money · 295. Jim O’Neill – The man shaping Burnhamomics · 12 Jul 2026 podcast

I'm not a technical expert on these issues.

In fact, far from it.

But there are plenty around.

I do suspect to really work it, you know, to implement it probably takes the time.

But again, you would know, you know, people like John Mulbuller and Kate Barker and people like this have been thinking about this stuff for a long, long time.

So...

I think you could actually have the right solutions pretty quickly.

The most important thing I would personally believe, being somebody that's spent 40-odd years, 30 of them active in financial markets, if you send the signals that these things are going to change, that in itself starts to influence the private sector in terms of what they're prepared to do and invest in things.

I think there has to be a shift in mentality about that assumption that all 66 million of us hold.

Because, you know, linking it a little bit to education again, and I know we touched on it in the past, the idea that we spend three times the share of GDP on health, a lot of it wasted compared to education.

You know, it's not normal.

When Maggie Thatcher was leaving, it was the same.

And if you really want to affect long-term economic growth, just that in itself has got to be changed because it's just ludicrous.

But back on this other thing, what I want to really highlight is two different aspects of it.

So for things to do with changing the mentality and outcomes and success of infrastructure spending, and you could include housing as part of that.

This idea of having Nista taken out of the Treasury as some kind of standalone body that's like an infrastructure version of the OBR, I am...

a very, very passionate advocate for that.

And rather troublingly for those that are sick to death of hearing me talk about it, John Armit, who was effectively the first person that ran the Infrastructure Commission, has just coincidentally published in The Times something almost identical to what I've been proposing, even though John and I haven't directly discussed anything like this for years.

And John is a guy that, you know,

presided over the early days of the Infrastructure Commission, and he knows that there are people that can estimate the macroeconomic consequences of Project X and Project Y in a pretty powerful way that can, most importantly, help the OBR with its own long-term trend growth forecast, but much more importantly, make British people see

Showing 321–340 of 446 · page 17 of 23