Noah Smith

speaker

437 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 24 Jul

Noah Smith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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

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Prof G Markets · America’s Economy Is Entering a New Era — ft. Noah Smith · 24 Jul 2026 podcast

You can also just do public goods.

You can use this for research and development spending.

to improve productivity in a Paul Romer sense.

You can use this to do national defense if we need to build up for a big war.

You can use this for building highways if we need better infrastructure.

You can use this to build trains.

You can use this to build critical infrastructure.

And you can use this for in-kind redistribution, like buying old people healthcare, which is not as broad-based as baby bonds, but it's pretty broad-based, because everyone gets old and everyone gets sick.

And so you can do a lot of these redistributionary things.

Um, so, so there's the insurance benefit, there's the redistribution benefit, and then there's the fact that the government's borrowing costs, you're talking about running up these kids' credit card, but you're not talking about their credit card because a credit card interest rate, credit card interest rates are through the roof where the government interest rates are a few percent.

Even after we raised interest rates to fight inflation, the government is the cheapest borrower.

right and unless you unless you believe that uh there's a good chance that the government is going to get below treasury returns on its stocks over the maturity of government debt that it takes out to buy these things which is a possibility i mean that's uh we haven't seen negative returns or we haven't seen below treasury returns i think on on 20-year uh you know s p whatever ever

before, but we could see it for the first time.

It's not out of the realm of possibility.

We could take a bath.

We could actually lose this, right?

If you use state uncontingent debt to buy state contingent assets, there are states of the world in which you take a bath.

You lose money.

Okay, the government can lose money.

And this is the argument that people used to stop Bush from investing social security funds in the stock market back in the day.

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