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

But had he done that,

we would have either less federal debt or much larger social security benefits, a much more robust social security trust fund today than we do.

It was actually the right idea.

And people use, you know, sort of the specter of risk to, you know,

to dunk on it, to stop it back in 2005.

And yes, there is risk, but it's aggregate risk because if, if, if corporate America is doing so bad that the stock market does really bad over a 20 year period or whatever, even a 10 year period, but especially a 20 year period, then, uh,

America as a whole has done badly.

It's hard to see a case in which the stock market does crap, underperforms treasuries for 20 years in which the regular Americans are thriving.

That's a weird state of the world.

It's a state of the world I'm willing to bet a lot against.

U.S.

debt is on a very bad trajectory right now.

That said, if you take out debt to buy U.S.

stocks, to have the government buy U.S.

stocks, and you have the option to use the proceeds from the stocks to repay the debt, if you structure the sovereign wealth fund that way, then it would be more sustainable than it is.

And in fact, this is what Japan has done.

So Japan, on paper, has a higher debt-to-GDP ratio than we do.

But they've had the government invest like a hedge fund and made very good returns.

And because of that, their debt is less of a burden than ours is now, even though it's higher as a headline share of GDP.

we would be the same.

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