Robert Peston

I mean, this is something obviously that's concerned me and Steph for years, this concentration of power, particularly what it's doing to our politics.

But if we could also just think for a second about the main drivers of this extraordinary concentration of wealth.

Yeah.

I mean, one of them I'm assuming are the sort of winner takes all nature of the digital economy that started to explode in size from the mid 1990s that we created.

What we saw is the creation of businesses.

whether it's your Google alphabets or these days, your Claude's and your open AIs that become essentially networks where the rewards for whoever happens to be the early owners are just off the charts huge.

And then I assume the other big driver, since you're talking about the post 2007 and 8 period, is just the way that zero cost of money, very low interest rates, inflated assets.

asset prices, but what would be the other drivers of what's doing this?

So this is staturism and Reaganism?

You know, surely you're borrowing money vast amounts against your slime business.

I have a retail business.

And funding your lavish lifestyle.

Or a boom loop for them, a doom loop for us.

And what role do tax havens play in sheltering the enormous wealth of these people?

And how does one distinguish between an economy, a country that is competitive on tax and

and an economy that basically its whole approach is just to provide, as I say, a safe haven for those who don't want to pay any tax.

You wrote a paper for the G20 in which you came up with a proposal to, I think it is to impose a 2% annual levy on those whose wealth is a billion dollars plus.

Is that correct?

A hundred million plus, yes.

So just talk us through how you arrived at this as a sort of... It's not exactly a solution, but it would raise a lot of money for... Raise a lot of very useful money for governments that are struggling to fund public services.