In all of these ways, he’s a man of ideas-so, yes, I think there’s a program here, I think it’s fair to say. And so, you know, periods of peace go hand in hand with periods of stable money, and periods of war are associated with instability. He might be the closest thing that Britain has to a gold bug in politics in the sense that he believes that gold-backed currencies constrain politics in the way that fiat money doesn’t, because gold-backed currencies constrain the amount of money-printing you can do, to put it crudely. Probably more revealing about his politics of money is the book that he wrote called War and Gold. Kwarteng isn’t, I think, a technical economic historian-he’s more a historian of ideas. I’ve kind of been racking my brains as to whether or not I may have taught him. To really drive what they see as a transformational vision of Britain.Īnd yeah, Kwarteng was at Cambridge as a student when I was there. Truss is on record as saying that she doesn’t care whether she’s popular or not.
I think that’s the core idea, to be less compromising. LISTEN HERE:For the entire conversation, and episodes in the weeks ahead on this subject and others, follow Ones and Tooze wherever you get your podcasts.Ĭameron Abadi: Is it fair to refer to Liz Truss and her finance minister, Kwasi Kwarteng, as economic ideologues? I know that Kwarteng has academic training as an economic historian-how would you characterize his historical work, and how does that square with the economic program that they’ve unveiled here?Īdam Tooze: Yeah, I think Truss and Kwarteng belong to the wing of the Party that does believe in the need to revive the party’s ideological muscles, if you like, to adopt a less pragmatic, more ideas-driven, visionary kind of approach to politics-essentially to revive the Thatcherite agenda of the 1980s. For the entire conversation, subscribe to Ones and Tooze on your preferred podcast app. What follows is a transcript of the interview, edited for clarity and length. Those are some of the questions that came up in my conversation this week with Foreign Policy columnist Adam Tooze on the podcast we co-host, Ones and Tooze. Should Truss have seen this coming? Do Britain’s economic policymakers have any good choices left? And is this not just a crisis, but the start of a new era in international economics? British financial markets have lost a total of $500 billion in just the first three weeks since Truss took office, and observers around the world have wondered whether this could be the start of an international crisis. When the government of British Prime Minister Liz Truss unveiled the details of her first budget one week ago-with a major tax cut for the country’s highest earners at its center-panic ensued: Britain’s currency fell in value to historic lows, the interest rate on government debt increased, and the Bank of England was forced into emergency action to purchase government bonds.
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