Geopolitics and Empire is joined by Bill Blaine, who was the strategist for Shard Capital,

a leading investment management firm. He is an author and commentator on financial markets.

You can find his daily musings at morning porridge.com. Thanks for joining the podcast, Bill. How was

vacation? Well, I did finally get a week off last weekend. I went to the Spanish Balearic Islands.

And unlike most people who were still spending time in the beach, my wife and I went for long walks in the mountains, but basically from good restaurant to good restaurant.

And I've got to say I'm now, and I have an addiction for a really good suckling pig.

I can, I bet.

I think I need to take a week off as well.

So now that you've hopefully been able to clear your head a bit and recharge,

I thought we could start by kind of getting your big picture of where the global economy is today and what's worrying you the most.

In your second to last morning porridge, missive you were discussing inflation, the energy crisis, shortages in the supply chain,

collapse, record employment coupled with record vacancies, to name a few.

This morning, you published another piece on Morning Porridge where you were discussing

the threat of central bank policies.

So what's most pressing on your mind at the moment?

Well, you know, we've got a whole series of things going on in financial markets. And you can call them

potential storms on the horizon. And that would include things about whether the global economy

is heading towards a recession, or is this going to be very temporary? And is it going to result in a minor blip and then we'll see

the pandemic recovery continue or is the global supply chain crisis which we are seeing very

physically in terms of the number of ships queued up at ports, the shortages of goods all around the problem,

the chip all around the world, the chip shortage, is that going to continue to deepen

because of all the consequences of what went on during the pandemic?

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