We're back in the pub a year later with Mark Blythe, the outspoken political economist at Brown University,

which means he works and talks and thinks at the intersection of big money and big power.

Your friends back in your hometown pub in Dundee, Mark are dying to hear.

It's been a year now. The word I hear in this pub, the forbidden word in your discourse, is bankruptcy.

When you move to the United States, Mark Blythe, our national debt was about the quarter of the gross national product for one year.

It is now 125% of the GNP. The government does not cover its costs.

It chooses not to raise taxes and it cannot stop borrowing until when.

Chris, have you forgotten all the conversations we've had for the past 10 years about how that's just totally the wrong idea?

I remember them word for word.

You know as well as I do that the household budget and the state budget are completely different things.

Of course, we do know that.

We also know that the problem that we've got is that if you look at the whole world as a single economy,

you've got two-thirds of the world make too much stuff. They're net exporters.

They have to sell it to someone else. That would be the net importers of which the United States is the biggest.

We have the deepest financial and capital markets, which means we can supply them with endless amounts of different varieties of bits of paper

in exchange for the cars, the televisions, the PPP during the pandemic and everything else that we get from them.

And because their business models are geared towards producing more stuff than they can ever absorb at home, they have to sell to us.

That's what creates our deficit. That's what creates our debt.

Now add in the cost of bailing the financial crisis and then add in the cost of the COVID crisis.

And you've got to where we are today.

Now if you go look at the yield on a 10-year bill, which would be kind of the canary in the coal mine for if there was any real debt problems,

it's sitting around 2.5%, which is where it usually is.

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