Is there a crash coming?
The Briefing Room
BBC
4.8 • 731 Ratings
🗓️ 23 October 2025
⏱️ 44 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Some of the biggest figures in finance, from the CEO of JPMorganChase to the Governor of the Bank of England, have been warning of potential shocks to the global economy.
As excitement continues to build about the transformative potential of Artificial Intelligence, the US stock market has boomed, potentially forming a fragile bubble. Meanwhile, recent bankruptcies in America have raised worries that a rapid growth in lending by private companies (so-called shadow banks) might be built on shaky ground - and have invoked memories of the subprime mortgage debacle that kicked off the Great Financial Crisis in 2007. And if that wasn’t enough, the threat that Donald Trump might reignite his tariff-driven trade war still looms over the global economy.
So how worried should we be? David Aaronovitch speaks to the top experts to find out.
Guests: Katie Martin, markets columnist at the Financial Times Duncan Weldon, economist and author of Blood and Treasure Simon French, Chief Economist and Head of Research at investment company Panmure Liberum
Presenter: David Aaronovitch Producers: Nathan Gower, Kirsteen Knight Editor: Richard Vadon Programme Coordinator: Maria Ogundele Sound Engineer: Duncan Hannant
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:09.0 | Halloween is almost upon us, so here's something to scare you. |
| 0:13.9 | In the last few weeks, the CEO of America's largest bank, J.P. Morgan Chase, |
| 0:18.9 | has warned of the possibility of a big fall in an overvalued US stock market |
| 0:23.5 | and a shock to the financial system from a growing banking sector, commonly known as shadow banking. |
| 0:30.4 | And equally recently, the Bank of England has echoed these concerns. |
| 0:35.3 | These are not sources to be treated lightly. So, are we heading for |
| 0:41.8 | the crash of 25? What do the experts say? Step into the briefing room and together we'll find out. |
| 0:52.3 | With me to explain where we've got to and where we might be heading, a Katie Martin, |
| 0:56.9 | markets columnist at the Financial Times, Duncan Weldon, economist and author of Blood and Treasure, |
| 1:02.9 | and Simon French, Chief Economist and Head of Research at Investment Company Panmure Libarum. |
| 1:09.1 | Simon, I'd like to start with you and what's actually happened to the |
| 1:12.7 | US stock market in recent months. We hear it's rising rapidly. Can you give us some kind of idea of the |
| 1:18.2 | scale? The rebound in global stock markets led by the US stock market has added about |
| 1:26.7 | $28 trillion to the value of global shares. |
| 1:30.6 | Now, to put that number in context, that's almost the size of the US economic output each year. |
| 1:37.3 | And that's a 31% increase in just six months since the global stock markets bottomed out after Liberation Day in the US. |
| 1:44.7 | That was Trump's Tariff Day. |
| 1:46.0 | That's correct. And that has only happened on three previous occasions in modern market history. |
| 1:52.5 | 1987, 1999 and 2009. And it doesn't take huge knowledge of market history to realize those were three quite seismic years for stock market volatility. |
| 2:04.1 | And that is one of the reasons why we've heard the concerns, the warnings from bank execs, both in investment banks and central banks in recent days. |
| 2:12.4 | So that's the straightforward scale of the increase. |
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