Hello and welcome to Ways to Change the World. I'm Christian Guru Murthy and this is

the podcast in which we talk to extraordinary people about the big ideas in their lives

and the events that have helped shape them. My guest this week is a world famous economist.

Nureal Roubini is a professor in New York, a global economic consultant and an author

who amongst many distinguishing things was one of those who foresaw the 2008 Credit

Crunch and Financial Crisis. His latest work is called Mega Threats and it details ten

trends that make it more likely than not that we are heading for a global economic crash,

a stagnant growth, debt crises and high inflation that will cause decades of dystopian suffering

and injustice. No wonder they call him Dr Doom. The good news is he says we can avoid it if we come

to our senses. Nureal Roubini, welcome. Great deal to that, Christian.

Let me take you through some of the ideas in your book through the prison of our politics

at the moment. You start with debt as one of the great crises. Now what we are told about debt

is that yes it's high but we have a plan to bring it down over time so there's no problem.

Why are the politics wrong? The politics is wrong because stocks of private and public debt,

private being debt of households, corporates and financial institutions,

public is central and local governments have been increasing decade after decade.

As a share of GDP globally that in the 70s was about 100% of GDP by 1999 was 200% of GDP.

Last year was 350% of GDP and rising in advance economies, 420% of GDP and rising

in China, 330. So we have a mountain of debt and many institutions, some parts of the

household sector, some parts of the business sector, some financial institutions, some governments,

some entire countries are insolvent. Given their income they're not going to be able to pay back

their debts by called them zombie institutions. Until recently even those who had debt ratio

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