She's like muted on the zoom or something. Oh, she's yelling at me and slack. That's great. Perfect.

That's perfect.

How'd your podcast start today? Kai will bridge a yell to me. Slack. Hey everybody, I'm Kai.

I'm Risdo. Welcome back to Make Me Smart where we make the day make sense. It is, I think, what do you want to know Wednesday?

Remacrace is here. Sorry, I had a mouthful of water, right before it drew started.

Remacrace is here, the host of the Marketplace podcast. This is uncomfortable. Kimberly is. I don't know where Kimberly is, but she's not here.

What is she doing? I don't know. Yeah. Hi. I'm so excited to be here.

Especially on what do you want to know Wednesday? I feel like it's a fun day. Yeah.

So we've got, yeah, we've got some great questions lined up for you, but before we get into them,

I feel like we should say if you've got a question about the economy, business, or tech that you'd like answered,

you can always email them to makemesmart at Marketplace.org or leave a voicemail. The number to call is 508UBSmart.

It gets to the point. Let's get to our first question now. It is an email from Krisha. Okay.

So, okay, let's do it. She writes, inflation is too much money chasing too few goods, but in the UK, they increase the interest rate and also had a tax cut.

Isn't that two steps up and four steps back? That's a great question. That is such a good question.

And if you listen to Marketplaces afternoon, you will hear somebody describe it to Justin Ho as drinking coffee and alcohol at the same time.

It's just a chaotic situation. It's a stimulant and a depressant all at once. So here's what's going on.

The UK economy, like many economies in the world, is slowing down. R's is, China's is, everybody's is, for a whole lot of reasons that we've talked about a lot.

But they've also got inflation, which is a really big challenge. So the new government, Prime Minister Liz Trust and her Chancellor of the Exchequer, which is their Treasury Secretary's name is Quasi Carton, came out last week with what's called a mini budget over there. And as part of that, mini budget, they said, we are going to cut taxes a lot.

And we are going to borrow money a lot to pay for having cut those taxes. And the global financial system said the hell you are and the pound crashed and guilt rates, which are, which are British bonds, right? Government bonds, they're called guilt, G-I-L-T-S's.

Those rates spiked. And the Bank of England saw that and said, this is very, very, very bad. Our economy is slowing.

Interest rates are going up. We're going to have to borrow a ton of money. This is very bad. So what happened was the Bank of England came out this morning, UK time, which is, which is Wednesday and said, we are going to buy up as much government debt as we can get our hands on for two and a half weeks.

And in so doing force interest rates to go lower and thus stabilize the situation. The Bank of England now is trying to, yeah, all right, I'm going to say this.

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