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Welcome to Navaralife, which today is not live, and that's because in the run-up to the

November budget, I wanted to take a step back from the news cycle and do a series of interviews

on the state of the UK economy. Why does nothing work? Is there anything Labour could do to fix it?

And do we need, for example, a wealth tax?

I'm planning to put questions like these to a number of high-profile economists and commentators

over the next few weeks.

And in terms of prestige, today I'm starting at the top.

Martin Wolf has been chief economics commentator at the Financial Times since 1996. He's worked at the paper

since 1987, before that he worked at the World Bank for a decade. He's widely considered

the most well-connected economics journalist in the world. Former US Treasury Secretary Larry

Summers has called him the world's preeminent financial journalist. And according to

foreign policy magazine, he has, quote, for decades been the most influential economics columnist

in the English-speaking world. Martin Wolf is very much a man of the economics establishment.

He's a keen supporter of market capitalism. But he's also become a prominent critic of its excesses.

And in his book, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, which I've got here, he argues that increased inequality.

An economy which has failed to deliver for ordinary people threatens to bring down the post-war economic system, which he values, and taking down

liberal democracy with it. Personally, I think Wolf may have underestimated how a radical,

a political movement would need to be if it's to rescue liberal democracy from the rentier

elites who currently control it. We explore those tensions throughout this conversation.

What's uneniable,

...