The talk was entitled
"Have we fixed the mess – are the rich economies of the West mended?" and was very interesting, I thought the guy was a great public speaker.
Some main points he covered:
- How the UK economy is appearing to begin to recover, but is relying too much on mortgage debt and services, rather than actual productivity and manufacture.
- Hence, the UK government debt will be harder to pay back than the debt of other countries (like Japan, as although Japan's gov debt is much greater, they have much higher levels of productivity).
- How China's production levels have dropped massively, and they have amassed $15 trillion of debt since 2008 (more than the GDP of the entire USA).
- The idea that the failure of the Eurozone to recover quickly has taken the spotlight off the UK's poor recovery.
- The idea that some banks may soon become "Too Big to Save" i.e. taxpayers money would not be enough to bail them out if they failed.
- How the recovery in the USA is actually a lot more promising than in the UK (more productivity, becoming self-sufficient in terms of energy due to shale gas).
plus a lot of other points I can't remember off the top of my head... His opinion is basically that the UK, although showing signs of recovery, has a long way to go...
I was lucky enough to exchange a few words with him about Bitcoin, or more specifically the technology behind it and whether he thought it would gain adoption in the future. He basically said he thought the whole idea was very interesting, and that this sort of "ultra free market" would probably be the future of financial systems, whether it takes 10/20/30 years. He seemed to think it was an elegant technology, "free from the unwieldy infrastructure of the current banking system".
I would have liked to ask him a few more things, like what he thought specifically of the deflationary/fixed money supply aspect, the idea of a distributed public ledger, the frictionless transfers, and whether he saw the current Bitcoin network as more of a payment system/a store of value/neither. But he was being asked loads of stuff by other people and looked pretty tired!
Anyway, seemed like a nice guy, and took time to really answer peoples questions thoughtfully (he didn't just reel off lines like a lot of politicians would). I would recommend seeing him speak if you ever get the chance
