52: Unmasking the World’s Mysterious Bank: Tower of Basel Uncovered!

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Our great podcasts, visit hartmanmedia.com Greetings from Just outside of Ecuador, with an elevation of approximately 12,000ft, high altitude, here we are at a beautiful spa with some natural springs, hot springs, and you know, you go dip in those and heals your body. So that's what we're doing here. We left the Polo club where we were staying before and having this great retreat and mastermind session here just outside of Quito, Ecuador. Anyway, we've got a great show for you today. Our guest is the author of the Tower of Basel, as in Basel, Switzerland, not the Tower of Babel, the biblical reference. And it's about the shadowy history of the secret bank that runs the world. And hey, banking is certainly a topic that should be on all of our minds as we have now had another bank failure. First Republic bank just acquired, well, the assets acquired by JP Morgan Chase. So all of those accounts will be changing over. What a big hassle, folks, I tell you, so many people are viewing these bank failures incorrectly. They are viewing them as though it is the end of the world. And as opportunistic investors, we should be viewing this as another sign of massive, massive inflationary pressure in the system. So I believe the numbers are something like. And we'll do, we'll go into this deeper on a future episode, but something like $19 trillion on deposit, of which only 10 trillion of those I believe are insured. Don't quote me on that. I'm not looking at it. I've been reading a bunch of newsletters and so forth. There's a lot of uninsured deposits out there in the system. Right. And Janet Yellen has basically state that we're gonna bail out and rescue whoever we want based on the too big to fail concept, but really based on the political friends concept. Right. You know, that's the way our world works. It's all cronyism, it's all absolutely appalling. But it is what it is and we have what we have. And this is just another sign of more and more inflation to come. So as opportunistic real estate investors, as people taking advantage of my trademark strategy, inflation induced debt destruction, should really be taking advantage of this opportunity. And interestingly, you know, there can be sectors of the economy affected in one way, while other sectors are affected very differently and namely real estate. So the JP Morgan Chase thing that is on the First Republic site as of literally five minutes ago, I just took the screenshot for you There were a lot of writers over the weekend and just this morning putting out newsletters saying they weren't sure what was going to happen. But it looks like this is what happened. Okay, so we will see what happens there. But inventory in housing, let's just talk about this. Remains very, very low. And remember, when we talk about inventory, of course, we need to separate it into two major parts. New home inventory and resale or existing home inventory and how that plays out. This article was really interesting. This is by Logan. He's been on the show a couple of times. He writes for Housing Wire as their chief economist. He says low inventory is fake news. Why are the home builder stocks up? Yeah, up so much, right? Home builder stocks not suffering anywhere near the way some people thought and predicted they would. Didn't they know that new home sales apocalypse is here? The article says, you know, the one that says we have too much inventory and millions of vacant homes in the U.S. according to this theory, and it is just a theory, we have more homes under construction than at any time time in history. The truth is it's not 2008 all over again. I understand the lure of the housing 2008 story. Logan goes on to say. However, people who say low inventory is fake news don't realize that the housing credit channels are very different from 2008. Now, we've talked about this extensively, folks. You know, the market is completely different than the 2008 scenario where all kinds of liars loans were being given out, where the mortgage lending standards were insane, insanely, insanely liberal. We have nothing like that now. We've had nothing like that the past 14 years or 15 years, I should say. It's just a completely different thing. So check out this chart if you're watching on video. If not, I'll of course explain it to you. And it shows the number of active listings since 1982. I like this chart because it goes back really far, way back to 1982. And you can see that our inventory now is, is lower than it's ever been.

Almost. Almost. Okay, because it was slightly lower during the COVID era, of course, where we saw it get even lower than it is now. But inventory now, extremely low. You can see that in 2008, I mean, it was like orders of magnitude higher than it is today. And even in 2000 when inventory got very.

And in about, oh, I guess that would be about 1994, inventory also got very, very low. It's lower than any of those times, except for that little blip during the COVID era where it got even lower than it is today. But inventory is still extremely low. Remember, in terms of active listings, only about 400,000 homes for sale in the country. We need triple that. We need triple that just to be at the normal mark. But again, always segment new homes to resale homes. The statistics I just shared are MLS statistics from the Multiple Listing Service. Now, the other thing, of course, that we've talked about many times over many years on the show is simply demographics. And I love studying demographics because demographics really show you the destiny. They show you the future. There is just no question that based on approximate ages of people moving through the population pyramid, they will act and spend certain ways at certain periods in their life. Now, it does get skewed a little bit. Certainly it's been skewed with the millennial generation who has postponed marriage, postponed household formation. Y' all maybe saw the failure to launch movie, that comedy movie, and that is certainly true. But at some point the dam breaks and this shadow inventory even of the millennial group, so many of them delaying things and sort of moving into that phase much more slowly, they even are still moving into it. It cannot wait forever. So the launch will happen. It might be a failure to launch for a while. They might postpone things, they might launch later, but they're still launching. Okay. And you just look at the demographics coming at the housing market and you look this very low affordability that we have, putting upward pressure on rents. I mean, you know, there's a lot to take advantage of and not the least of which let's just talk before we get to our guest today, just for a moment about inflation induced debt destruction. Again, because with an offer like our hundred percent financing offer that you can only do five homes on this and the lender is overwhelmed. But get in touch with us through jasonhartman.com if you're interested in this product. It is a very unique, very special product and you have to qualify for it. I mean, you got to jump through all the hoops, folks. This is not some easy loan to get. It is a fully underwritten loan product. But it is unique because think about it, if you're putting 20% down normally and you've got to pay a little bit of a premium, our last borrower that did this was only really paying about three quarters of a point premium, still cheaper than what's called a DSCR loan, debt service coverage ratio loan. They were paying about a three quarter of a point premium premium for the privilege of getting an extra 20% inflation induced debt destruction. And with bank bailouts and government budget problems, the specter of inflation, even much greater than we've seen already looms really, really large. So don't be fooled. I mean, people, the investors that take advantage of this are going to win the game, as they always have. And just a comment about some of these naysay out there. You know, it seems like every time I do an interview on YouTube, I get trolled by these idiots, these absolute idiots who are just jealous people who missed out on the housing boom. They were the same people telling me in 2012, 11 years ago, they were telling me, oh, the market's going to crash. You know, we're just coming out of this terrible recessionary time and things have come back and how far can it go? It's going to crash. There's going to be a real estate crash. That's 2012. I was hearing that. Okay. And by the way, I was predicting the real estate crash in 2005 that happened just a couple years later. Whether you think it's 2007 or 2008, I really saw that by spring of 2006, the real estate market had crashed. And I was predicting that. All you need to do is go back and listen to my old episodes. You can hear exactly what I was saying at that time. Okay? I predicted, predicted that because I knew all of these adjustable rate loans with these low teaser rates would start adjusting and I knew there was a mortgage meltdown on the horizon. I got into vociferous arguments, especially with realtors who said, no, no, you're wrong. The market is going to continue forever. It's going to go forever. So I was the pessimist then, right? And lately I've been the optimist because we have this very low inventory. We have 25% of the people in the country with mortgages have mortgages at or below 3%. We have 65% of the country with mortgages at or below 4%. And we have 40 over 40% of the country with no mortgage at all. Where's the distress? The foreclosure rate is half, half of what it normally is. So it's just unbelievable, the clickbait and the stuff these people fall for, but they're just jealous that they missed out on the boom, right? They were telling me two years ago, they were telling me five years ago, they were telling me 10, 11 years ago that the market's going to crash. Jason, you're crazy. I look at demographics, I look at housing supply, and that's why I know better. And because you Listen to the show. You know better. I'm not saying there won't be little ups and downs in the market. Of course there will. There's ups and downs always in any market. And even if the real estate market doesn't fare as well as we might think.

Compared to what, what else are you going to do? Right. What else is someone going to do with their money? Say they're right and say the real estate market takes a dive and there's some significant depreciation in that market. Well, all that's going to do is put upward pressure on rent because people can't buy or aren't buying. Now, I don't know about, you know, the low inventory and how we're ever going to solve that problem. I mean, look, there are two things that derail my philosophy. Number one, a massive increase in supply of housing or a massive decrease. Number two, in demand. So if there's some big sickness that, you know, very scary, wipes a bunch of people out and demand declines, that will not be good news. Right. That will be terrible. It would be horrific and it would be terrible for the markets. Or if some new technology comes along and it's not going to be 3D printing, by the way, we've done many shows on that, but some new disruptive technology comes along that somehow provides a massive amount of new housing supply, that would also derail things. But barring those two things, overall, the big trend, the macro trend, is that income property is going to continue being the most historically proven asset class in the entire world. Yes, always. Little ups and downs in any market in any asset class. But the big macro trend is pretty optimistic for income property investors that buy prudent properties in the right markets. They, you know, they're not buying stuff in Los Angeles or San Francisco or any of these expensive markets. Right. They use the Hartman risk evaluator to protect themselves from downside risk by understanding the LTI ratio, that is the land to improvement ratio, and how that benefits the protection of downside risk when it comes to income properties. So all of this on many prior episodes. You can listen to those at any time. They're all out there for you. So I really encourage you, always listen to our flashback Friday episodes because you'll see what we were thinking many, many years ago and how a lot of those things, actually most of those things except interest rate predictions, they pretty much all came true. I mean, the track record is just, I don't know how you argue with it, but people will continue mostly out of their jealousy and envy because they are disappointed with themselves because they did not take action and buy prudent properties in prudent markets. That made sense from day one. And, you know, it's just the way the world is, folks. So.

We'Ll leave it at that. Okay? Oh, couple housekeeping announcements. But before we get to our guests, actually I'm here in Ecuador and I look forward to joining all of our pro members and our mentoring members. Remember, we have a new schedule for the first week of the month for our mentoring members. Same schedule for our pro members. As always, we always see you the first Tuesday of every month on Zoom. And we look forward to seeing you. That's tomorrow because it's Monday today. So we look forward to seeing you there and just mentoring members. I want you to remember we do have that change in schedule for the first week of the month, and that is this week. All right, we will see you tomorrow night and on the next episode. And let's get to the interview with our guest and talk about the Tower of Basel and the bank that controls the world. Here we go.

It is my pleasure to welcome Adam Labore to the show. He is the author of 15 books, including the Tower of Basel and In Basel, Switzerland. That's where the bank of International Settlements is located. And the subtitle title of the book is the Shadowy History of the Secret bank that Runs the World. So we're going to go deep into that topic and some other related topics. If you're concerned about inflation, central bank, digital currencies, and all things central banking, this is the bank for central banks. It's the place that they meet. And I think you'll find this interview to be very interesting. Adam, welcome. How are you?

Well, I'm fine, thank you. Thank you so much for having me on the show.

It's my pleasure. And you're coming to us from London, right?

From London, yeah.

Fantastic. Well, first of all, I think it might be helpful for the viewers and listeners for you to just distinguish between these entities we all hear about, but we don't know much about. And I would say the World bank, the International Monetary Fund and the bank of International Settlements. What is the difference between these three big entities?

The bank of International Settlements is the bank for central banks. It's where some central banks do their banking. It's also a place where bankers, central bankers meet to talk about monetary policy. That means the control of the money supply. And it's a research institute, the imf. The International Monetary Fund is involved at a state to state level, providing loans and Packages of financial support and advice. So if a country gets into a terrible mess, for example, like Britain did in the 1970s, it went to the IMF for a loan. So the BIS doesn't do that. The World bank is, is concerned primarily with development projects in the developing world.

Excellent. Okay, so, so now we understand those differences. And I mean, do all central bankers from every country participate in the bank of International Settlements or for example, our central bank in the United States, the Federal Reserve, does it do things on its own or does it do them in coordination or at least meeting with, and banking with the bis?

So the Fed is obviously a key member.

The governor of the Fed attends the meetings of the bis, governors meetings, as does the, you know, the bank of England, the French national bank, you know, the Bundesbank. All the major players go to these meetings every other month and talk about monetary policy. So that's what I was saying. Monetary policy is to do with money supply and interest rates as opposed to fiscal policy, which is to do with taxing and spending. Taxing and spending, yeah. So central banks, they're obviously working with their treasurers and their finance ministries, but they're not deciding tax policy, they're deciding interest rates and money supply policy, right?

Absolutely. So the subtitle of your book is about the shadowy history of this secret bank that runs the world. Expand on that idea, if you would.

Yes. So the, the BIS was founded in 1930. It has an absolutely fascinating history. It was founded to channel or German reparations payments from the First World War. After the First World War, Germany had to pay reparations for that. And so they needed a financial instrument or institution to do so. It was set up by a man called Yarma Schacht, who was the president of the German Reichsbank and later became best known as Hitler's economics minister and essentially was the man responsible for sorting out the Nazi economy after the chaos of the Weimar Republic. And his very close friend was called Montague Norman, who was the governor of the bank of England. So they set up this bank, the bis. They set it up in Basel. Why in Basel? Because mostly in those days, people traveled by train and Basel was easily reached by lots, lots of train lines. And Even now the BIS's headquarters, it's in a different building to the 1930s, is right by Basel train station. So that's, that's why how it ended up in Basel. And then the, one of the fascinating things about the BIS is that it's set up as an international. It's set up by International treaty. So although it's functions as a bank and a meeting place and a research institute, it has the same protections as indeed do the IMF and the World Bank. Diplomatic level protections. So if Swiss law doesn't really apply, know that Swiss police can't enter the BIS without permission. The, its high level functioners have diplomatic level of protection. Its assets can never be seized by the Swiss, you know, in the unlikely event it went bust and or owed credit to something, it's kind of extraterritorial. So it's very, very interesting institution.

And you're in favor of the BIS being here as part of the system, but you are critical of it for certain things, right?

Yes, I mean I think it's good that the BIS exists because we need a place where central bankers can go and meet. That's good. Especially in a globalized economy now where what happens in one country instantly rebounds in another country. We've seen with Credit Suisse and you know, at the SVB bank in America that went busted, bang, instant rebound around the global financial system. So we need that. But my critique is that we should know much more about what happens in these meetings of central bankers. Because central bankers are public servants. We pay their salary and they're taking decisions that are crucial to us. You know, how much of our savings going to earn, what's our mortgage rate going to be. All this stuff is taken by central bankers. And if they, if, you know, I'm a reporter and I just instinctively feel when powerful people meet in, in secret meetings, we don't know what they're talking about. We need to know. The Fed publishes the minutes of, of its, of its Monetary Policy Committee meetings. So does the bank of England. So I mean, why can't we know more about what the BIS does and what's going on in those.

So they don't publish minutes then?

They don't publish minutes. Now they say the me the meetings are confidential.

Yeah, it's interesting because nobody really in the US would believe that the Fed is transparent. So, and, and they publish minutes. So this is one step, you know, more secretive than our Federal Reserve, which is pretty secretive in many ways. People are very critical of the Fed as I think they should be.

I mean what the BIS says, I would just give them, they're not here, so let's give them their chance to respond. What they say is that the bankers need to be able to discuss things in confidential surroundings so they can speak confidently. Now I understand that. I don't think, I wouldn't say that we need to know that the Bank France president said this and argued for that, and the bank of England said no. How about that? But what we can know is who was there, how long the meeting go on, what were the broad themes of the meeting, what was the consensus? You know, so there's, there's a halfway house here.

Yeah. Talk to us about the way. Well, I mean, we don't know exactly, but, you know, maybe speculate even too, or tell what you do know about the way these central bankers are coordinating things. And one, of course, recent example would be the change in monetary policy, which was just massive, maybe the biggest change ever during COVID They're really coordinating to inflate away the value of people's currencies. And they seem to be doing this in a very lockstep fashion. They do it at the G7, G20 meetings as well. Talk to us about this.

Yeah, well, I think what happens, a consensus emerges. And it was your right to focus on Covid because, you know, one of the things that central bankers always say is, you know, and their mandate is to control inflation. You know, the European Central bank has to keep inflation down between 2%. The bank of England's inflation target is 2%. But at the same time, they flooded the economy with cheap money.

Money.

I mean, in Britain, we had a thing called eat out to help out during COVID whereas you could, you know, go to a restaurant to keep the restaurant business going. The government would pick up half of your part of your tab. And they had, we had the furlough plan where you could, you know, the government would pay for people's salaries. Now, I understand that Covid was a came out of the blue, essentially. It needed fast, sharp responses. But it went on, on and on and on, all this money flooding in. And then, you know, hey, guess what? We got inflation at 10 in Britain. But how did that happen? Well, you know, an eighth grader doing economics knows that if you flood an economy with money, the value of the money goes down, so the prices go up. So this is what is a. Is good that you ask? Ask this. I don't know what the answer is because these are smart people. But somehow they can't turn the tap off. Even though it's their job to control inflation, they can't turn that tap off.

Yeah. Well, it's really interesting that our central bank chair, Jerome Powell, for so long after the problem was really solved, he kept saying inflation was transitory. Inflation was transitory. And then just way too late, there was a reversal in that thinking and that Policy, I mean, they obviously have an incentive to inflate. Even though their mandate is supposedly to control inflation, they're benefiting from it. Right.

Well, that's, I mean, I don't, I don't know. I can't say they're benefiting from it, but it is a mystery to me. It's a mystery why people in the Fed and in the bank of England, I mean, these are the two that I follow more, why they keep saying inflation is transitory. It's not transitory. It's, you know, like the Governor of the bank of England, he, he's blaming everybody. He says it, oh, firstly, it's the fault of people who retired at 50. So, you know, that's somehow, that's it.

How is it their fault? Why don't you.

Well, I don't know. Maybe because they retire so they spend too much money on, they put too much money into the economy or. I, I don't know. But that's what he said. It's too many people are retiring too early. Then he, then he said that people shouldn't ask for pay rises. I mean, it's always everyone else's fault, you know, and look, like I say the pandemic was, you know what, that's entirely what causes black swan events. But okay, even, even so, I mean, you can work out different options for dealing with it. And you know, maybe at the start, yeah, you pour some money into the economy because you've got to keep things going. You've got to stop people panicking. But for so long.

Right, I agree, I have. They were just way too accommodative. I mean, at the start, I, I agree. Look, if you're going to. I'm not really a fan of central banks. I think the market should just control the value of currencies. But again, we have what we have. And it was okay with me that they did the initial easing, the initial injections, but they just kept the party going for way too long.

Yeah, exactly.

And now, now we're all suffering from the whiplash effect of that.

Yeah, completely. Yeah, completely. And also the psychological effects on the society. I don't know so much about what happened in America, but here, you know, there's, there's been a kind of shift that people don't want to go to work. They, you know, they won't want to stay in there. If so many people want to work at home, stay in the offices. If, you know, we have 20 more than one in five people of the age cohort that should be economically Active are not economically active. People are on antidepressants. People are feeling socially isolated. You know, it's. It's had terrible, terrible consequences, not least for children as well, you know, or not economically.

Right, but now you're talking, talking about the pandemic in general. You're not talking about the BIS or. That's true.

Yeah.

What else do you want people to know about the bis?

Well, I want them to know about its history, that it has such a strange history, that here was a bank set up in the night in 1930, and during the war, it kept going and it was. It was regarded. It was doing a lot of services for the Third Reich, and it was regarded as. By the Third. By the Nazis, as one of their key foreign exchange branches.

Well, and your book to that subject is called what, Hitler's Bank, Right.

Yeah. Well, I mean, the President of the BIS was an American called Thomas McKittrick. So I call him Hitler's American banker because he was. He was the president of the BIS from 1940 to 1946. Okay, so you can say from 1940 to December 41, when America enters the war, America was neutral, but America was not neutral in 42, 43, 44, 45. And so here you have an American running this bank which is providing services to Nazi Germany. And I just thought it was. It was in an incredible story, and it's the one reason why he was doing that. I suppose the case with the Defense is that he was gathering intelligence, which he was passing on to Alan Dulles. Now, Alan Dulles, as some of your viewers will know, was the head of the Office for Strategic Services, the American, the precursor to the CIA station in Bern, Switzerland, where he was one of the most important American intelligence officers during the Second World War. And what would happen was that a man called Emil Poole, who was the vice president of the Rice bank, he would come down to Basel for a nice chat with Thomas McKittrick, and then McKitchery would tell Alan Dulles what Pool had told him. So I suppose that's kind of the case for the Defense. It was a. A channel and, you know, for getting information from the Nazis to the Allies. But still, it's absolutely extraordinary because, I mean, he could have shut the bank down. You know, he could. You know, he could have or he could have suspended it, but it kept going through the set. Through the Second World War.

War.

So it was. It. No, I think it just shows that even in a wartime, you know, if at a time when, like, American boys and British boys are literally Landing on the beaches, you know, walking into machine gun fire in, you know, after D day in summer 44, fighting their way through Europe. Now, here's a man, an American, having nice chats with the vice President of the Nazi Reichsbank, who was later convicted of war crimes. You know, we're not talking about some lowly functionary. He was. He was convicted of war crimes at Nuremberg, as was his boss. Right, But I think that's worth knowing.

Yeah, yeah, it's amazing. I mean, that's. This is why they call them banksters. Yeah, yeah. I mean, because they're. They're financing drug dealers, arms dealers, you know, bad characters everywhere. They. They can make money. Money.

Well, I think what it taught me, what I, you know, also what I learned from. From writing Hitler's Secret bankers, is that just money always finds a way. You know, you think two countries are at war, but my money finds a way.

You know, what does that mean? Expand on that. Money finds a way.

Well, that's what I'm. That this is a, you know, the BIS is a perfect example of that, that, you know, this institution is run by an American. One of the other senior officials is a man called Paul Heckler. So his correspondence used to sign it Heil Hitler. And it was, you know, it was kept going because in Britain people were saying, oh, well, hold on a minute. Why is this bank still existing? That was set up by Montague Norman, you know, the head of the bank of England. And then. And. And people in Britain and the treasury, treasury officials were saying, well, actually, we need it. You know, we need it. And why do we need it? We need it for post war, because this war will end and sooner or later we'll have to do business with Germany again. Now, I saw something similar on a much, much smaller scale when I was a reporter in the 1990s covering the Yugoslav wars. A lot of those wars were about. They were supposedly about ethnic identity. Serbs, Croats and Bosnians. But a lot. What a lot of them were about, about looting and black markets, you know, trading in petrol and stolen cigarettes and things. No, there was always. There's a nexus between crime and war.

Always. So.

But during the Second World War, it was a government level.

Yeah, yeah, very good. Are there any more modern scandals like that that you have to share? Will we just not know about them for decades?

Well, I don't. You mean to do with bis? Yeah, yeah, I know. I don't know of any other. I mean, that's, that's.

That.

That, to me, that's the Scandal. Now, I must give them credit, they're completely open about this. They don't hide. You know, when I, when I went there, when I wrote my book, they, they operate under the 30 year rule. Documents up to the third, up to 30 years old. You can see they gave me everything I asked for and I have no reason to believe they held anything back. The historian was very helpful to me. You know, they, I, everything, everything was there, everything was open.

Yeah.

And I should also say they have, they have changed a bit in the last 10 years since I wrote my book.

Book.

When I wrote my book, I asked them, you know, obviously for a serious interview with one of the officials, high ranking officials. They gave me an email interview with a mid ranking official. That was it.

Yeah.

But now if you go to the BIS, they've got a YouTube channel and they have a young woman doing a five minute intro.

I watched one of those videos. Yeah.

Yeah.

It just seems like PR video though. It's.

Yeah, but you know, you're in, you get in the building, you see what.

Yeah, it's better than nothing.

Yeah, you, you know the door, you go through the door. Yeah. So it's, it's changing a bit. It is. You know, because also the world is changing.

You know, they have to.

The idea of, of being so unaccountable and so opaque. It's not, you know, it's not like that anymore. Yeah.

So what is the connection between the BIS and, you know, they, they were trying to shut it down after World War II because the Nazi connection and, and how did it pave the way to the euro?

Yes, obviously after the Second World War, especially in America, there was a lot of anger. How come this American banker, Thomas McKittrick's been so helpful to the Nazis? So in the US Treasury Department, Harry Dexter White and Henry Morgenthau, who was the Treasury Secretary and his key aide, they wanted to push for the bank to be shut down. And some people were Even calling for McKittrick to be prosecuted, you know, as a, as a war criminal or for, you know, being on the side of the Germans. But that didn't happen. The BIS had some powerful allies, including, for example, Alan Dulles, who we talked about. So it reinvented itself, it stayed in business. Plus also it was a functioning bank. And it was a bank for, you know, quite a few countries, you know, with shareholders from important countries. So I suppose it would have been tricky to shut it down. But anyway, it's always been very nimble. So it reinvented itself as the place where all the preparatory work was done for the euro. Because if you think about something like the euro, the, the right, you know, the, the deutsche mark and the Italian lira and the French franc, they can't just be wiped out. What they had to do was narrow the exchange rates, you know, to bring them more in harmony, to stop the big jumps around, so that when the single currency did come to exist, it was a much smoother transition. So that was called something called the snake in the tunnel. So the idea is that you've got this tunnel, but the currents are moving around in it, but the tunnel gets smaller so the snakes have less room to maneuver. So a lot of that preparatory work was done at the BIS through the 50s and 60s and 70s, and then that was done at something called the European Monetary Institute, which then became the European Central Bank. So the euro is very much a creature of the bis.

Very interesting, very interesting. I bet very few people know that. I certainly didn't.

Yeah. So, I mean, it came straight from there.

What is your opinion on the outlook of the euro as a currency and the EU in general, especially given that you're in London and post Brexit?

I'm no longer in it.

Yes, I know, that's my point.

Yeah, well. Well, I think two things. I think that, I mean, the EU as a currency is here to stay. It's not going anywhere.

I think it's very interesting that when we think about the history of the euro, no country's population was ever asked if they wanted to get rid of their national currency. It was just done, it was just removed. Personally, I'm not in favor of transnational currencies. I believe in sovereign nation states that control their own currencies. Even if, yes, sometimes there are big exchange differences and, you know, it can make things more difficult for importers and exporters. I understand that. I'm not running an import export business, but, you know, I. Oh, I think if you're going to do that, you've got to take the people with you. It's not, it's not right to just wipe out national currencies and not consult people with referendums as to what, what it means, what it means for their money, where, you know, there was no consultation on this, which is done. So I think though, that obviously the euro is here to stay. I mean, it's a, it's the unit of a very, you know, important part of the world.

I'm assuming since you believe the euro will stick around, then of course the EU will too, right?

Yeah, absolutely. The EU will stick around. The question for the EU is how much farther down the federalist path it will go. Because the huge contradiction about the euro is this. You have all the eurozone members with the same currency, but the currency, you know, so their money supply is controlled by the European Central bank and okay, their central banks have a vote on that, but they're not autonomous in their money supply anymore. And there's a massive disconnect, as even the people at the BIS who made the euro said admitted, it's going to be very problematic to have a currency that's got one central bank controlling the money supply, but different fiscal tax and spend policies. And that disconnect is very problematic because that's one reason why Greece got in such a mess. You know, Greece was brought into the euro before. Arguably it was ready, but, you know, the countries are kind of semi, semi independent or semi autonomous. But at the same time, no one, no one, I think, is going to argue that this be a Central European tack fiscal policy. It's because that's the economic logic of essential Europe, central one unit currency is that there's a central fiscal policy too. But no one is going to argue for that. To say, you know, in France and Germany or Italy, we're no longer going to have the power to decide what our taxes are. I mean, I just think Britain had the greatest escape to, you know, because there was some time here when there was a lot of talk about joining the euro. And, you know, I'm so happy that we, we did not do that, that.

That would have been much harder to disengage from that.

Yeah, I mean, we were, we wouldn't have been able to. But, you know, that EU membership aside, I think the idea that your monetary policy is controlled, you lose control of it. That's why I was always puzzled by lots of Scottish people when they say they want Scottish independence. They say we're going to join the euro. So do you understand what that means? Because you're having even less control over your money supply than you do being part of Britain. At least in Britain you're part of the States. Right.

And what just seems incredibly difficult to me is the fact that you can have countries with such different levels of productivity in their economy joined together. I mean, Germany and Greece or Germany and Spain, how can those two coexist?

Well, that's it. That's the great contradiction, isn't it? And it's strong enough and it's durable enough that it can absorb that, that the buffer exists. But, you know, in the long term. I don't know if in 20 years what it will be. Nobody knows. I mean, you know, if you ask economists about the future of the euro in 20 years time, I'm sure some will say it won't exist. Some will say it'll be even stronger. Some will say we'll have, you know, brought in another 27 countries. You know, who, who knows. It's not, it's not possible to say. But yeah, that, that is the fundamental disconnect. And the problem is that you've got unified unitary monetary policy and disparate national fiscal policies.

Well, Adam, this has been a very interesting discussion. The book is available as well as your other 14 books in all the usual places. Do you want to give out a website or anything?

Yes, you can go to my website. It's my name, www.adamlabord.com and you can follow me on Twitter.

Adam Lepore Excellent, Adam. Thank you for joining us.

Thank you.

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