Economist WARNS: “You Have No Idea What’s Coming”

0:00 I really want to focus on what's going

0:01 on in the world right now cuz I have so many questions.

0:03 It's It's all quite confusing.

0:05 Extremely.

0:06 And understanding the layers of motivation that, you know, Trump has, Iran have,

0:11 Israel have, is um it's a difficult jig- jigsaw puzzle to put together.

0:16 I guess that the question that I keep asking myself is like, what is going on?

0:21 You can't get away from the fact that we've basically

0:23 elected a mafia don to president of the United States.

0:27 You've got a guy who um admires the mafia is running the country.

0:33 So, what we're getting in some ways is a shakedown

0:36 rather than anything driven by any sense of political necessity.

0:41 So, that's that's a crazy element to begin with.

0:44 And the American deep state, as it's called,

0:48 has been anti-Iran for 40 or 50 years.

0:51 Israel has wanted to defeat Iran for that length of time.

0:54 Trump is stupid enough, but also cunning enough, a combination of the two,

0:59 to take on what Israel wanted to do, which was destroy Iran.

1:04 They're now trying to do it and they're finding

1:06 that they've they've bitten off far more than they can chew.

1:09 Trump is someone who cares a lot about people's opinions of him.

1:13 And he must have known that this would be

1:15 politically unpopular to target Iran at this moment in time.

1:19 I don't think so.

1:20 I had a relationship with somebody with narcissistic personality disorder.

1:24 So, that's something I over and above what I

1:26 learned academically that I when I think about his behavior.

1:29 And somebody like that, they want to be the center of attention at all times.

1:34 They can't stand it when somebody else is being spoken about.

1:37 It's ridiculous, but it's it's a pathology.

1:39 So, he's interested in people's opinions so

1:42 long as they're positive and they're about him.

1:44 So, you think Are you saying that he attacked Iran

1:46 and started this war in part because he wanted attention?

1:50 That's always something with somebody who's got that disorder.

1:53 Yeah.

1:54 I mean, what do you think about his rational?

1:55 He's saying that he attacked Iran because they had

1:57 nuclear weapons and they were it was an imminent threat.

2:00 We still don't know whether Iran has nuclear weapons.

2:03 Okay?

2:03 We know that Israel has.

2:05 If you're going to attack a country, you'd usually attack Israel, not Iran.

2:09 But you can't attack attack Israel, can you?

2:11 Cuz I cannot make sense of what politicians

2:13 all over the planet are doing these days.

2:15 There's a huge gap between what politicians are saying about global

2:19 politics and what people in the street are saying about it.

2:23 So, people on the street have seen the Gaza genocide.

2:26 They've seen all the conflicts Israel has started there.

2:28 And I think the general sentiment in most countries in the world

2:32 today is anti-Israel because of the way it's treating the Palestinians.

2:36 And that's what people are thinking about.

2:38 The top echelons, like in this country,

2:40 as you know, if I if I say free Palestine,

2:43 I say that outside on the street, I can be arrested.

2:47 It's crazy.

2:49 What There's a huge divorce between what people

2:52 are thinking and what their politicians are saying.

2:55 And I can't give any explanation for that divorce apart

2:59 from believing that Israel has something over our political leaders.

3:04 What do you mean?

3:04 You think they have something over our political leaders?

3:06 I think there are We know about the whole Epstein The way

3:10 that these Iranians refer to what's happening

3:12 is they say they're fighting the Epstein class.

3:14 And there's belief that there's something where

3:16 Epstein has been working for for the Israeli

3:19 intelligence service and has blackmailed worthy

3:23 material on a huge range of politicians.

3:26 And that's the only way that I can explain the the sort of things

3:29 that politicians are supporting when their populace

3:32 is angry about those same policies.

3:34 So, you get demonstrations here in our free Palestine demonstrations.

3:38 80-year-old female vicars being arrested for saying this sort of stuff.

3:43 You go back 40 years ago,

3:44 there was a a belief in the public and a belief amongst

3:48 politicians that Israel had a right to exist and it was all pro-Israel.

3:53 And now, after 40 years, the type of abuses that have happened in Palestine

3:58 have hit individual ordinary people's attitudes to Israel.

4:03 So, ordinary people are saying Israel's the aggressor.

4:06 Israel's making the mistakes.

4:08 But the politicians are all saying it's

4:09 a it's it's anti- um Semitic to criticize Israel.

4:14 If you had to give a a one-sentence answer as to why this war started,

4:21 cuz we sort of hypothesized a few things there,

4:23 what would that one-sentence answer be?

4:27 [sighs] [laughter and gasps]

4:28 Again, this is trying to make sense of the senseless.

4:31 I just think Israel wanted to destroy Iran.

4:33 They thought they could do it and they thought they

4:35 had an American president who would help them do it.

4:38 And [snorts] they uh drastically underestimated

4:40 how prepared Iran was for that conflict.

4:43 Why would Israel want to destroy Iran?

4:45 What's the back context there?

4:47 This goes back to religious elements.

4:49 The Zionist state had the right to that whole region.

4:52 And there's an expansionist element to Israel's behavior for the last 40 years.

4:57 And the major rival they saw themselves as having in that sense was Iran.

5:02 They can invade Jordan, they can attack Lebanon.

5:06 They could do all these things.

5:08 Of course, they the '67 war,

5:11 they wiped out the invading Arabian armies in 6 days.

5:16 They have this past history of being militarily dominant in the area.

5:21 And they they knew that Iran was too big for them to take on on their own.

5:25 They thought they could get the Americans in there.

5:26 And I think they drastically underestimated

5:29 how prepared Iran was for this situation.

5:31 When you say Iran were prepared for this situation

5:34 and it somewhat surprised Israel and the US,

5:36 what is that preparedness you're speaking about?

5:39 Well, it's for a start,

5:40 the the fact that Iran witnessed that there were um decapitation

5:44 attacks on other countries in the region going way way back,

5:48 not just the last 10 years, but the last 40 or 50 years.

5:52 And decapitation attack?

5:53 off the leader.

5:54 You kill the leaders.

5:55 And then, with the leaders killed, the armies in disarray,

5:58 and you can come in and invade and take over.

6:00 So, I'm getting rid of Saddam Hussein, that sort of thing.

6:02 You know, wipe out Saddam Hussein's power

6:04 base and then the whole system collapses.

6:07 That was the Iraq story.

6:09 But the Iranians observed that and they

6:11 have broken their military into 31 divisions.

6:14 There are 31 provinces, like 31 states in that sense, inside Iran.

6:19 Their military is broken into those 31 units.

6:22 They've got their own fail-safe system running in the background.

6:25 They've got their own resources, their own missiles,

6:29 production systems, all that sort of stuff.

6:31 So, you've got to take out the whole 31 and then they'd have that sub-area.

6:35 So, the only way you can beat the country is

6:37 by literally bombing it to back to the Stone Age.

6:40 Which is appears to be what they've been trying to do.

6:43 Trying to do, but the thing is it's a huge country.

6:45 I mean, look at you know, scale of Iran.

6:46 The The map's always distorted how large So, that is larger.

6:49 That's more than half the size of Western Europe.

6:52 It's got a population of 90 million,

6:53 about 1/3 or 1/4 of the population of Europe, far more than Iraq.

6:58 I mean, it looks like it's double the size of the UK or more.

7:01 Or more than double.

7:02 I mean, you know one thing about the Mercator projection?

7:04 No, what's that?

7:05 Okay.

7:05 It's that it's it makes the the northern

7:07 hemispheres twice as large as the southern.

7:10 And Iran's in the northern hemisphere, but not as far north as England.

7:13 So, the distortion gets amplified the further north you go.

7:16 So, it's bigger than France and Germany and Italy

7:18 and Spain and possibly Poland in terms of area.

7:23 And then, if you even see just looking on the map itself,

7:25 you can see the corrugations there uh versus what you can see

7:29 What's a corrugation?

7:29 You know, the the what's representing mountains.

7:31 Okay.

7:32 Okay.

7:32 There's more mountains inside there.

7:34 It's a hor- it's a horrendous terrain to fight a war on.

7:37 I think what Trump is doing at the moment is a pump and dump scheme.

7:40 He's trying to drive up the oil price,

7:43 tell friends beforehand that he's about to make his announcement,

7:46 which will cause the price to fall.

7:48 And he's just oscillating this way up and down and exploiting

7:52 it for his friends and for his own wealth in the process.

7:55 Do you actually think that's the case?

7:56 Yeah, I'm sure.

7:57 I mean, I always have to make sense of this stuff.

8:00 This must be hurting his friends economically because this this you know,

8:02 the stock market's going to take a dip if he's not careful.

8:05 And his friends are all shareholders in different big companies.

8:08 So, you know, and also when we think about energy

8:09 If you know, like the one of Keynes' great lines

8:12 was that there's no point in buying a stock which

8:14 you think is going to increase in value over time

8:17 if you think it's going to slump in the immediate future.

8:20 So, he's making an announcement which causes oil markets to panic,

8:23 so the price goes up.

8:24 We're giving him control of the most powerful country on the planet.

8:28 He knows if he's making an announcement at the news markets,

8:31 he has no compunction whatsoever in exploiting that to cause rises and falls

8:36 in prices and try to exploit them himself and with his friends.

8:40 I did I mean, I did see that.

8:41 I've got the data here on on the floor showing those graphs.

8:44 I I genuinely looked at that and thought, yeah, you you know, maybe,

8:47 but it's also conceivable that Trump is quite a predictable

8:50 character and he tweets at the same time every day.

8:52 And it's also I think me and you both

8:54 know that before the markets open on a Monday morning,

8:57 he's going to want to say something really positive.

9:00 He has a track record of doing that.

9:01 So, is it conceivable that they knew he was flying because it

9:04 was tracked that he was going to be on this plane journey?

9:06 There's going to be a press gaggle.

9:08 We know he's going to give an interview.

9:09 I actually think that was quite predictable.

9:11 If I was a betting man, I would have gone Sunday night, Monday morning,

9:13 I would have put a bet on oil prices coming down, the stock market going up.

9:18 Yeah, I like that.

9:18 For example, one of the things he said most recently,

9:21 he talked about getting a present from Iran.

9:23 And then he finally let slip what the present was

9:25 and was letting eight ships through the Strait of Hormuz.

9:28 Oh, is he now?

9:30 Those eight ships were not American, they were only other allies.

9:34 I think what he's thinking is these That's

9:36 going to mean the oil market gets calmed down.

9:39 That means the price is going to fall.

9:41 Uh so, I can then do another pump and dump.

9:43 Let's explain the Strait of Hormuz.

9:46 Oh god.

9:46 Yeah, okay.

9:47 As if we had to explain it for 16-year-olds.

9:50 Because there's been lots of coverage on it and I think

9:51 some people have kind of skipped past the importance of the region.

9:55 What is the Strait of Hormuz and why does it matter?

9:57 Well, it's the choke point in this Persian Gulf

10:00 to get through you've got like 21 km so yeah,

10:02 that's an incredibly narrow gap for ships to pass

10:05 through and that means that all the countries that pump

10:08 not just oil but fertilizer helium all these critical

10:13 elements for the production system all have to pass through

10:15 this point and obviously that's well within reach of any

10:18 weapons from Iran so they can say you do

10:21 or do not pass depending on whether we approve or don't

10:23 approve of your political your country's attitude towards our country.

10:27 You said fertilizer?

10:29 Yeah.

10:29 Oil and helium?

10:31 Yeah, helium.

10:32 Where are they coming from?

10:34 mainly coming from I think from mainly from the Saudi Arabian side the Saudi

10:37 Arabian like Iran would have the same things but Iran would keep it keep

10:42 those for themselves but Saudi Arabia is the main source of gases and oils

10:47 which are refined and as byproducts we get sulfur dioxide and we get helium.

10:52 This is the helium?

10:53 Yeah.

10:54 Okay.

10:54 That's Yeah.

10:55 a couple of kilos of helium but helium

10:58 it's an element which there's no substitute.

11:01 So helium is inert.

11:04 What does that mean?

11:05 It means it doesn't interact with other chemicals.

11:07 You want to give it a try?

11:08 I've never done it.

11:09 think there's any in here.

11:10 Oh what a pity.

11:11 Okay, what I would have give it a try.

11:13 You got any real helium?

11:16 Oh bloody hell, helium balloon.

11:19 [laughter] Does it change your voice?

11:23 I don't know.

11:23 Has my voice changed?

11:24 A bit.

11:27 [laughter]

11:26 I'll give my voice a try, okay.

11:28 Okay, I've never done this before but I've heard it at parties.

11:34 Okay, now I I think my voice has changed somewhat from a

11:40 [laughter] The fact you can do it.

11:40 OH MY GOD.

11:45 THAT DOESN'T RHYME.

11:46 OKAY.

11:46 WHERE IS helium coming from?

11:48 It's coming from a gas field so about 30% of the world's helium

11:52 comes from a gas field which spans both uh Saudi Saudi Arabia and Iran.

11:56 If you don't trap helium physically somehow it goes to outer space.

12:01 That's the ultimate destination of the stuff.

12:03 So it's trapped in the same things that trap oil and then when you drill for oil

12:07 you also get helium coming out and then

12:10 helium is absolutely critical for the semiconductor industry.

12:14 Didn't matter 100 years ago.

12:15 And semiconductors are important for what?

12:17 Everything.

12:18 I mean you you've you take the semiconductors out of that you've got a brick.

12:22 Okay?

12:22 The processors the CPUs the memory chips they're all

12:26 made helium is an essential element to make them.

12:29 For iPhones or tablets or devices Everything everything electronic.

12:32 If you need semiconductors you need helium.

12:35 So if you cut off 30% of the world's helium supply

12:38 you cut off the capacity to produce 30% of the world's semiconductors.

12:42 And Iran have blocked that gap.

12:44 And that means that we've suddenly lost 30% of the world's helium.

12:48 I've got a quote from March 2026 from leading helium expert Phil Cornbluth.

12:52 He said we're looking at a minimum two to three

12:55 months shutdown of helium production with up to six

12:58 months before supply gets back to normal and he

13:01 explained you can't stockpile helium because it leaks through containers.

13:05 Yep.

13:05 So once supply is cut off semiconductor production will stop entirely.

13:10 South Korea gets 65% of its helium from Qatar

13:14 in that region and makes two-thirds of the world's memory chips.

13:17 Their government has launched an emergency investigation into the shortage.

13:20 Nobody's talking about this.

13:21 I know and this this is one reason

13:23 that's quite terrifying about the scale of what we're

13:26 going through cuz people are just thinking it's

13:27 going to be oil's going to be more expensive.

13:29 That's the sort of mindset we have but in fact critical

13:33 elements of the production system are being terminated by this conflict.

13:37 You can't produce chips anymore and you can't Well, you've got to hang on.

13:41 You can't produce these chips either because the fertilizer is disappearing.

13:44 So on you're holding a potato in your hand.

13:46 Yeah.

13:47 How are potato chips going to be impacted by the war?

13:50 Because of fertilizer.

13:52 If we don't have the fertilizer we can't grow the potatoes

13:54 and it's not just potatoes it's the whole range of crops.

13:57 We eat food, okay?

13:58 We eat this grain stuff.

13:59 It actually starts as brown stuff because

14:02 the fertilizer is an essential part of growing

14:05 all the food we eat and the fertilizer

14:07 is produced by a process called the Haber-Bosch

14:09 process which takes petroleum and nitrogen and fixes

14:14 them in such a way that you can put this on the on the field

14:16 and your plants will grow courtesy of the fertilizer.

14:20 If we didn't have fertilizer at all guess

14:22 how many billion people the planet could actually support.

14:26 know.

14:26 Between one and two.

14:28 And fertilizer comes from this region?

14:29 Again 20 to 30% of our fertilizer comes through that region.

14:32 Through the Strait of Hormuz?

14:33 Through the Strait of Hormuz.

14:34 Where is it coming from?

14:36 It's coming again from the the same gas field that's producing the helium

14:40 produces a side effect of fertilizer and you need you need you know,

14:44 I'm not a chemist okay so I can get these things wrong but you

14:47 need sulfur you need sulfuric acid

14:49 as well as part of these production processes.

14:52 20% of the world's fertilizer helium sulfuric

14:55 acid all pass through that Strait and if you take them away then you can't make

15:00 microchips which is what Korea is suffering from.

15:03 You can't make fertilizer which which everybody will suffer from.

15:08 If we lost 20% of the world's fertilizer we'd lose roughly

15:11 20% of the world's food and it cause a global famine.

15:14 We've never had this experience before.

15:16 We've had localized famines you know,

15:17 countries like India have had famines in parts of Africa and so on.

15:21 But if this is not available the globe has a famine.

15:24 And what's the last tanker you've got down there?

15:26 There's one more on the floor.

15:27 god.

15:27 Okay.

15:29 Hey, that's pretty good.

15:30 That was accidental but that's that's petroleum okay?

15:33 Petroleum tanker obviously empty 20 liters.

15:36 So that's oil?

15:37 That's oil.

15:37 Oil, okay.

15:38 So if that that's what we're losing right now and people are focusing upon

15:42 the price of this but the really important point and I can bring up one

15:45 of my own charts here is the role of energy in production because if we

15:51 don't have energy we can't produce goods

15:53 and services and the link is incredibly tight.

15:56 This is looking at change in energy and change

16:00 in gross world product over the last 40 years.

16:03 I'll throw this graph on the screen for people that are watching.

16:04 Yeah, so what what you've got here is

16:06 the annual percentage change in gross world product

16:09 and the annual percentage change in gross energy consumption

16:12 and they're virtually lockstep and they're the same magnitude.

16:16 So when energy goes up GDP goes up.

16:18 energy goes down GDP goes down.

16:20 Now we're losing about 20% of the world's

16:23 liquefied natural gas a substantial proportion

16:26 of its oil as well we could see a 5 or 10% fall in energy.

16:30 We will certainly see a 5 or 10% fall in global world gross world product.

16:35 So explain that to me.

16:35 So where is the oil in this region?

16:37 It's everywhere.

16:39 [laughter] Okay.

16:39 I mean this this is one of the accidents of history that the oil is

16:42 a large part is concentrated here and a large

16:45 part over here and a bit in Russia.

16:46 So over here for people that can't see you're pointing at Iran Saudi Arabia.

16:51 Arabia.

16:52 Iraq and then there's a lot in the United States

16:55 and there's You can see you've got some in Russia as well

16:57 and there was a small amount like the North Sea

16:59 had a substantial amount of oil as well at one stage.

17:02 And the type of oil in this region I hear is quite important.

17:05 It's very I mean oil there's no such thing as a homogeneous product.

17:09 What does homogeneous mean?

17:11 Homogeneous everything is the same everywhere.

17:12 You can if you don't get it here you can substitute from something over here.

17:16 That's a myth that economists actually unfortunately believe.

17:19 They basically could persuade people to think that everything is homogeneous.

17:23 In fact oil from Venezuela is almost like tar.

17:26 Oil from here is flows like water comparatively.

17:29 You need different processing systems to to extract

17:32 that oil than you need over here.

17:35 If we lose this we can't replace it with something from over here.

17:38 So once that goes then the production system of the planet is damaged.

17:43 This has been the shocking thing for me as a citizen has been

17:48 the fact that a war with one country could decapitate what 20 to 30%

17:54 of global production.

17:55 global production of oil.

17:57 Yeah.

17:57 And food.

17:58 That's a vulnerability if I've ever heard one.

18:00 I know and this is like one reason I'm

18:02 a critic of mainstream economics is they trivialize all this stuff.

18:05 They don't teach their students how critical this is.

18:08 So most people are like you even people done a PhD

18:11 in economics even worse in that sense than other people.

18:15 They don't understand how critical and how fragile our production systems are.

18:19 So people can talk about a war in supply.

18:21 No, it's going to cut off your food supply.

18:24 No, it's going to cut off your food supply.

18:26 And for the average person listening now what will

18:28 they start to experience if this war doesn't immediately end?

18:33 Two or three months India is going to run out of fertilizer.

18:37 And so there'll be a famine in India.

18:39 Food production on the planet could fall 10 25%.

18:43 And therefore the ship there simply won't be enough food for everyone

18:46 on the planet and then it's a question of who's going to starve.

18:50 Now you'd think the wealthy countries are going to be safe.

18:53 They'd like for Australia my old home country has about 30 days oil supply.

18:58 When it runs out it can't get food from the farm to the city anymore.

19:03 So Australia is incredibly vulnerable.

19:05 We're all far more vulnerable than we realize

19:07 and this war is threatening everybody on the planet.

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