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Home » Transcript: Geopolitical Lies Fuel Financial Bubble w/ Jeffrey Sachs

Transcript: Geopolitical Lies Fuel Financial Bubble w/ Jeffrey Sachs

EDITOR’S NOTE: In this timely conversation on The Duran, economist and Columbia professor Jeffrey Sachs sits down with Alexander Mercouris and Alex Christoforou to examine how Western geopolitical narratives are inflating a dangerous financial bubble. Sachs argues that the erosion of American and European hegemony is a crisis for elites clinging to outdated dominance rather than for the world at large, drawing pointed parallels to 1914 while assessing the real strength and rationality of China, Russia, and Iran in an emerging multipolar order.

TRANSCRIPT:

Introduction

ALEX CHRISTOFOROU: (00:00:00 – 00:00:06): All right, Alexander, we are here with Professor Jeffrey Sachs on The Duran. Professor Sachs, thank you for joining us.

JEFFREY SACHS: (00:00:07 – 00:00:08): Great to be with you guys.

ALEX CHRISTOFOROU: (00:00:09 – 00:00:18): We are happy and honored to have you with us. Gentlemen, we have a lot to talk about, so I’m just going to pass it off to you, Alexander, and to you, Professor Sachs, so we can discuss what’s happening in the world.

ALEXANDER MERCOURIS: (00:00:19 – 00:01:55): Absolutely. And no better person to discuss what is happening in the world with than Professor Sachs. We’ve been talking with Professor Sachs for several years now, many years now, in fact, and he has been charting the course of American foreign policy, and he has been explaining in program after program, both on our channel, in many places, including, by the way, the UN Security Council, but in other places too, that US foreign policy is going completely off the rails and that it was all going to end badly.

And I think the events of the last few months bear that out completely. We have conflicts in Ukraine. We have conflicts in the Persian Gulf and the Middle East. We have a looming confrontation with China. We have issues in the US economy. We have very grave issues in the European economy. We have, let’s say it openly, Iran under extreme economic pressure, which is something that should concern everybody because the plight of the Iranian people is not something people should ignore.

All of this going on and everything is connected and there is a single thread and that thread takes us back to Washington. Professor Sachs, is that an adequate summary, or at least I’m not saying a complete summary, but an adequate summary of where we are. And perhaps you could take us further.

A double crisis: the West and the United States

JEFFREY SACHS: (00:01:56 – 00:14:24): That is a great summary, a great start for a conversation. And first, let me thank both of you for the incredible accuracy, perspicacity of what you are discussing and reporting every day, because we know we live in a weird media bubble as well as a financial bubble. And the media bubble is everything’s going great, we run the world, and you pierce that every day and also are proved right months and years in advance. And so I think that this is, for me, your work is extraordinarily important.

We have two foreign policy crises underway, and for the same essential reason. I would say a crisis of the United States and a crisis of the West. The West meaning, in this case, of course, the core of the US alliance, the United States, Britain, European Union, Japan, and Australia. Who knows about others? Because is Canada part of the alliance or at war with the United States? We can’t be sure right now because of Donald Trump. But basically, this core is the core of countries that ran the world for at least two centuries. Basically, the 19th century and till towards the end of the 20th century. And they no longer run the world.

And that’s a crisis for them, not a crisis for the world, not a crisis for you and me in our lives, in our living standards or anything else, but a crisis of power. And the United States, of course, played a particular role in this from 1945 onward, when the US was either the primus inter pares, the first among equals, but it was never quite that. It was the dominant country for decades, and then it declared itself to be the sole superpower after 1991 when the Soviet Union ended.

And that crisis is the same. The US no longer dominates the world, but it is programmed deeply in its foreign policy, in its politics, in the media, in decisions that are made day to day to act to protect a hegemony that no longer exists. And so I see this as a double crisis.

The strange part of all of the behavior of recent years is not so much the United States behavior, which is utterly vulgar and self-defeating, but the behavior of Europe, which seems completely bizarre, totally against Europe’s own economic and strategic interests. European powers have cut themselves off from the energy source that fueled their economy, for example, Russia. And you ask, why is that? And one theory is they do what the United States says, but I think a deeper part of it is that it’s the same mindset.

Even 80 years after Europe lost its empires, they still have an imperial mentality, especially Alexander, your country, Britain, which will never lose it perhaps. It acts like an empire. When a mayor becomes prime minister, the first thing he does is put on the imperial mantle and head to Kyiv and so forth, as if this is the most pressing issue facing Britain today.

So we have a double crisis. The big one is the end of the Western-led world. The specific one is the end of the United States’ world. What makes it a crisis is not that fact of multipolarity, which on the whole is either utterly benign or beneficial. And I just want to stress this, and this may seem paradoxical to many people, but China’s rise is good for my living standards.