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Home » Who Really Runs the World? w/ Simon Dixon (Transcript)

Who Really Runs the World? w/ Simon Dixon (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript of The Peter McCormack Show: w/ Simon Dixon on Debt, Power, and the Global Financial System, January 9, 2026.  

Brief Notes: Western democracies look chaotic from the outside, but in this long-form interview Simon Dixon argues the apparent disorder is actually a highly structured system built on debt, asset extraction, and control of capital flows. Peter McCormack and Simon unpack how modern money is created, why governments function as leveraged balance sheets, and how citizens end up as collateral in a global debt machine. They explore the rise of asset managers like BlackRock, the role of the IMF and World Bank, and why wars, bailouts, and inflating stock markets all serve the same financial incentives. The conversation then turns to what this power structure means for ordinary people’s freedoms, living standards, and the case for Bitcoin as a form of boycott and survival strategy. 

Introduction

PETER MCCORMACK: Simon, how you doing man?

SIMON DIXON: All good, Peter. I think last time we spoke was when we were either in Hong Kong face to face and then we did a podcast with Bill Barhydt. I think that was we—

PETER MCCORMACK: Hong Kong was first.

SIMON DIXON: Yes.

PETER MCCORMACK: It’s strange that this is the first time we’re doing this in person.

SIMON DIXON: Yeah, yeah.

PETER MCCORMACK: After all these years, it’s not even a Bitcoin joke.

SIMON DIXON: Yeah, that’s wild. I’m sure we’re going to talk about—

PETER MCCORMACK: Actually I’ve just seen the price is back over 90k.

SIMON DIXON: Okay.

PETER MCCORMACK: It will dump 5k again, surely. Yeah. I don’t even know where to begin. I mean, I was listening to this Dominic Cummings interview on the Spectator Gove’s show and he was talking about the complete dysfunction of the state, the absolute dysfunction of the state. Why nothing works, why everything breaks and why nothing can get done.

And there’s like half of me is that it’s just a dysfunctional state and then half of me, there must be some vested interest somewhere in that this doesn’t work. And whilst that happens, all the poor and the middle class just get poorer. And there’s a group of people on yachts, like I don’t know what’s going on. Tell me.

How Modern Money Creates a Ponzi Scheme

SIMON DIXON: Yeah, okay, where do we start? All right, well, let’s maybe do some structural things and then we can look at the big issues in the UK. But I think people have a very misguided understanding of what I call power dynamics, like who’s making decisions and what is the role of the state and the government.

From all my research, the state and the government are a battering ram to take blame for the fact that they are a piggy bank in a Ponzi scheme that needs to reallocate finance to where their lobby wants it to go.

Okay, so what does that actually mean? Well, firstly, you start with the monetary conversation, which is how we first met, which is the pound. And fiat currency is fundamentally a Ponzi scheme. What does that mean? That every single pound that is created, it started with a $1.2 million loan between William Paterson and the King of England.

And that loan was a perpetual loan that had perpetual interest. And they gave a monopoly on the creation of the pound to the private banks, which the Bank of England was at the time. And so with that structure, which is exported globally around anyone that subscribes to this model, you have a problem. Where is the money to repay the interest if every pound is a debt?

And you soon realize that, well, the money to repay the interest doesn’t exist. And so you have to find someone else to take on another loan in order to repay the interest on the money that doesn’t exist. And so structurally, that is how the pound is created, how the dollar is created.

And so you have a number of consequences to that. The first is you treat every consumer as an asset. You try and get them in debt, you treat every corporation as an asset. And those corporations, they can either get access to zero percent loans, which is at the highest level of power the closer you are to a central bank or you’re a small business and you pay—well, you don’t get a loan for a start because they’d rather lend it to the consumer for a house that isn’t going to run away.

Or, you know, you pay the highest level of interest, whether it’s 30% on a credit card or a payday loan at the consumer level. And so the corporate debt market is really for the highest levels of power. And the small to medium sized enterprise doesn’t really get the loans unless they’ve got some kind of cash flow type of thing.

And then the third one is the most obvious one, which is the government. And so when the consumer debt, when the consumer goes bankrupt, you restructure it and put it on the government’s balance sheet. And when the corporate has significant influence and significant control, they tell the government how to spend the money when they take on the debt.

And so you end up in a situation where people think that what we have in the west is capitalism, but what we actually have is socialism for the corporation that can get the cheapest interest rate and access to the money printer and the rest get capitalism. But that capitalism is fundamentally in a game where we have this concept of the K-shaped economy.

And the K-shaped economy means that if everyone’s trying to take on the debt and roll over the debt, then most people lose that game because the people that can access the 0% money can leverage that money to get the assets and the rest become an asset because they go deeper and deeper into debt.

And because this scheme is structured as a Ponzi scheme and the interest doesn’t exist, the rich fundamentally become the class that own the assets and everyone else just becomes the assets that’s paying all the interest.

The IMF and Sovereign Debt Trading

PETER MCCORMACK: Right, hold on.