- If you are a member of the working or middle class
in the United States your life has not improved
in last 40 forty years.
We have taken hundreds and hundreds of millions of people
out of poverty around the world over the course
of the past decades.
The rise of China has been extraordinary,
1.4 billion people we've never seen anything like it
that growth has occurred on the back of
open borders and free trade, no question.
But you have lost a lot of opportunities in the West.
You have created much greater structural inequality
and it's not just about the economy
but the economy's a big piece of it.
If you are a member of the working or middle class
in the United States your life has not improved
in the last 40 years, you feel like
the American dream no longer applies to you
while the Chinese feel like the Chinese dream
that's something that they can be a part of.
That obviously undermines the notion of liberal democracy.
If the majority of Americans don't think
they're capitalists 'cause they don't have capital
then they're not gonna support a capitalist system
and they're particularly not gonna support it
if they think that the capitalists on top
aren't doing anything for them.
If their infrastructure isn't being invested into,
if their schools aren't being invested into,
if their policing isn't being invested into,
if their healthcare is worse than it used to be,
if we're not responding to a massive opioid crisis
then they're not going to support these governments.
And by the way, we're saying this at a time
when the US economy is growing at a strong clip.
We're saying this at a time when the IMF
has just upgraded their expectations for global growth
in 2018 and 2019 to 3.9%, the best the world economy
has done since before the financial crisis.
If that's the case now, what's gonna happen
in the next recession?
What's gonna happen suddenly when we don't have
a huge tax plan that benefits everyone
and we're spending like crazy and increasing the deficit.
What's gonna happen suddenly when times get tighter
and when the corporations aren't hitting the profitability
that they are right now.
I mean clearly this is a situation
that is going to get worse.
We elected Trump in the United States.
So people think it was an illegitimate election
but there's no question he got the Republican nomination
over 16 other candidates and Ted Cruz
was probably number two.
Bernie Sanders was clearly enormously popular
on the Democratic side, like, whoever won
the US election, we've not seen an election like this
with this kind of anti-establishment sentiment
in certainly, not as long as I've been alive,
and in Europe the vote for Brexit,
in Germany, the support for the
Alternatives For Deutschland party
for the first time a nationalist party
in the German parliament since Word War II.
Given their history that's extraordinary.
In Italy, the Five Star movement, the Northern League
winning from the far left and the far right,
this is obviously not an accident.