The Iran economic shock is coming. How to protect yourself

One two.

One two.

Sounds good.

And you're just waiting for me then.

I'm just going to walk in and sit down and start then, I think.

Okay, I'm back.

Today, we are going to explain how to protect your finances during the Iran war.

Okay, so I've been away for about 6 months, making a documentary.

And we're bringing the channel back.

I would have loved to have spoken about the massive gains in the Wealth Tax movement, but I think it would have been a bit absurd for me to not do one explaining everything you need to know about the war.

It looks like it's going to be a pretty massive economic crisis.

There are some important things that are not being made clear in the news, so we are going to explain exactly what's happening, how that's going to affect you economically, how you can protect yourselves from those impacts, and what we can learn about the economy.

Okay, so I'm going to run quickly through the basics.

They are on the news basically all the time, so you probably already know them, but we do need to cover it very quickly for those who don't know.

The US and Israel have basically invaded Iran.

Iran didn't fall immediately.

They assassinated the leader.

Iran has blocked this area of sea known as the Strait of Hormuz, through which an enormous amount of the world's oil and gas pass through.

At this point, we don't know how long it's going to remain blocked.

It could be a few more days, or it could be a few more months, but either way, there is going to be an enormous increase in the price of energy, of oil and gas, and that is going to cause a knock-on impact on the prices of pretty much everything, but most obviously food and fertiliser.

So we are starting to see, and we will continue to see, big increases in the prices of energy, oil, gas, and probably food as well.

One quite important impact, which has not been discussed much on the news, is that this has had a big knock-on impact on expectations for interest rates.

So this is going to cause inflation to go up.

Central banks around the world are supposed to keep inflation low, so there is a question as to whether central banks will increase interest rates.

So central banks all over the world were generally in a cutting cycle.

Rates were coming down.

But at the moment, financial markets expect those... most

of those central banks to turn around and start hiking rates.

The base rate here in the UK is currently 3.75%, and financial markets at the moment are expecting two or maybe even three hikes this year, bringing the base rate back up to 4.5%, which means your mortgage rates will already have gone up if you're looking for a new mortgage or may go up.

I personally don't think we will see interest rate hikes to that extent, and I've actually started to bet against those interest rate hikes happening.

But at the moment, financial markets are expecting central banks across the world, including here in the UK, in, in Europe, in Australia and New Zealand, all across the world, to raise the interest rate in response to the increase in inflation, which means your mortgage will go up, and it also means the cost of government borrowing will go up and has already gone up.

So in the UK, the cost of government borrowing is very relevant.

We've spoken about it a lot.

The UK has the highest borrowing costs in Europe.

This, when you combine it with the fact that UK growth is low and the total amount of UK government debt is high, means that it has become very difficult for the UK government to spend money.

At the moment, the cost for the UK government to borrow money for 10 years is just under 5%, and that's gone up from about 4.2% just a month ago.

This means that because the UK government uses quite a complicated formula to decide how much it can spend, which factors into it the cost of borrowing, probably the UK government is going to struggle to respond to support consumers during this energy crisis,

and may even have to do further austerity.

That is not a UK specific issue.

Borrowing costs have gone up for basically every country in the world, which increases this growing crisis of government indebtedness, high government interest payments, and will make it difficult for governments across the world basically to respond to support consumers, average people during the energy price crisis

that is coming, that is already underway.

Okay, so how is that going to affect you?

It's going to affect you in pretty obvious ways.

The prices which are likely to go up most are, number one, going to be energy, and number two, going to be food.

That should be reminiscent of what happened when Russia invaded Ukraine.

The big thing about price rises that are led by energy and food is energy and food are a much more significant percentage of spending for poorer people than for richer people.

It is a big chunk of the spending of an ordinary family, but for very wealthy people, it's a very small percentage of their overall expenditure.

So basically, this crisis is going to hit the poorest the hardest, and it's going to have the most obvious impact.

It's going to be more expensive for you to heat your home, to turn your air conditioning on, to drive your car, to probably take any flights, if you want to take flights, and also to feed your family.

So the next question is, how do you protect yourself?

The obvious thing that is going to happen here, which also happened when Russia invaded Ukraine, is there is going to be a lot of pressure on governments to react to protect their citizens, which is you.

Now, the obvious thing that is going to happen, which happens automatically to a degree in this country and will happen across the world, is governments will be pressured to basically respond directly to the most obvious and visible consequence

of what has happened, which is rising energy prices.

And governments will be pressured to cap energy prices, to subsidise energy, to reduce taxation of energy.

Basically, governments will be incentivised to keep the price of energy down, and this is a really bad policy.

I'm going to explain why.

So I think if we get this, and we will get this to some degree in basically every country in the world, this policy of governments subsidising, governments directly coming in to keep the price of energy down, we will basically be repeating the economic mistakes which we made in COVID.

So those of you who have watched this channel from the beginning will know that I started this channel in June 2020 because we were in the early stages of the COVID crisis, and it was relatively clear to me that governments here in the UK, also around the world, were going to respond to the economic crisis

in such a way that they eliminated the most obvious, visible, negative consequences of the economic crisis, which at the time was primarily lockdown, but in a way that caused enormous negative side effects, namely a massive decrease in government wealth,

a massive increase in the wealth of the richest, and obviously, as a consequence of those two things, an enormous increase in inequality.

And I think the way that we reacted to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the way that governments are likely to react to this crisis now, trying to directly subsidise energy prices, basically is making the exact same mistake again, which is, okay, what do we want to do?

We want to get rid of the most terrible, most visible economic impact of what's happening.

So in the case of this energy price crisis, that is expensive energy, and in the case of COVID and lockdown, that was people can't work, people can't pay their wages.

So the sort of most basic sort of idiot-level economic response is, okay, what we want to do now is keep energy prices low, and what we wanted to do in COVID was keep paying people's wages.

So what we simply do is the government goes and either borrows a ton of money or prints a ton of money and pays to keep energy prices down and pays people to work.

And when that happens, what you see is the government prints a ton of money or borrows money from the rich, and in the case of COVID, gave money to poorer people, who immediately used it to pay their rent and their bills, and it went to richer people, or in the case of energy price crisis, they give it directly to the owners of the energy,

which means a massive decrease in government wealth and a massive increase in wealth of the richest.

And I think what you're seeing here is a repeat of basically the same 2 mistakes which are being basically consistently made every time we have an economic crisis here in the UK, in the US, in any Western country, which is naivety about wealth and naivety about distribution.

So when COVID happened and the government gave an enormous amount of money out, I was screaming about what the long-term implications of that would be.

I was saying that it would lead to collapsing government wealth, which would lead eventually to austerity.

I was saying that it would lead to enormous accumulation of cash by the rich, which would lead to increased asset prices, more unaffordable housing, falling living standards, an inflation crisis.

But at the time, there wasn't really much appetite for this kind of discussion because people were very focused on the immediate short-term economic problem, which at the time of COVID was we need to have a lockdown, you know, people need to be paid if they can't work, and in the energy crisis which is starting now,

it was people need to buy energy, energy price is going up, government needs to subsidise their energy.

It's very important to recognise that these government measures, the paying of people's wages during COVID and the subsidising of energy prices or the reduction of energy taxes now, do not come for free.

They cost the government money.

So you are...

What you are getting is protection from the immediate impact of this crisis at the cost of loss of government wealth and also at the cost of increased wealth of the richest.

Basically, I think we've fallen into a basic systemic playbook in the UK, in Western countries, of the way that we deal with crises is we massively increase inequality, and we give away government wealth to deal with the symptom of the problem, and we just don't worry about

the increased inequality that leads on from that.

Okay, so we should explain briefly how a price cap in general would work.

When prices are capped in situations like this, the way that that works is you pay a lower cost, and the extra price, the price that has gone up is basically paid by the government.

So even though you do not see the price going up, you are effectively, via your government, via your taxation, or via loss in your government's wealth, you are still paying the higher price.

You don't pay it, the government pays the extra, and that extra amount goes to basically the owners of the energy, the owners of the oil.

But this approach, this approach of let's just stop the price going up by allowing the government to take the loss, I think also has the weakness of making the mistake of being excessively focused on money and not really recognising the importance of real resources.

I did a video last year saying, like, forget about money.

Money is not the only thing that matters.

What actually matters is real resources.

The fact of the matter is there is less oil and gas now, and somebody has to use less oil and gas.

A sensible government would be thinking about how can we reduce our usage in a way that is basically best for our country, and would be trying to do things like let's try and reduce very wasteful usage like private jets, these kinds of things.

Let's reduce the most wasteful usage where we can.

If you simply try to keep the price down when there is less oil going around, it is going to cost you an enormous amount because nobody is going to reduce their usage.

So what you'll probably have in the end is price goes up a little bit, government takes a massive loss, and at the end of the day, the people who reduce their usage are going to be the poor, because poor people are much more responsive to changes in price than the rich.

I think it's important to recognise rich people, they don't really care how much their energy costs.

They don't check the price of their energy before they decide how much heating to use.

They don't really care the cost of their flights are.

They are going to consume as much as they're going to consume regardless of price.

If you allow price to rise a little bit and the government takes a massive loss, the people who end up reducing their consumption will be the poor anyway.

And I think in a sensible country, we would be looking at how can we reduce the most wasteful usage, rather than forcing poor people to consume less.

The third thing is that this policy in the UK of basically taking the whole loss on the government is increasingly going to be arguably impossible because of this other thing we have seen, which is big increase in government borrowing rates.

I've been speaking about this for a long time now, but the financial markets have been watching the UK very closely.

And whenever the UK government tries to spend more money, they basically shut it down, which means that we're in a situation now where it's quite possible the UK government will not be able to significantly subsidise your energy bills.

Which basically means if you're hoping your government will do something, they probably won't, they probably can't, because they spent all of their money, and all of their wealth on the last two crises, where they should have been taxing the rich, but instead they funded by borrowing from the rich.

Yeah, this is what happens when you have governments which are incredibly naive to wealth and incredibly naive to distribution, and who refuse to basically build the systems to tax the rich.

We have created governments which are fundamentally structurally dependent on dissaving their wealth, either selling their assets or accumulating massive amounts of debts to deal with crises.

And that only works as long as you have assets to sell, as long as essentially rich people are willing to lend you more money.

I'm going to flash up at this point a graph which I've used a couple of times before, which is...

It's either Thomas Piketty or Gabriel Zucman, these French wealth inequality economists looking at government wealth over time, and you can see this massive decrease in government wealth, not just for the UK, but basically all Western countries.

What you see here is a method of economic thinking in Western countries where they have become incredibly dependent at times of crises upon giving away government wealth.

And what this means is eventually you end up with no wealth, and then you end up in a situation, in a crisis like this, where basically there's very, very little you can do.

The UK is the furthest along on this, but other countries, the US, most European countries, they're going in the same direction.

They will deal with this crisis by reducing government wealth, which means eventually they will hit the same position that the UK is in now, where you have a serious crisis, and basically there's nothing that your government can do to protect you.

Okay, so there's a second idea going around that the way that you should... your government should protect you is by investing in more production of domestic energy, more production of domestic gas and oil.

And I don't think this is necessarily a bad idea.

I think especially if you have a country like the UK where we are incredibly heavily dependent on imported energy, it might be more sensible to have more investments in domestic energy production, it might be more sensible to have more investments in domestic energy storage.

But I do think that this idea that you can protect yourselves from these kinds of crisis by having domestic energy production is a little bit of a red herring, or is at least an incomplete strategy.

And the way that we can see that is quite simply by looking at the US.

So the US has invested enormously in fracking.

There's this method of extracting oil and gas, in the last 10, 20 years, and it has become the world's largest oil producer.

So the US is by a long way now the largest producer of oil in the world.

Is the cost of living going to go up for average Americans?

Yes.

Quite simply, yes.

And the reason is, those oil production facilities, those energy production facilities in the US are not owned by the American government, and they are not owned by the American people in the large part.

Ordinary American people do not own large parts of that oil production.

That oil is owned by incredibly rich people who will dig up the oil during an energy price crisis, and they will sell it abroad to other incredibly rich people who will use it to fly their private jets.

So I don't think having the energy in your backyard necessarily protects you if you don't own it yourself.

And that brings me to the third idea about how do you protect yourself from an energy price crisis.

Now, I came into this crisis, owning a lot of oil, hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of oil.

And that is not because I am a genius trader.

My background is interest rates trading.

I don't have any background in oil trading.

I don't have any background in commodities trading.

The reason I came into this crisis owning a huge amount of oil is very simply just one basic reason, because I am rich.

It is as simple as that, and I, like the vast majority of rich people, like to own a broad, diversified portfolio of assets.

I own quite a lot of property, I own quite a lot of stocks, I own quite a lot of bonds, and I also own quite a lot of oil, and I also own, you know, wheat futures and corn futures and cotton futures and all these commodities because I'm a rich person and I, like most rich people, simply own loads of everything.

So when this, crisis happened, and I... I'm not in any way an expert on war, I didn't

and I... I'm not in any way an expert on war, I didn't know this war was going to happen, the oil price went up 50% and I make hundreds of thousands of pounds.

This, I think, tells you the way that you protect yourself from an energy price crisis is you need to own the ******* energy.

You need to own the resources.

And this, here's me in the UK, which is probably the least prepared country in the world for an energy price crisis, right?

Massively depend on imported energy, hasn't built up its own energy storage, doesn't have an enormous amount of reserves of energy like other countries like Japan or Korea have, which it probably should have done, and yet when there is an energy price crisis, what happens to me?

I make hundreds of thousands of pounds because I own the energy.

If you are watching from America and you are paying more for energy despite the fact that there is a **** ton of oil in your country, that's because you don't own your oil, I do.

And the point I'm trying to make here is when I come out here every ******* week and tell you guys, "You need to care about wealth distribution," it's not because I am some ******* communist tree-hugging hippie.

It is because if you do not own your resources, then when the price of the resources go up, you are ******* And when I talk about wealth distribution, that is not just like some abstract term, right?

Wealth distribution is about who owns the resources.

It is about who owns the housing.

It is about who owns the energy.

It is about who owns the food, all right?

Here in London, we've seen rents go up ******* enormously in the last 5 years.

How do you protect yourself from that?

You own your ******* house.

That's wealth distribution.

When oil price goes up massively like this, how do you protect yourself?

You own the oil.

That's wealth distribution.

Wealth distribution is about your ownership of resources, and if you want to be protected from the prices of resources going up, you need to have ownership of those resources.

That is wealth distribution.

All right, so you're probably sitting there thinking, "All right.

Thanks, Garys Economics.

But it's a bit ******* late for that.

I don't ******* own the oil.

You should have told me a month ago, 2 months ago.

What should I do now?"

And I'm not saying you should go and buy oil now.

The war remains, like, incredibly unpredictable and volatile, and there's all of this nonsense in the news every day.

I'm not an expert on war.

I can't tell you if it's going to end tomorrow.

I can't tell you it's going to take another year.

There's no way of me knowing these things.

The oil price could double.

The oil price could go back down.

All of these things are totally possible.

If you buy the oil now, you are at risk if the war ends, then you're going to lose money.

And if you are not rich, then the only way you could buy the oil is to borrow money, and then you're massively at risk.

If the price goes down, you can't pay it back.

Basically, you need to improve your ownership of general...

of general...

Your general share of the resources basically needs to go up.

Like, it, you can't just bet on oil.

The reason I'm safe, whether oil goes up or oil goes down, is not because I own oil.

It's because I own ******* everything.

Like the rest of rich people, I have a big, broad portfolio of assets, so if one thing goes up, if oil price goes up and the stocks go down, that's fine.

I just buy some more stocks, right?

You need to be protected by ownership of resources.

And the irony of this is, not that long ago you were protected because only 50 years ago in the post-war period most countries in the Western world basically recognised this fact, which is if you want the people in your country to be relatively secure

they need to own some share of the resources and what we had were large wealthy resource-owning governments.

So here in the UK, we had the government which owned housing, which meant that you as a citizen couldn't really fall off the bottom of the housing ladder and couldn't find yourself unable to afford housing.

Most Western governments also owned the basic means of production for the most important essentials in their country, which is energy, transport, and water.

You know, governments owned these things.

We had the situation where governments owned these resources and then when things happened in other countries they were able to some degree to protect you.

But when I show you this graph, and I'll flash it up again, the graph I showed you earlier in this video, this graph of collapsing government wealth, this graph which I've shown a number of times in, in the last year on the channel, what this war does again, I hope, is make it clear to you

that things like this collapsing government wealth, are not just abstract numbers on a graph.

What that means is you used to have governments which owned housing, which meant that you would be guaranteed housing if you were unemployed, and they owned to some degree energy production, which meant that if there was a disaster overseas, if there was a war overseas, your government could provide you at least to some degree with energy, and now that government wealth has been lost

which means you are not protected anymore.

I hope I'm making it clear here, right?

The only way for you to be protected, for your family, for your community to be protected is for you, your family, your community to have some decent ownership of the wealth of your country either through ordinary families being owning decent amounts of wealth or

through your government owning decent amounts of wealth.

And when I talk about wealth inequality growing, this is not an abstract concept.

What that means is we used to have large wealth-owning middle classes and working classes in the West here in the UK, we used to have large wealth-owning governments in the West here in the UK, and now we don't.

That means you used to own energy, now you don't.

You used to own housing, now you don't.

And when you don't own that wealth, you are fundamentally insecure.

And if you want to know how you can own wealth in this economy where wealth becomes more and more unaffordable and where wages become lower and lower and it becomes hard enough even to think about how do I buy my own house, never mind owning things like oil, never mind owning things like wheat futures to protect my access to energy, to protect my access to food,

if you want to know how you can have access to wealth, there is only one answer for you that works, and that is tax.

Look, I am not, was never like a left-wing person, right?

I am somebody who grew up poor in East London, wanted to be rich, studied economics, got a job at a bank, made a ton of money.

That was what I wanted from my life, right?

I never wanted to have a channel saying you need to care about redistribution, saying you need to care about tax, right?

The reason I have a channel which spends all of this time promoting a relatively unpopular idea like tax is because how the **** else do you get your resources back?

I'll flash it up again a third time.

Look at this graph of government wealth.

Look at the collapse in government wealth, right?

Look at the situation of ordinary working families, right?

My dad worked for the post office on £20,000 a year and bought a house, right?

That is not possible for working families now.

Working families have lost their assets.

Governments have lost their assets.

The middle class is losing its assets.

This is a clear trend.

If you do not reverse it, how do you expect to protect the assets of you, your family, your community, your country?

It is relatively clear the flow of assets is away from people like you towards super wealthy people who pay lower tax rates than you.

And whenever we have a crisis, 2008 crisis, 2011 sovereign debt crisis, COVID, Ukraine, Russia, this oil crisis now, whenever we have a crisis, that is managed by governments in such a way that the government gets poorer, the middle class gets poorer, and the rich get richer, and there is no way to reverse that,

no way for you to get your assets back other than tax.

So if you want to protect yourself from this economic crisis, from future economic crises, you need to be forcing your governments to be building a tax system which is capable of taxing the richest people in their country, people like me who are making money from your oil when an energy crisis happens like this,

at fairer rates so that you can get your assets back.

Simple as that.

If you want to know how to protect yourself in an energy crisis, in any crisis, you need to be talking about tax.

I shot a video, God, it must be 3 or even 4 years ago now, with a friend of mine called Steffan Griffith.

Nice guy, Welsh guy.

He'll be so happy I've mentioned the video.

It was called Life Out of Balance.

You can probably still find it on YouTube.

You might even see a shot of my mum might be in it.

But anyway, I shot with this guy who I didn't even really know him at the time.

This is...

Nobody knew who I was, and he reached out to me on Facebook, "Let's go shoot a video about wealth inequality." And, we walked around Ilford, then we walked around Canary Wharf, and he asked me a lot of questions, and I answered them.

And at one point he asked me, and I was kind of not expecting it, he asked me, "Do you think this increase in wealth inequality is going to lead to more war?" And, you know, I work quite hard to, like, stay in my lane on things.

And I know what I'm an expert on, and I know what I'm not an expert on.

And, I think I'm a legitimate world expert on inequality and the way inequality affects the economy, and I'm not going to pretend I'm world expert on war.

But when he asked me that, my initial reaction was... was yes.

But I didn't want to say that.

This was before the Russia-Ukraine war, so it dates it.

It was a long time ago we shot.

And the reason I thought in my head yes was...

So that was not long after I finished my master's.

I did a 2-year master's at Oxford, 2017 to 2019, in economics, and I wrote my thesis on the, the relationship between inequality and asset prices.

And basically, this super massive thesis, you can probably find it on my website, was basically saying that when inequality gets very high, because rich people are very rich in a very unequal economy, and rich people like to buy assets as opposed to ordinary people who like to buy goods and services, when wealth inequality gets very high, asset prices become very high, and wages become very low.

And as soon as he asked me that question, I'd never really thought of it before, but I realised straight away, well, if asset prices are really high, and wages are really low, and all of the power is held by these incredibly wealthy people that want more assets, you can see there's a really strong economic case for war, right?

Because people are ******* cheap.

Assets are ******* expensive.

Why not just pay a bunch of people to go and ******* take someone else's assets?

You know, because people are cheap, assets are expensive.

I could see that it made sense.

I didn't say it at the time, because I didn't want to basically become like some sort of, "Oh, there's going to be more war.

There's going to be more war."

But I think it is incredibly dangerous to create this class of incredibly wealthy people who are incredibly powerful, who are able to basically, like, build and command their own armies.

If you look at history, I've mentioned before I'm a fan of medieval history on this channel.

You go and you look at, you know, the medieval times when you had these, like, very, very unequal societies, and all of the wealth was monopolised by this tiny, tiny minority elite of society.

What's the main thing they spent their money on?

******* armies to fight each other, right?

Like, if you're super, super rich, what do you want?

You want a ******* army, right?

You know, what is Vladimir Putin?

He's probably the richest man in the world.

He's got his own ******* personal army, right?

Now we've got a US that is basically being controlled by a bunch of billionaires who are making a ******* tons of money from it, and they control the army, right?

I think it's, it's incredibly dangerous to create this society where all of the power is held by this tiny minority of people.

Because, you know, if you have well-distributed power in society, war, it doesn't make ******* sense.

So, you know, nobody's going to win from this war except who?

******* I win, because I've got the ******* assets.

You know what I mean?

The rich are going to win, right?

You know, there's a great book, called Catch-22, which, I would strongly recommend, which kind of portrays war as not a fight between one country and another but, like, a fight between the elites of two countries against the working classes of those countries, where they force these guys to fight each other and die.

And who makes money from it?

The ******* rich make money from it.

Yeah, I think it's really dangerous.

And I did a video last year, which I think is one of the best videos I've ever shot on the channel, called The Squeeze Out, which basically goes through just really step by step, like, how wealth is being transferred in our society.

And it talks about this idea that, you know, back in the '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s, ordinary working class people were able to accumulate assets, and that's not possible anymore.

And what you see there is wealth being squeezed out of sort of the poorer half of society.

And then it talks about how now if you look at Western governments, Western governments used to own wealth, and now they don't own wealth, and that's wealth being squeezed out of another part of society, governments.

And it talks about how now as we're seeing younger people from even, like, middle class or slightly richer families being unable to buy housing, what we're seeing is wealth being squeezed out of the rest of society.

And, when I was planning that video, I kind of thought...

You know, I think this, the stage where we are now is it's... the working class is gone

is it's... the working class is gone in terms of wealth holding.

Governments are mainly gone.

You know, you do still have some governments, like most obviously the German government or maybe the Australian government has a little bit more they can push.

But, you know, Western governments like the UK, the US, Japan, their wealth is basically completely gone.

And it's the middle class that is being hollowed out now.

And when I shot that video, in my head when I was planning it, I thought, "Well, what happens once the middle class gets dispossessed?" And then, then what you have only really is only rich people having wealth.

Rich people want to grow their wealth, and I think in the last 70 years post-World War II, the way that rich people have grown their wealth is by dispossessing these groups of society who managed to grab some wealth but not hold on to it after World War II, which was, you know, this wealth-owning working class people like my dad,

these wealth-owning governments.

They've been squeezed out by this growing wealth of the rich.

But what happens when they squeeze everyone else out, and the only people left with wealth are the rich?

And I couldn't help but think the obvious conclusion was the only way that rich people continue to grow their wealth when the middle class has disappeared, as we can see, is to go to war with each other.

You know, it's...

And if you look at history, I think that's the way that it goes.

But I've avoided talking about these things too much on the channel.

And the reason is, I think once you start getting to things like war, like, it's heavy, and it's stressful, and it can sometimes be overwhelming.

And, like, of course, I've done this whole video talking about the economic consequences of war.

I think it is important to recognise, and it would be remiss of me not to say after going through all of the economic consequences, that war is a real thing and people die, and people's houses get destroyed, and a lot of bad **** happens.

And, when all this stuff is going on and all this stuff is on the news, it can be overwhelming.

it can be stressful.

The way that this particular war is run, it almost feels like there is an intention to create outrageous, bombastic headlines that sort of knock you off your balance and make it hard to sort of stay calm, and make it hard to just be calm and rational and think.

I did a video just after Trump came into power, that I said one of the most important things that we're going to have to do, one of the most important skills that we're going to have to develop, that you're going to have to develop, is to be able to maintain your stability and maintain your calm in the face of just, like, a pretty constant

outrageous stream of, like, wild news coming at you.

And I think this is why I don't like using this channel to talk about things like war, because I think that if the public is stressed and panicking, feeling insecure, feeling unstable on their feet, I don't think that that is the kind of mindset

from which we can build towards something better.

So, I didn't want to come back and do a video about war, but this is obviously... has the potential to be a quite significant economic crisis.

And, I know that people come to this channel because they want things to be explained to them, and that they want to know what's happening.

And I had to deal with it.

But unless we get new developments, I'm not going to talk more about the war, because this...

You know, we're not BBC News here.

You know, my job is not to just keep you informed with whatever ******* Donald Trump's latest tweet is.

What I'm trying to do here is to move the trajectory of our society, of our economy, away from being one where inequality is getting worse and people are getting poorer, to one where inequality is getting better and people are getting richer.

And I think we are making massive progress on that front.

I don't think we're going to win today.

I don't think we're going to win tomorrow or this year or next year.

But I genuinely think we are going to win.

Yeah, I set a rule for myself, I don't know when, I think it was sometime last year or maybe it was the year before, that I needed to include towards the end of every one of my videos something hopeful, something that made people feel like they should keep getting up out of bed and keep fighting.

Because I started to feel like...

and if you watch some of my older videos, you'll probably feel this as well.

I started to feel like sometimes my videos, even though the analysis was always very good, and I think my predictions have, have pretty much constantly been borne out as being very correct, they were quite depressing and they weren't very positive about the future.

And if I'm honest, I think that was probably partly because I was quite depressed, and I was not that hopeful about the future.

And I decided to try and put something at the end of my videos that made people feel like, "No, there is a chance.

There is a chance things can get better."

Because I think that that mentality, that attitude, is basically essential if things are going to get better.

And for a long time, if I'm honest, I struggled to include these more positive thing in the end of the video because in the heart...

in my heart of hearts, I didn't think we were going to win.

But over the last sort of two years of doing these videos and seeing public debate and public understanding about the significance of inequality and the importance of things like wealth taxes massively change, seeing the huge growth in public support that we've had, especially here in this country, but all over the world,

seeing the huge growth in the wealth tax movement, the truth is, it has become less and less hard for me to end these videos on hopeful messages because, and people who know, people who've been watching these videos will know that I used to say very honestly that I don't think we're going to win.

But the truth is, I think that we will now.

I don't know how long it's going to take, but I think that we will.

If I'm being totally honest, I didn't want to bring the channel back for a new series this year.

I've been working on this documentary for the last 6 months, and it has been so much ******* work.

And I was out on tour in Australia, New Zealand, and I'm tired.

Yeah, I'm exhausted really.

I've been working two hard for a while now, and, I get recognised when I'm trying to buy chicken stock at Lidl, and it's complicated.

And it changes...

It affects my life, and I'm still trying to figure out, like, how I deal with that, but I did come back.

And we're going to be doing videos every week.

Hopefully, I'm going to be able to hold it out till August.

I've got some cool stuff lined up that I want to talk about, some cool guests that going to come on.

And I came back even though I didn't want to come back because it's important, because it matters.

And I think really if we're going to win, I think that's all it needs really.

Enough of us to keep coming back, to keep putting our shoulder to the wheel, keep working and keep pushing forward even when we're tired, even when we don't want to do it.

If enough of us do that, we'll win.

All right, so that's it.

You guys know what to do.

I was going to do, like, a quick update here at the end of this video about what I've been doing and what's coming next, but this video has already been incredibly long, and I think I'll leave that till next week.

We're back now, weekly videos.

I think we're really at the heart of something here.

I think we're really creating something.

We're really pushing something.

So, yeah, you know what to do.

Stick with us, watch the videos, understand them, tell your friends, tell your family, tell your mum.

If you really want to support, join the Patreon.

None of the money goes to me.

We could get some ******* staff, maybe an office one day.

That would be nice.

But for now, yeah, come back, watch the videos.

Another 4 or 5 months, we're going to fight back, and we're going to win.

Let's change the world, yeah?

Tax wealth, not work.

Thank you.