#208 - Ann Pettifor - "A $40 Trillion Debt Crash Is Coming”

**Ann Pettifor** (0:00)
I looked at the levels of sovereign debt owed by the United States and Britain, and I looked at the numbers and I thought, this guy, these guys are never going to repay.

**Peter McCormack** (0:08)
Do you think there's a second, a potential second crisis like that coming? That's what I'm worried about.

**Ann Pettifor** (0:12)
Yeah, it's imminent.

**Peter McCormack** (0:13)
It's imminent.

**Ann Pettifor** (0:14)
Yeah. If I had a lot of money to bet now, I would bet on it. And they said to him, where did you find 11 billion dollars to bail out AIG?
And he said, oh, that's very simple. He said, we have something at the Federal Reserve that all offices have got, which is called a computer. And we entered the number 11 billion dollars. There is a lot of zeros into that. And we made a transfer to AIG. He was the first governor to say, this is where money comes from.

**Peter McCormack** (0:43)
I feel like a lot of people are struggling now. And I think it can get a lot worse. I feel so little confidence that there's anyone out there who actually does want to fix this.

**Ann Pettifor** (0:51)
Yeah. People lost their jobs. They lost their homes. They lost hope. And they turned to a strong man because the strong man is going to defend them. And what does the strong man do? He takes them into a catastrophic war and millions of them die.
So, you know, the problem is, what do we do with this frustration and this anger?

**Peter McCormack** (1:12)
This show is brought to you by my lead sponsor, Iron, the AI cloud for the next big thing. Iron builds and operates next generation data centers and delivers cutting edge GPU infrastructure, all powered by renewable energy. Now, if you need access to scalable GPU clusters or are simply curious about who is powering the future of AI, check out iron.com to learn more, which is I R E n.com.
Nice to meet you, Ann.

**Ann Pettifor** (1:38)
Yeah, good to meet you.

**Peter McCormack** (1:39)
Very excited to talk to you. I want to learn about how you convince some very rich people to cancel 100 billion of debt.

**Ann Pettifor** (1:47)
Right, yeah.

**Peter McCormack** (1:48)
That's where I want to start.

**Ann Pettifor** (1:49)
Okay. How do you do that? Well, first of all, you have to identify your target. When I got involved in this, I got hired by a bunch of NGOs to do this job. They said, we'd like you to go to Washington and get the debt canceled. Because most of it is decided at the IMF and the World Bank and the Paris Club. They all gather, all the bankers gather in Washington twice a year. I said, look, I'm a really powerful cookie, but even I couldn't do that. I said, what you have to do is you have to mobilize the public. They said, oh, you can't do that because the public aren't interested in finance and money and sovereign debt and compound interest and bilateral and multilateral, all of this stuff is far too complicated. I said, I don't believe that. I said, it's not rocket science and it can be explained and when you explain it. Anyway, so then to my surprise, one of the guys that appointed me was a very wealthy man and I had to meet them in the Christian aid in Mayfair of all places.
I came out and my husband said, oh, you messed that up, didn't you? I said, yeah, I think I did because I told him, they couldn't just go to Washington and get the debt canceled. Anyway, as a result, I get hired and I decide that, right, what we're going to do is a big education campaign. We're going to explain this stuff to the people and mobilize them. I don't believe people act until they feel empowered, until they understand stuff.
And so we started and then I get approached by a woman who says, I've had a vision from God. I said, Oh God. She said, Yeah, God has told me that I have to help Jubilees. I said, Well, that's fine. I said, We haven't got a proper office and we need at least in those days, that was 1996, 1997, we need at least 30,000 to get going.
I said, The worst of all is we need charitable status and someone's got to deal with a bureaucracy and it's not me. She said, Don't worry. She came back six weeks later. She had the money, she had the place, and she had charitable status. After that, I took her very seriously. She's a wonderful woman. Anyway, then we began just to basically breaking down the story into bytes that people could understand. We had the policy of writing briefing notes on one side of the page, bullet points, and drafting them in a way that was an argument. As if you were a lawyer in front of a court and you were trying to make the case. So you don't just spew out numbers, you use numbers as part of your argument.