Andrew Ross Sorkin and Zanny Minton Beddoes on Markets, Crashes and The Future of The Global Economy (Part One)

**Mia Sorrenti** (0:00)
Hello, Intelligence Squared members. Producer Mia Sorrenti here.
What can the crash that shook Wall Street in 1929 teach us about today's age of technological disruption and market speculation? Today's members episode is the full recording of our recent live event with author, New York Times columnist and CNBC presenter, Andrew Ross Sorkin. Sorkin joined us at the Royal Geographical Society to discuss what history can tell us about the future of capitalism. In conversation with editor-in-chief at The Economist, Zanny Minton Beddoes, Sorkin explores the forces behind one of the most consequential financial crashes in modern history and why its lessons still matter today. Let's join our host, Zanny Minton Beddoes now, live at the Royal Geographical Society.

**Zanny Minton Beddoes** (0:48)
Thank you, thank you. I am delighted to join you and I'm delighted to join you with my friend Andrew, who basically needs no introduction. But just in case you didn't know, this is one of the world's foremost financial journalists, if not the foremost financial journalist. No, it's true, it's true. You have your finger on the pulse of the day-to-day of global markets more than anybody else, three hours on squawk box every day, DealBook newsletter. But you also now have a tremendous historical perspective, both from Too Big To Fail, the canonical telling of the 2008 financial crisis, and now this book, which I am assuming you have all read since it's been out in hardback for about eight months. Now it's the paperback edition.
It's an extraordinarily good book if you haven't. And if you're coming here to get a crib of the book, we're going to disappoint you, because we will talk about the book a bit, but what I really want to talk about is the lessons of this book for today.
Andrew does all of this because he's extraordinarily productive. We've been comparing sleep scores off stage.

**Andrew Ross Sorkin** (1:57)
The auras. The auras versus whoops. Auras versus whoops.

**Zanny Minton Beddoes** (2:00)
Andrew's ahead of me. But he's also someone who is incredibly well prepared. I'm just going to tell a little story, which you will remember this, I think. But we both go to various conferences and occasionally, actually usually, we both end up moderating something or interviewing somebody. Last year, at one of these conferences, Andrew was supposed to be interviewing three very prominent CEOs.
24 hours before or 48 hours before, he got some terrible sickness and couldn't come. Do you remember this? I remember this. I got a text saying, would I stand in for Andrew? And I said, okay, fine. And it was, I won't say who they were, but they were all very prominent CEOs. And I said, okay, but is there anything he's done? Or, you know, is there any prep notes that anyone's done? And Andrew very sweetly sent me his prep notes, where I saw why this man is so good at what he does. Oh, my God, the amazing amount of preparation and thought that had gone into this interview. And so basically, I just parroted what he'd written. And afterwards, everyone came up and said what a fantastic interview it was.
So, this is an extraordinary journalist. You have written this book, 1929, and you've said on several podcasts that there are flashing like parallels between the 1920s and today. And obviously, markets at record highs, obviously not today, those of you who've been looking at what's been happening in the markets today and presumably going to go down even further now that we've heard the Iranians have downed a US helicopter, but not withstanding a four markets plumbing record highs. But there are also, I think, sort of really deep parallels. Technological revolution, huge geopolitical shifts, the US in the 20s became very anti-immigration, it became embrace tariffs.
When you look at today, where do you think the real echoes are and what is different?

**Andrew Ross Sorkin** (3:57)
First of all, thank you for that remarkable introduction.
I actually think of you as the great financial journalist of this age, so I do, I do. Give her a round of applause, because if you don't read The Economist, it's an amazing thing.
To me, they're the two biggies, but they're mostly psychological. So I look at, and you mentioned it, one of them, there's the technology itself, which was, you know, in the 1920s, automobiles really were exciting, and they should have been exciting. And radio was exciting, and it should have been exciting. RCA, by the way, also had the patent for television. So there was a lot to be excited about in terms of the future and what that portended. But the other real shift in the 1920s was the invention of new financial products, with lots of debt attached to them, that allowed people to trade. And that was part of sort of the gambling culture that emerged. I feel like that, more than anything else, so today, we're very excited about AI as a, by the way, we're excited and scared of AI, which I think is different in some ways than the 1920s, because I don't remember, I'm sure folks who were, you know, buggy whip makers were scared of automobiles, but that was probably, you know, the total of it. I think AI is both exciting and scary on multiple ends of the spectrum, but we're also seeing the financialization again of industry, and we're seeing all sorts of new financial products, whether it's crypto, or whether it's Polymarket and Cauchy and these prediction markets, or whether it's just changing the rules and taking down some of the guardrails that frankly had been put in place, some of which were put in place, by the way, in the 30s and 40s. So when you see, for example, this SpaceX IPO, which is gonna go public on Friday, and you see something like the NASDAQ changing the rules around their own index fund, so that they can attract SpaceX to their exchange and effectively create a automated buyer for the SpaceX shares. To me, it's things like that. Not that that unto itself is gonna be the thing that pushes us over the edge, but it's things like that where there's not enough people, I don't think, sort of throwing the red flag saying, guys, we gotta watch out.