The Grant Williams Podcast Ep. 115 - Michael Every FULL EPISODE

**Grant Williams** (0:10)
Before we get going, here's the bit where I remind you that nothing we discuss should be considered as investment advice. This conversation is for informational and hopefully entertainment purposes only. So, while we hope you find it both informative and entertaining, please do your own research or speak to a financial advisor before putting a dime of your money into these crazy markets. And now, on with the show. You are about to listen to a very special full episode of The Grant Williams Podcast, featuring my guest and friend Michael Every of Rabobank. The subject at hand is a broad one, the parallels between the United States and the Soviet Union, but there is so much thoughtful discussion here. I implore you to give what Michael says a listen, because I think you will find it very, very helpful going forward. This conversation is just one example of the kind of thoughtful, wide-ranging discussions I regularly have with smart, experienced people across finance, politics and business. The conversations are drawn on history, markets and real-world experience, and they are aimed at making better sense of what's really going on beneath the headlines, particularly when the issues themselves are complex and the noise around them just makes them seem even more daunting. If you are interested in exploring more of that work and in joining a growing community of subscribers trying to navigate an increasingly turbulent world, you can find out more by visiting www.grantwilliams.com. There you'll find my various podcast series along with Things That Make You Go Hmmm, my monthly letter that looks at the ideas and the forces shaping the world around us with a focus on clarity, perspective and understanding rather than prediction or conventional financial analysis. If you're looking for something a little different, a way of thinking about markets and the world that goes beyond the usual frameworks, you're very welcome to join. The thousands have already found the value of my work. You can explore samples and learn much more at grantwilliams.com. And now on with the show.
Michael, welcome to the podcast, my friend. It's been a while since we've had the pleasure of talking, and I'm so looking forward to our conversation today. Thanks for doing this.

**Michael Every** (2:26)
Thank you very much for having me. It's great to be back.

**Grant Williams** (2:28)
You're one of those names that people like me that spend their lives immersed in this subject is a very familiar one. Your work is very familiar. Your work has been a great sounding board, a reference, a sanity check for me over the years. Not so much for other people, maybe because of your kind of institutional setting, which affords less and less people a chance to listen to you. But the last couple of years, thankfully, you've been much more able to get out and become more of a public figure, which has been fantastic. But your work has been exceptional and it has of all the many people commenting on the world. Your through line is just about unmatched in terms of the way the world is unfolding in ways that you've been talking about for a long time now. You've added some new wrinkles to that recently, some phenomenal original thinking, which we'll get onto. But what I'd like to do to begin is to let you actually state that broad canvas that you've been looking at for quite a number of years now in the way that you see it, rather than have me paraphrase it or tell you how I see the way you think. Let's hear it straight from the horse's mouth. Let's talk through how that thinking has evolved. And we'll get to your recent evolutions of that thinking, which again, for anybody who's been paying attention to you with a thoughtful bent on it, once again, you've got us all sucking our teeth going, man, I hadn't thought of it like that. So let's go back and you paint the through line however you want, and then we will get into some of the newer revelations that you've come up with.

**Michael Every** (3:55)
Thank you very much for those very kind words. I'm going to do the really thing that everyone dreads when they go and see a band, which is, I'm not going to play too many of the greatest hits, I'm actually going to try and do some new material, which is always dangerous.

**Grant Williams** (4:10)
Sometimes the Beatles play all the stuff from Revolver for the first time. Don't worry about it, you're good.

**Michael Every** (4:14)
But starting with the real greatest hit, for a long time now, people who know me are aware that I've been saying that what we call the liberal world order could easily collapse and we were on a path to it collapsing in exactly the same way that it collapsed around World War I and World War II. My logic for that, and here is the big drum roll greatest hit, was that effectively that the liberal world order we had built, if you really stripped it down to its moving parts, was for various reasons undermining American military industrial strength, which meant that American relative military strength compared to other players was declining, and that the only thing that was propping the liberal world order up at its base wasn't the fact that we love rules and regulations or liberalism, it was American muscle. So once American muscle relatively had atrophied far enough, it itself as a country would walk away from the liberal world order to try and build up some muscle again and start using banned substances and doping, shall we say, to try and muscle itself out rapidly and be breaking all the rules that say you're not allowed to do that. And that's effectively where we are now in 2026 Last time we spoke, I made very clear that the framework within which that transition would take place would be a shift from economic policy to economic statecraft.