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00:04Welcome Professor Stiglitz, so good to have you back here at L'Incontro Nielsen, last year we had a conversation,
00:16you were traveling in Europe, so good to have you back here.
00:19It's much nicer to be here in person. Absolutely. We love it. And, you know, this is a huge meeting,
00:28which has a long history, but let me start with another summit, with another meeting, which today is taking place
00:34in a very far place, which is Beijing, with President Xi Jinping is currently meeting.
00:41They just had the state banquet, I mean, with President Donald Trump. And apparently it's a meeting among all friends.
00:50A lot of smiles, a lot of ceremonies and so on. In the end, they're managing the most dangerous relationship
00:58in the world. What's your sense of the potential outcome of this meeting?
01:04Well, I think President Xi has been very clear in getting across a couple of political messages. The first is
01:15Taiwan is important and don't mess with it. And the U.S. is messing with it because it's proposing to
01:26sell a record amount of military equipment to Taiwan. So he was really pushing back on that.
01:32The second message was trade wars are bad for everybody. And of course, Donald Trump loves tariffs. He said that
01:45he loves tariffs. And those are the precursors of a trade war. In the first round of that trade war
01:52with China, the U.S. backed off.
01:56In the first mandate as well. So, you know, that on the market, there's this say, taco always chickens out.
02:03Trump's always chickens out.
02:04A taco.
02:05Taco. Will this be the case also with China? Is this what we're seeing today?
02:10I think probably, yes. You know, Trump loves pomp and circumstance. He wants to build an arc to triumph in
02:20Washington, the great ballroom. So he likes grandeur. And Xi has been pandering to him.
02:34When you contrast the strong political message that President Xi with what he comes with, what Trump comes with, is
02:46we want you to buy more soybeans.
02:48There's sort of a different level of conversation. Food is good, as you all know, and soybeans are good.
02:56But the level of discourse is very different.
03:00Let me use the words Donald Trump would use in this situation. Who's got the cards at the table today
03:06between Xi and President Trump?
03:08I think Xi has the cards.
03:11Why?
03:12And you saw that in the first round of negotiations, where Xi pointed out that he controls the critical minerals,
03:25rare earths.
03:26They control 80, 90, 95% of different critical earths, magnets, little things, small components, but without which you can't
03:38produce cars, without which you can't produce a lot of the other things.
03:43Before you go into a war, you ought to think about what cards you have and what cards they have.
03:54And Trump didn't do that.
03:56And so Xi said, I'm sorry, but if you're going to do this, we'll get you in.
04:06Well, absolutely, Professor. You mentioned Taiwan, which was at the center of the dialogue.
04:10Clearly, do you expect Xi Jinping to get something out of Trump and some concessions on Taiwan in exchange for
04:19some kind of help to get out of the mess of the Strait of Hormuz and the Iran situation?
04:26I don't think China is going to give in much on that.
04:32There may be some words, but I think, I think President Xi is enjoying the mess that Trump got himself
04:42into.
04:44It's, again, he didn't think about who had the cards.
04:50Iran had one card, which is the Strait of Hormuz, as I say, one fifth.
04:57And not only so much oil goes through, but we've now begun to realize that a lot of other things
05:05go through there, like fertilizer is at risk, which is important for food.
05:14Aluminum.
05:16Helium.
05:17Helium for chips.
05:18And so there are so many strangleholds.
05:22The world is different than it was in 1970 when there was the previous oil embargo by the Middle East
05:32then.
05:35That was oil.
05:36Now it's a whole range of commodities, the full effects of which we won't see for a while.
05:43Is that one of the reasons why oil price is still around 100, 105, 95 a barrel versus the expectation
05:52of the market?
05:53You know, Hormuz was the nightmare of every energy trader and every energy company, but it's still trading kind of
06:00in a trading range.
06:02What do you think is that?
06:03Well, I think there has been a lot of uncertainty about how long this war is going to last and
06:09how quickly things will recover.
06:13If you remember, at the beginning of the war, Trump kept saying it's going to last a few days, a
06:21week, two weeks, and now we're in several months.
06:27And knowing, in sight, there's a ceasefire, but it's not a ceasefire because we have a blockade, which is an
06:34act of war, and Iran keeps lobbing missiles.
06:41One of the things that I think have not been fully appreciated, at least according to energy experts I've talked
06:48to, they've already done a lot of damage to the infrastructure in the Middle East.
06:55Repairing that infrastructure is going to take a long time.
07:00So I think the market hasn't fully yet taken into account this may last a long time, and it may
07:09take an even longer time to get things back to normal.
07:14Right, absolutely. You're right.
07:15For example, we in Italy rely a lot in terms of gas supply from the Ras La Fan gas city
07:22in Qatar, which has been bombed heavily, and it will take, according to some experts that we had interviewed with,
07:30between three and five years to get back at that situation.
07:33So, Professor, clearly, this war, again, is a new tragedy, humanitarian catastrophe.
07:40At the same time, how would you assess the economic impact for the rest of the world?
07:46Because in Europe, what we see is that, according to the ECB, economic growth is slowing down, inflation is going
07:52up.
07:52In the U.S., inflation is going up. This week, 3.8%.
07:56At the same time, economic growth remains pretty robust.
08:00What's your take on this?
08:02Well, I think it's going to have variable effects in different countries because there are offsetting things.
08:09So, you mentioned the 3.8%.
08:14You know, inflation was going down.
08:16Now it's going way up.
08:18Now, the wholesale prices that were just announced yesterday or today were 6%.
08:27Inflation has now gone from oil into what we call the core, so it's seeping into other parts of the
08:38economy.
08:38Now, what that means, central banks' knee-jerk reaction to higher inflation is higher interest rates, and that slows down
08:50the economy.
08:51So, the inflation directly is going to slow down the economy.
08:56It's going to take away people's purchasing power, and indirectly through the increase of interest rates.
09:03Now, in the United States, the countervailing force is the data centers, AI.
09:13About a third of all U.S. growth now is accounted for by investment in data centers.
09:21It is not a balanced growth.
09:23I don't think it's a sustainable growth.
09:25I think there's an AI bubble.
09:27We can talk about that later.
09:28But, for now, that's what's keeping the economy going.
09:35In Europe, it's a different picture.
09:40The war in Ukraine, unfortunately, is still going on.
09:43Europe has figured out, at last, that Trump, and I would have to say, having elected Trump twice, U.S.
09:55cannot be relied on, either for defense or technology.
10:00And so, Europe is ramping up, Germany particularly, and, you know, changing the fiscal constraints.
10:08So, that's providing a stimulus that offsets that.
10:12But, globally, other countries are not in that position.
10:18And so, I think the estimates are that global growth will be markedly slower as a result of these forces.
10:26Well, this is not good news, especially for this piece of the economy, which relies on consumption, on consumer behavior.
10:33How do you see the resilience of consumers in this kind of situation, and what the dynamics, especially here in
10:40Europe, we might expect?
10:42Well, to begin with the U.S. that I know best, consumer confidence is very low.
10:52There's just a lot of uncertainty.
10:55You know, there are some forces in the U.S. that make things worse in terms of inflation than in
11:01Europe.
11:02We have the tariffs.
11:03We have the immigration policy, which is creating labor shortages.
11:09There's the political uncertainty.
11:12And all of this has contributed to, I think, pessimism.
11:17A widespread, you know, not only polarization, but a real pessimism in the consumer market.
11:23So, I think the U.S. consumer market is not, I would say, not robust right now.
11:32The forces in Europe are a little bit different, as I say, because you don't have the tariffs.
11:38You have to respond to the tariffs.
11:43You capitulated, in my view.
11:45You should have, Europe should have been stronger in reaction, and obviously that undermines confidence in Europe's geopolitical position.
11:59And, you know, the war in Ukraine is a continual drain, but it's, from my perspective, absolutely essential to win
12:08that war.
12:10Absolutely.
12:10Now, there's another fact that it's quite difficult to explain, given all the complexity and all the bad news for
12:17the global economy, which is markets.
12:20You know, we at ClassyBC, we're a market channel, economic channel.
12:24And markets are trading at historic highs.
12:28Dow Jones 50,000 and S&P 7,400.
12:32For the first time since year 2000, today, the Milan Stock Exchange, Futsi Mib, crossed 50,000.
12:41And again, you know, how do you match this with the reality of the economy that they face every day?
12:49So, my view is, there's a lot of short-sightedness.
12:55Also, I don't know as well the European market as I do the U.S. market.
13:00The U.S. stock market really reflects a very few companies, the tech companies, the AI companies.
13:08And they're doing very well.
13:11As I said before, I think there's a bubble in AI.
13:16If you look at the rest of the stock market in the United States, it's not doing particularly well.
13:22So, I think the overall number gives a distorted view.
13:29But markets almost always are a little bit short-sighted.
13:35They aren't looking, you know, they're looking for the now and not asking about what is the future world going
13:47to look like.
13:48Yeah, talking about the future world, you know, the markets are betting that we're living a new industrial revolution,
13:54which is based on AI.
13:56And the infrastructure we need is so huge that hundreds of thousands of billions will be invested in this new
14:05economy.
14:06You mentioned data center, old infrastructure, which is real economy, which is workers, which is plumbers, which is technicians, engineers,
14:14whatever.
14:14We are short of energy, we're short of chips, we're short of land to build.
14:20So, it's a huge tension.
14:21Do you think this is for real, or is it a bubble, and do you expect this to burst?
14:27And many of these billions are invested with no return.
14:31There's not going to be a return.
14:32What do you make of it?
14:33Yeah, I said before, a bubble.
14:36Let me try to explain why I think it's a bubble.
14:41By the way, I think it still will have a very big effect on our economy.
14:48That's a different issue.
14:49Productivity is surging.
14:51What?
14:51Productivity, productivity, productivity, given AI, productivity is surging.
14:55And if we look at the numbers of companies, they're doing better.
14:59In particular companies, but not in the aggregate.
15:02We don't see it in the aggregate statistics.
15:06For the profits to be as high to justify the investments, assumes that there's not going to be competition.
15:15Because the basic law of competition is that competition drives prices down to what we call marginal cost.
15:23And this is an industry where marginal cost is relatively low, and profits will be driven out, and there will
15:31be a lot of losses, like in the tech bubble at the end of the 90s.
15:35Now, what we've seen is how quickly a startup like Anthropic can catch up with a firm that has a
15:48big lead like OpenAI.
15:50And there are a lot of other firms in the market, if you look at a global point of view,
15:57DeepSeek has managed with a fraction of the resources to produce a competitive product, not quite as good from what
16:08everybody says.
16:09It's trading way lower, and it's trading way lower than Anthropic, valuation, market cap expected for OpenAI.
16:16Yeah, and one of the things is that in the developing world, in the third world, because it's cheaper, it's
16:23open source, it's beating OpenAI and beating Anthropic.
16:29So there's going to be a lot of competition, and there's going to be a lot of competition that's going
16:34to drive the profits down.
16:36The second thing is that even assuming it's technologically successful, if it is as technologically successful as Anthropic's claim, it's
16:50going to be a lot of labor market disruption.
16:53We aren't capable, especially the Trump administration, but I think in general, managing that macroeconomic disturbance.
17:02And so you can't have a prosperous company if the overall macroeconomy is not functioning well.
17:12Well, absolutely. So there are financial aspects, but let me stop with that, because there are economic consequences and social
17:19consequences of what's going on.
17:21So AI has created an enormous wealth, will probably produce with more productivity, more profits for some companies.
17:30The real problem, and you've been working a lot in your career on this, is that has been created.
17:38Inequality, you've been saying it's not just a social matter, it's a macroeconomic matter.
17:43How do you see the future of this, they call it K economy, the rich are getting richer, the middle
17:51class is suffering, the poorer are getting poorer.
17:53But before I come to that, I want to emphasize a real risk that the way we are organizing AI
18:02actually will lead to lower productivity systemically for the whole economy.
18:09And the reason is that we used to have an expression called GIGO, garbage in, garbage out.
18:20And the point is that AI relies on information produced by others, at least at the current time.
18:31That's media like yours, newspapers, and what AI has been doing is stealing all that information.
18:42That's a strong word.
18:44But it's a big point.
18:56Go to AI, because you can get a summary of everybody's information.
19:02But if they take away all the eyeballs from you, all the attention, what's your business model?
19:08And already employment is going down, and so there won't be the production of good information that is so essential
19:19for a good information ecosystem.
19:22So some of my research has emphasized that there is a real risk of the quality of information ecosystem going
19:29down.
19:30And if that happens, societal productivity may not gain as much.
19:34If I may, Professor Stiglitz, one of us, at least on this matter.
19:38And in terms of social impact in general, socially...
19:48I have a big debate about safe and ethical AI.
20:03You know, the guys who got the Nobel Prize for creating AI, Stuart Russell, who's the head of Berkeley,
20:13their view is that AI has a downside risk, which is very great.
20:19In fact, at a meeting a year ago in Paris, one of them stood up and said, you know,
20:26have we created something like the atomic bomb that's so dangerous?
20:32And, you know, how do we feel about that?
20:35So they're very strong about having good regulations to channel AI in the right way.
20:43The role of the European Union is a, as they said, in the right direction.
20:48And the European Union is a right direction, right direction, right direction, right direction.
20:57So, we started with Trump and Xi Jinping, but you just mentioned the European Union,
21:02which is clearly crucial to us.
21:07And what's the place of Europe?
21:10dell'Europa in questo lavoro
21:12di liceo politico
21:13perché ieri
21:16Mario Draghi è stato
21:18ricevuto il primo Charlemagne
21:20che è un rilassamento per coloro
21:22che hanno sostenuto
21:24lo sviluppo dell'Europa
21:25e ha fatto un discorso storico
21:28ha detto per la primissima volta
21:30siamo da soli
21:31insieme
21:33quindi non possiamo più fare affidamento
21:36agli Stati Uniti, alle paesi di sicurezza
21:38la Cina ha un surplus industriale
21:42che è una minaccia per noi
21:44ci può essere una desertificazione
21:45industriale per noi
21:46quindi dobbiamo usare le nostre forze
21:49le nostre forze direttamente
21:51per fare quello che non abbiamo fatto
21:53per anni
21:54l'Europa deve crescere insieme
21:56mano nella mano
21:58molto più che nel passato
21:59quindi aveva già scritto
22:03un rapporto
22:04il famoso rapporto Draghi
22:05soltanto il 10% di quanto lui suggeriva
22:07è stato applicato dall'Europa
22:08lei come la fede?
22:10quindi è una situazione fondamentale
22:12in questo momento
22:15sono d'accordo con Draghi
22:18rispetto a quello che ha appena detto
22:21io farei addirittura un passo in lÃ
22:23perché l'Europa in questo momento
22:25è il solo luogo
22:27in cui rimane e prospera ancora la democrazia
22:33e prosperano ancora i diritti umani
22:35negli Stati Uniti
22:39sapete cosa sta succedendo
22:40c'è stato ieri
22:43è stato pubblicato un editoriale
22:45si diceva appunto che gli Stati Uniti
22:47sono a metà strada
22:48fra l'autocrazia e la democrazia
22:50è stata fatta una disamina
22:52di tutte le varie categorie
22:53di tutti i vari aspetti
22:55e un paio di settimane fa
22:57anche
22:59è stato pubblicato
23:02un rapporto sulla libertà di stampa
23:04e gli Stati Uniti
23:05sono risultati di essere
23:06il 66esimo posto
23:08a livello mondiale
23:08e questo è molto preoccupante
23:10per quanto riguarda
23:11la libertà accademica
23:13noi siamo nel 40% inferiore
23:17di solito eravamo in cima
23:18a questo tipo di classifiche
23:20quindi l'Europa si è da sola
23:22purtroppo
23:23e questo significa
23:25che deve fare avvidamento
23:27su se stessa
23:28per quanto riguarda
23:30la difesa
23:30la tecnologia
23:32l'energia
23:33eccetera
23:34e Trump potrebbe addirittura
23:37tagliarli fuori di fatto
23:39quindi dovete
23:40essere capaci di fare avvidamento
23:43su voi stessi
23:44a livello di tecnologia
23:45e di difesa
23:46e la relazione con la Cina
23:48forse è l'aspetto più complesso
23:50fra tutti
23:50la Cina
23:52è riuscita
23:54a
23:55diciamo
23:56produrre innovazione
23:57a basso costo
23:58appunto per tagliarli fuori
24:00dai mercati
24:00e quindi questo
24:02vi ha creato
24:02uno svantaggio competitivo
24:03ma
24:04Draghi ha ragione
24:05dovete usare
24:06le politiche industriali
24:09per poter recuperare
24:11restaurare
24:13le vostre capacitÃ
24:13produttive
24:15vediamo con l'Italia
24:16come vede il futuro
24:17dell'Italia
24:18da un punto di vista economico
24:19alla luce di quello
24:20che ci ha appena detto
24:21poco fa
24:22ma direi che l'Italia
24:24è un paese affascinante
24:27mi adoro l'Italia
24:28affascinante
24:30perché
24:30vi sono alcune parti
24:32dell'Italia
24:33che sono molto dinamiche
24:34fra le più dinamiche
24:35mentre in altre zone
24:38si vedono
24:40ad esempio
24:42aziende
24:46che sono molto innovative
24:49e se si vedono
24:51le medie
24:51le statistiche medie
24:52di fatto queste statistiche
24:54non riflettono
24:55la dinamicitÃ
24:56di quanto si vede
24:57in alcune zone
24:58in alcune regioni
25:00dell'Italia
25:01che hanno
25:02ottime performance
25:04quindi
25:06è importante
25:09portare a termine
25:11la transizione
25:12rispetto
25:14all'industria
25:16manufatturiera
25:17ci sono
25:18diciamo
25:19rimangono comunque
25:20rimangono ancora
25:21molto spazio
25:21per i servizi
25:22ad esempio
25:23voi
25:24in Nord Italia
25:25avete
25:25ad esempio
25:27la moda
25:27altri settori
25:29quindi avete
25:30l'innovazione
25:31che ha un ruolo
25:32trainante
25:33nella produzione
25:34di prodotti migliori
25:35e quindi
25:38io
25:38credo
25:40che l'Italia
25:40di fatto
25:41sia una sorta
25:42di puzzle
25:42vero e proprio
25:43nel senso
25:44che
25:45si vede
25:47che ci sono
25:48tante storie
25:49di successo
25:51ma
25:51a livello
25:53individuale
25:53non so
25:54ad esempio
25:55io ho
25:56una caffettiera
25:57italiana
25:57a casa
25:58che funziona
25:59benissimo
25:59che adoro
26:00ci sono
26:01tantissimi
26:02aspetti
26:02il cibo italiano
26:03lo adoriamo
26:04tutti
26:05naturalmente
26:06qui abbiamo
26:07molti attori
26:08del successo
26:09delle aziende italiane
26:10quindi ci sono
26:11molte storie di successo
26:13ma di fatto
26:14come economista
26:15guardo all'Italia
26:16quindi senza
26:18soffermare
26:19su questo aspetto
26:20quindi se vado
26:21a vedere i numeri
26:22aggregati
26:22quindi la crescita
26:23della proprietÃ
26:24in realtÃ
26:25i dati
26:26non sono
26:26molto promettenti
26:28non sono stati
26:29così fangolosi
26:30quindi bisogna
26:31cercare di riconciliare
26:33questi fattori
26:35discordanti
26:36grazie
26:37cercheremo
26:37di riconciliare
26:38questi fattori
26:39e grazie ancora
26:40professore
26:41per essere qui
26:41con noi
26:42grazie a tutti
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