"China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin." — Ken Rogoff

Today I'm speaking with Ken Rogoff who is a professor at Harvard, author recently of Our Dollar, former chief economist at the IMF. Ken, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Uh, thanks so much for having me. Uh, and welcome to Harvard, which is where we're filming this.

In your book, you have a lot of anecdotes of meeting different Chinese leaders, especially when you were chief economist at the IMF. And it seems like you had positive experiences. They would listen. You met the premier with your family and he would like listen to your advice.

So, one, how does that inform your view about how competent their leadership is? And two, how do you think they got into this mess with their big stimulus or whatever else you think went wrong to the extent that when you were talking to them in the early 2000s, it seemed like, you know, you were kind of seeing eye to eye or they would understand your perspective. Do you think something changed in the meantime? Well, I first want to be careful to say they listen to everybody.

I mean, the Chinese are way better than we are uh of sort of hearing a hundred different views. uh mine would be one of many many many you know that they heard. So I was very impressed by the competence of the Chinese leaders. So I actually gave a a lecture in their party training school where if you're a mayor, you're a a provincial governor, you're any bureaucrat on your way up, you go to this thing which for them is like Harvard Business School.

They really looked for competence. So of course there were um various loyalty things but there you you meet the leaders and I met a lot of them and when I was at the school I met a whole bunch of people uh they actually asked really raw questions too. They said things I I couldn't believe it that they were asking and I was told you know within the school you're allowed to say anything. So they had this system for a long time and when you met Chinese technocrats or or even you know sort of the mayor of Shanghai or they were impressive.

I'm not saying ours aren't but it's a mix. I mean I think you know that uh and ...