the debt crisis, the -- going back to the breakdown of bretton woods but particularly in the 1980s to 2000's the period of enormous increases of inequality of the world. so we think we demonstrate that there is a very close relationship between inequality and financial events and, therefore, essentially with the phenomenon that led up to this great financial crackup in 2007 and 2008. >> dr. galbraith, when someone says free trade, what do you think about? >> i think it's an illusion of trade in the modern world -- it is a matter of transnational networks of production. they are managed there is really no such thing as free trade. if there were it would have been disrupted long ago by the emergence of modern china. >> we turn to the gold standard. >> another illusion. gold is an archaic symbol of monetary of world. it's impractical in the modern world. >> and the fed. >> i think we need a functioning federal reserve. i spent much of my career in congress on the oversight of the federal reserve. the real challenge is there is to have a federal reserve that serves the country, and it is

was a very courtly designed system it was a manmade system it fell apart and they came up with a bretton woods system from a few forty four to seventy one and there was no reserve requirement you could print as many dollars as the u.s. wanted to grant and only have a certain amount of gold all the other countries on the planet would back their currencies with u.s. dollars and the u.s. dollar is backed by gold at thirty five dollars an ounce and then next and stops the convert go into gold in one nine hundred seventy one and the world has been on a dollar cysts standard since then so we've gone from on baby steps from gold to personal or back into less gold backing to no gold back to where currencies are all back to ious on it's well every thirty to forty years this falls apart now we've got to go back to something from nothing if the central banks are going to use their goals to back debt what are they going to have left when the world monetary system sees this next shift i think the countries that do that are going to be broke and the countries that still have some gold are going to end up be

britain would it was not the case that every currency in the world was anchored to gold the way bretton woods were and if your currency was anchored to the dollar and the dollar was anchored to gold and i think in the twenty first century version of that maybe it would be the dollar the euro and the chinese you want maybe three or four currencies sadly for england they don't have much gold either they england actually sold most of their gold at two hundred dollars an ounce today it's almost eighty dollars for a very good price that was it was a bit of a. chance of the exchequer gordon brown but it's so i think the big three china and europe and the us would be in the club and they would be set to go through the new zealand encounter than others could then pay their currencies to say the us dollar with the euro summit so that's how that would work but it's interesting that for fifteen years central banks were not sellers of gold and as you pointed out in the process when they become that buyers of well there's actually a cartel did they get a advanced copy of your book i don't know because the