The audience the podcast i did with you the other week, you were brilliant and the amount that you know and the degree to which you can make that apply to modern america is remarkable. I look forward very much to the chance to chat with you. I appreciate that i had the pleasure to read through your book i was impressed how quickly it came out. Mind took seven years to write so i need to take a page from your playbook to be more diligent with my research and writing but that is on china issues so we have some questions on the challenge the United States faces. My ego requires me to ask what did you think as a genuine china scholar what did you think over all of the information in the book quick. You start with the tough questions. The underlying recommendation and your view how china pursues its goals, i would agree with. Theres a lot of people who have different interpretations but i do think it is very problematic how china is trying to pursue power and influence i may disagree with s
I know. Alltime highs we have like, what, 39 trading days to go is that it . It is a tight time frame here the interesting thing around the market is it has shrugged off concern. One of the reason the market has gone higher is because of really light positioning. That mentality hasnt changed. That has fuelled the rally in the market you see the dow in the green but just barely. Nasdaq futures down by a point again, we are sitting at new highs after the gains we added on yesterday you look at the treasury market yielding 1. 85 xerox looking at buying hp. The company has an informal funding commitment xerox has a Market Company a third of hp. Both of these companies former technology stall waters. Xerox has had a couple of falls. Do people steel xerox things it is like faxing. Hp has tried to keep up it is like help me im drowning. Hp shares are up. Xerox somehow is the acquiring company. And there would be a premium to hps market cap. I just get depressed reading this xerox already scra
Nations in Eastern Europe but thats a kind of a narrative that is very western i suppose but i lived there it was i dont have that same kind of feel for it ok though having said that im very glad those communist regimes are gone and the wall go ahead john. You know well like you peter i lived through those events very directly like you i was studying Eastern European studies at oxford at that point i spent that summer in 1909 in romania and and indeed in september 89 i was in west berlin and was there when the 1st east berlin is arrived in west berlin having driven through czechoslovakia hungry austria and the whole of germany so i have a very strong memory of it as well i would make 2 points the 1st is that none of it would have happened without gorbachev decision to pull the rug on the Eastern European communist regimes that was decision he took in june and which he announced to the german chancellor helmut kohl at the time and all. The events that we remember now the jangling of key
In the fall of the berlin wall im joined by my guest John Laughlin in paris he is a political scientist and historian in washington we have harold james hes a professor of history and International Affairs at Princeton University as well as author and editor of a number of books including when the wall came down reactions to german unification and in cork we cross to Geoffrey Roberts he is emeritus professor of history at University College cork and a member of the Royal Irish Academy all right gentlemen crosstalk rules in effect that means you can jump in anytime you want and i always appreciated let me go to john and paris 1st i mean 30 its been 30 years now believe it or not because i remember it so vividly when it happened a few months before i had been living in poland for a number of years and an avid student of Eastern European communist affairs at the time john 30 years on what is its meaning because i look at cursory reviews of you know that in commenting on it it is the peopl
Is the attraction then why do we have so many millennial zz and so many people attracted to this idea that so many of them have no historical knowledge of whatsoever go ahead thomas in baltimore was mostly because people like David Henderson and myself have been snuffed out of the academic world there are still hundreds of classical liberals in american academe but were outnumbered by hundreds of thousands of others and the young people are taught what economists call the nirvana fallacy they pose socialism as some sort of utopian ideal and compare that to the real world and of course the real world always comes up short when you compare it to utopia and thats basically the methodology thats used and its even used widely in the economics profession with all the theories of socalled market failure and so even if you take economics you dont really get well grounded in how markets work and the importance of private property and private enterprise. Was in most economics departments in my o