Financial markets and derivatives authority Janet Tavakoli returns to the podcast to discuss a number of the themes contained in her new book Decisions: Life And Death On Wall Street.

She paints a particularly informative timeline of the greed and rot that has come to dominate the modern financial system, and how its tentacles have fully penetrated and subjugated the halls of power in Washington DC.

We’re in precarious times for sure. What we have done is unprecedented in the history of the United States. We got rid of the benchmark, the gold standard. We don’t have any any stable benchmark anymore. Instead, we have currencies that are being benchmarked off of each other.

If you’re measuring your weight you want a scale, right? You want an actual measurement of weight, not a relative one. You don’t want to be comparing yourself to a bunch of obese guys in the gym. You need a standard benchmark. So once you get rid of the benchmark, then you can eat whatever you want and exercise as little as you choose that’s okay. Well it is not okay. We all know that. But that’s exactly what we’ve done in finance. We’re printing money like mad. We’ve created a huge distortion where, for years, savers have gotten negative real interest rates. Negative real interest rates in the Untied States for a long, long period of time, and in Europe we now have sovereigns of course who are paying both negative nominal and negative real interest rates.

This is unprecedented in the history of finance. I talked to a retired head of the Chicago Fed (so I’ve probably narrowed the field because I don’t know how many of them are still living) and he said None of us knows what is going on. We’ve never done anything like this before. They don’t know what the end game is. They’re totally at sea and it’s their own fault because they got rid of our scale. They got rid of our own benchmarks, and they’re trying to muddle through without having any way of measuring what we are doing.