I haven’t posted in a long time but wrote this weeks ago and am posting it now as it is still relevant!  On a show last month (11/12/21), Bill Maher had Kevin O’Leary, Shark Tank’s “Mr. Wonderful,” as his guest. Shark Tank is a very popular TV show where hopefuls with an idea for a business try to get a panel of very rich investors to put some money in it. O’Leary mentioned that he saw the pandemic as a main source of our global supply chain problems causing factories to close in many countries that supply essential parts. I agree. Closed production lines take time to re-open and, in a world of vaccine apartheid, many countries are still facing pandemic restrictions. Adding to this, demand for many goods stayed strong and increased as rich countries were coming out of pandemic. A shortage of truckers and warehouse workers, reflecting dissatisfaction with wages and working conditions, caused further delays and price and wage increases as demand for goods and workers outstripped supply.

Biden is being blamed for the consequent shortages and price rises when the problem is global, as present in Europe as it is in the U.S. The U.S. president can no more fix the global supply chain than he can lower the price of oil whose supply is being restricted by producer nations — which is also driving up all prices. I mean, it’s complicated and I don’t have a good diagnosis or solution. Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University said “Pandemic macroeconomics is a new macroeconomics…. We are to some extent flying blind.” One thing I do know is that we have world markets that are very interconnected and interdependent that have a certain fragility to them – small perturbations can have large repercussions and large perturbations, like the pandemic, has multiple, difficult-to-foresee consequences.

Bill Maher started his conversation with O’Leary by asking whether billionaires know more about the economy than the rest of us. O’Leary’s answer was “No!” but then he went on to give us his very biased view of the economy. O’Leary blamed Biden and government spending for inflation. Not true, Biden hasn’t spent that much yet and inflation is now a global problem not restricted to the U.S. Bill asked him something like:  ”How much is too rich? Income inequality is strong. There is an underclass in the U.S. who are barely getting by day-to-day?” O’Leary then went on rather incoherently that salaries in the film industry for animators and videographers are going up. Bill asks, what about everybody else? No answer. Bill reiterates, how much is too rich? O’Leary points out that there is always someone richer like Elon Musk, but he deserves his wealth and we’ll get his when he dies, no need to take it now. How crazy! First, “we” don’t get it when he dies, estate taxes are a joke. And second, so what if there are richer people, all that wealth is obscene, especially when over half the world is living so precariously. I think Warren Buffet would say that O’Leary’s philosophy is giving billionaires a bad rap (although, for the record, O’Leary doesn’t have a billion, “only” about 400 million).

And, of course, Bill and O’Leary end the conversation with “we’re both capitalists.” Bill says “there is no doubt that capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty than anything else.” Which may be true, but the other side is that capitalism has kept more people living at the margins than at any time in human history. Bill follows that with “we’ve tried other systems but nothing else works.” We’ve actually tried hardly anything. My book and my recent short piece explore TAPAS, There are Plenty of Alternatives, the critics response to Margaret Thatcher’s TINA (There is No Alternative).