Tocqueville 21 Podcast: Post-Covid Economics with Charles Dumas

Welcome back to the Tocqueville 21 Podcast!  As the war in Ukraine and the French elections have drawn most media attention for the past couple of weeks, we thought it might be helpful to take a step back and explore other topics of interest: namely, the fallout of the Covid epidemic, and the challenges faced by the global economy in transitioning to cleaner sources of energy.

This time, we sat down with Charles Dumas, chief economist of TS Lombard. An analyst with a long and storied career at institutions such as The Economist, JP Morgan and the London School of Economics, Charles is a prescient doomsayer, having predicted the dot-com bubble of the late 90s, the US housing bust of the late 2000s, and the slow global recovery in the aftermath of the 2008 recession. He is the author of many books, including Populism and Economics, which covers the economic causes of the recent challenge to the liberal consensus of the post-Cold War era, and Decarbonomics, which focuses on the challenging transition to a carbon-free economic system after the Covid epidemic.

Our discussion focuses primarily on ecological economics, but also touches on his thoughts on growing economic nationalism, China’s ongoing housing and emissions crises, and the broader threats faced by the global supply chain.