Why Too Much Is Too Little: Marc Chandler on America’s Surplus

“Bezos said he had so much money he couldn’t spend it all on Earth. And I think to myself, well, cut your prices.” — Marc Chandler

INTRO

Jeff Bezos, our Amazon overlord, once complained that he had so much money he couldn’t spend it all on Earth. Hence his toy rockets. My guest today has a more down-to-earth suggestion. Cut your prices. Pay your workers more. Let them unionize.

Marc Chandler is no dreamy Bolshevik. He’s spent his life as a currency strategist. Every day for the last forty years he’s tracked the trillions of dollars sloshing around the foreign exchange markets. And what he sees, he argues in his new book, Surplus, is too much. Too much stuff, too much capacity, too much capital with nowhere useful to go. Keynes thought the economic problem of scarcity might be solved by 2030. We comfortably beat that Keynesian deadline, Chandler says. But Bezos’s toy rockets are stopping us from getting to it.

So what to do? The hard-headed Chandler doesn’t fall into the trap of imagining America can become Denmark. Instead, he wants it to return to the founders’ marriage of freedom and equality, and to end the collapsing of economic and political power. No more Muskian buying or selling of elections. It’s a familiar argument from an unfamiliar quarter. America has changed. Even money guys like Chandler have had enough.

Marc Chandler ends Surplus with a parable of heaven and hell. In hell, there’s a banquet table full of food, but everyone has spoons too long to feed themselves with. So they all starve. In heaven, they feed each other across the table with these spoons. Too much, then, doesn’t have to be too little. It all depends on how we use our spoons.

FURTHER READING

•   Surplus: The History of Too Much and the End of Economic Primacy (Prometheus), by Marc Chandler.

•   Marc to Market, Marc Chandler’s market commentary.

•   “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” (1930), by John Maynard Keynes.

•   The End of Economic Man (1939; Routledge), by Peter F. Drucker.

•   KEEN ON AMERICA episodes cited: Mordecai Kurz on the trouble with trillionaires, Scott Curran on Musk, Bezos and MacKenzie Scott, Dennis Rasmussen on Frederick Douglass, and Anthony Badger on Hoover, Roosevelt and the making of the American state.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Marc Chandler is managing partner and chief market strategist at Bannockburn Global Forex. He was previously head of global currency strategy at Brown Brothers Harriman, and before that at HSBC and BNY Mellon. He teaches at New York University and is the author of Making Sense of the Dollar and Political Economy of Tomorrow. He writes the market commentary Marc to Market. Surplus: The History of Too Much and the End of Economic Primacy is published by Prometheus.

ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA

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