129. How Serious Is The UK’s Debt Mess?

Steph and Robert are joined by Dr Gerard Lyons, an influential economist and Bank of China board member, to discuss whether Rachel Reeves is wise to ask China to invest in the UK, whether the Chancellor will need to come back for more tax rises later this year and what he really advised Liz Truss to do. Sign up to our newsletter to get more stories from the world of business and finance. Email: [email protected] X: @TheRestIsMoney Instagram: @TheRestIsMoney TikTok: @RestIsMoney goalhangerpodcasts.com Assistant Producer: India Dunkley, Alice Horrell Producer: Ross Buchanan Head of Content: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Robert gives us his take on 'Starmer vs Musk' and Steph tells us why she thinks business rates are going to be a big problem this year. There’s also a discussion about misunderstood concepts in economics, first up: GDP. Plus we catch-up on the exciting post Steph and Robert received over Christmas. A clue: it involves a Clinton and a Truss. Sign up to our newsletter to get more stories from the world of business and finance. Email: [email protected] X: @TheRestIsMoney Instagram: @TheRestIsMoney TikTok: @RestIsMoney goalhangerpodcasts.com Assistant Producer: India Dunkley, Alice Horrell Producer: Ross Buchanan Head of Content: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Karen Ward, Chief Market Strategist for one of the leading financial institutions in the world, JP Morgan Asset Management, talks to Robert and Steph about how Starmer can restore investors’ confidence, why she worries that the surge in the Magnificent 7 huge tech stocks is over, how AI can make most of us better off and whether Trump will be less radical than his rhetoric. Sign up to our newsletter to get more stories from the world of business and finance. Email: [email protected] X: @TheRestIsMoney Instagram: @TheRestIsMoney TikTok: @RestIsMoney goalhangerpodcasts.com Assistant Producer: India Dunkley, Hannah Rashbass, Alice Horrell Producer: Ross Buchanan Head of Content: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Steph and Robert explain why 2025 will be the most important year of our lives, and assess whether it will be a terrible or great year.  It is all about the unraveling of globalization and the proliferation of wars. One word nutshells the world on a fulcrum: Trump. Sign up to our newsletter to get more stories from the world of business and finance. Email: [email protected] X: @TheRestIsMoney Instagram: @TheRestIsMoney TikTok: @RestIsMoney goalhangerpodcasts.com Assistant Producer: India Dunkley, Becki Hills Producer: Ross Buchanan Head of Content: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Why are so many low income families living in the kind of slum conditions that would have shamed the Victorians? And why are so many of these slums in social and council properties? Robert and Steph look for explanations and solutions, and ask whether Labour’s promise to build 1.5m homes will help, in a conversation with ITV’s award-winning investigations editor Dan Hewitt. Sign up to our newsletter to get more stories from the world of business and finance. Email: [email protected] X: @TheRestIsMoney Instagram: @TheRestIsMoney TikTok: @RestIsMoney goalhangerpodcasts.com Assistant Producer: India Dunkley, Hannah Rashbass Producer: Ross Buchanan Head of Content: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Steph and Robert reflect on some of The Rest Is Money’s big insights from 2024, including why governments should focus on improving our happiness rather than our incomes and why Labour’s biggest mistake was to ignore the black hole in the public finances before the election. Sign up to our newsletter to get more stories from the world of business and finance. Email: [email protected] X: @TheRestIsMoney Instagram: @TheRestIsMoney TikTok: @RestIsMoney goalhangerpodcasts.com Assistant Producer: India Dunkley, Hannah Rashbass Producer: Ross Buchanan Head of Content: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Robert and Steph answer your questions including whether we are heading inexorably towards another financial crisis and whether the UK might be more prosperous if the National Health Service were privatised. Sign up to our newsletter to get more stories from the world of business and finance. Email: [email protected] X: @TheRestIsMoney Instagram: @TheRestIsMoney TikTok: @RestIsMoney goalhangerpodcasts.com Assistant Producer: India Dunkley, Hannah Rashbass Producer: Ross Buchanan Head of Content: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Google is making huge bets on artificial intelligence and quantum computing. It is reinventing how millions of us work and live. But in the process is it also eating its own lunch, destroying the search business that turned it into one of the world’s most valuable companies? Steph and Robert put all this and more to Matt Brittin, Google’s most powerful European executive, as he prepares to step down and quit Google after 17 years. Sign up to our newsletter to get more stories from the world of business and finance. Email: [email protected] X: @TheRestIsMoney Instagram: @TheRestIsMoney TikTok: @RestIsMoney goalhangerpodcasts.com Assistant Producer: India Dunkley Producer: Ross Buchanan Head of Content: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Robert and Steph talk to Sir Bill Browder about making billions after the fall of the Soviet Union, only to end up with a target from Putin on his back. This is a story of murder and corruption leading him into his life’s work persuading governments to hit human rights abusers where it hurts. The threat of Putin’s revenge is ever present and Bill’s stories include the time he was bundled into a car by Spanish police fearing for his life. Sign up to our newsletter to get more stories from the world of business and finance. Email: [email protected] X: @TheRestIsMoney Instagram: @TheRestIsMoney TikTok: @RestIsMoney goalhangerpodcasts.com Assistant Producer: India Dunkley, Hannah Rashbass Producer: Ross Buchanan Head of Content: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Steph and Robert are joined by Sir Bill Browder, political activist and co-founder of Hermitage Capital Management, formerly the largest foreign portfolio investor in Russia, to discuss how using Russia’s frozen assets against them could help Kiev win the war, why Putin won’t take a Trump peace deal and why the toppling of the Assad regime may only prolong the war in Ukraine. Sign up to our newsletter to get more stories from the world of business and finance. Email: [email protected] X: @TheRestIsMoney Instagram: @TheRestIsMoney TikTok: @RestIsMoney goalhangerpodcasts.com Assistant Producer: India Dunkley, Hannah Rashbass Producer: Ross Buchanan Head of Content: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices