"Heading For Global DEPRESSION!" Professor Jiang Debates Iran War, Trump And China Ties

0:00Piers Morgan:Are we heading for a global recession, do you think? I think that we are heading towards a global depression. I'm terrified. People are not going to starve to death. They're going to die of thirst. Where is Russia? Where are the Brits? Where are the Chinese? Where are the Europeans? I think that's been a big problem for Trump is nobody seems to be helping. If you want to get people to help you, probably don't call them a bunch of morons all the time would be my starting point. It seems like you all can't determine who's the good guy here and who's the evil. You're the bad guys, for God's sake.

0:28Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's my point. OK, if you can't realise that America is the evil empire here... You're saying the United States is the evil empire. Yes, yes. Stop reading Hollywood scripts and realise which planet you're on. OK, but for the evil empire, why is it every immigrant in the world wants to come to the United States? Nobody wants to go there now, mate.

0:48Piers Morgan:This is a serious warning, announced the IRGC after firing at a US warship. The Strait of Hormuz remains closed. to the 100-mile choke point along with the Iran's southern border. It's become the regime's most powerful weapon. Clearly, the United States has no military solution for opening it. And while President Trump may boast that the US doesn't need the strait, rocketing gas prices and spiking inflation say otherwise. Recent polls show that voters now trust Democrats more than Republicans on the economy for the first time in 16 years. The fact is that oil trades in a global market. That means Americans will pay the price just like the rest of us.

1:23Piers Morgan:And while the White House has promised immediate relief, As soon as the strait reopens, most experts say that economic chaos will reign for months or worse. So how bad could it all get? Well, one of my guests today is warning of everything from recession to famine. Joining me to debate is the economics professor and commentator Steve Keen, former economics advisor to President Trump, Stephen Moore, and returning to Uncensored, the game theorist Professor Zhang. Well, welcome to all three of you. Steve Keen, welcome to Uncensored. Thank you. What is going on here economically? We keep being told this is the worst stress on the global economy through energy that we've ever seen.

2:05Piers Morgan:Is that right? And how much worse could it get? Well, it's right. And every measurement I've seen said it's larger than 1973 with the Yom Kippur War, larger than the price rise in the 1979 when prices increased by a factor of four. and it's basically destruction of a large part of the planet's infrastructure for dragging oil out of the ground and everything else we get along with oil. So it's not just oil that's being destroyed. It's something like about 30 % of the world's helium supply. It's something of the 30 % to 50 % of fertilizer. Sulfuric acid is half of the sulfuric acid we use for industrial processes is gone.

2:45This is going to cause a monumental shock to the production system of the entire planet.

2:51Piers Morgan:The markets so far have been remarkably resilient, given how stressed this has all been. Why is that? And are we going to wake up, as some predict, I think you'd be one of them, is there going to be a massive backlash to all this in terms of a potential recession, do you think? Yes, I do. And I'm just smiling because I remember listening to George Soros once explain his approach to how he made money out of the markets. And he says, forget the efficient markets hypothesis. That's a load of nonsense. what actually the markets actually do is they underreact in the first place and then overreact later so he'd pick something where there was going to be an underreaction like for example what's going to happen to the british pound where back in the days of fixed exchange rates and he'd say he'd buy them at that stage and know that they you know up or down you know take a put or a call position know that the market's going to come up to his position later and make a killing now that's what's happening right now i spoke with five people who are financial markets experts in a Twitter forum some couple of weeks back, and I finally got bored and left the damn thing, because not one of them talked anything about the physical manufacturing processes behind what's happening in the strait.

4:01And when you destroy helium production, when you destroy fertilizer throughput, when you lock all those resources up, the production system has to fall over. So this is going to be a financial crisis caused by damage to the production system, which is the opposite of the usual situation. The financial system screws the manufacturing system.

4:20Piers Morgan:Stephen Moore, welcome to Uncensored to you. Thank you. You've been very supportive of Trump economics, Trumponomics as some people call it. It struck me that this was always a massive gamble by President Trump and that the potential downside was big and it's turned out to be very big so far with very little at the moment, I would say, very little tangible upside in terms of concessions from the Iranians, because they've realized that by strangling and controlling the Strait of Hormuz, coupled with their strategy of attacking their neighbors, their Gulf state neighbors, that that two-pronged strategy can be very effective in damaging the economy, both for the Gulf states and for the global economy with the strait.

5:09Piers Morgan:How bullish are you about what is going on here if this carries on for a few weeks or months? Well, I certainly agree that, look, energy is the master resource. Everything that we have is derivative of energy. And so when you see the price of oil go up to as high as$110 a barrel, it was at almost half that level at the beginning of the year. Remember, at the beginning of the year, thanks in part to Trump's drill baby drill strategy, we had the lowest gas prices in 50 years adjusted for inflation. So everything was going swimmingly with respect to energy. And then all of a sudden you have the straits closed down, you have the bombing.

5:52And that has certainly disrupted things in a very negative way. And look, a higher price of oil is just basically a tax on the world economy. It affects everyone. I agree that so many industries, from our technology industry to our transportation industry, to our manufacturing, is all very dramatically affected by a higher price of oil. And the real question is, how long will this last? Now, none of us know that answer. I would say that the best way of gauging how long this will last is to look at the futures market. In other words, you can buy a barrel of oil three months from now, and you can pay a price for that.

6:31And so the futures markets are telling us that the price of oil will migrate back down to, you know,$70 or$80 a barrel. And let's hope that they're right. Because if it doesn't happen, it's going to be really bad news for the Republicans come midterm elections. Because the one thing that we all know is that Americans hate paying high gas prices at the pump.

6:56Piers Morgan:Yeah, but the person that knew that better than anybody was President Trump. You know, I've known him a long time. You have. Yes, it was a massive gamble. I understand he wants to stop Iran developing a nuclear weapon. I understand the arguments. I just felt like going to war with Iran in a way that's happened had so many potential negatives to it, that it was an enormous political risk, never mind anything else, and a huge, as it's turned out, economic risk. And the truth is about the future markets, for example, with this, I don't think anybody knows, Gilles, Stephen. I mean, the truth is I don't think President Trump knows.

7:31Piers Morgan:What we do know is that the IRGC, the Iranian regime, remains pretty well in charge. That seems clear because the people are not rising up at all. We know that the Strait of Formos remains pretty well closed. They have control of that. And if they think they can hold America to economic ransom, it is highly likely, given the history of this 47-year regime, that that's exactly what they'll do, that they will affect maximum leverage economically, knowing that that is actually their most effective weapon. So I would simply say to that that, you know, Trump has said short-term pain for long-term gain.

8:12And the big question, of course, is how long is that short-term pain going to last? And so I don't have an answer to that. I am not a foreign policy expert. I'm an economist. I'm here to tell you if the price remains high, it will have a very negative effect on the economy, especially given the fact that we are now moving into this incredible new age of AI robotics where the data centers, where our energy demands are going to double over the next 10 years. So we're going to use a lot more energy. And I'll just say one other final point. The world is not running out of oil and gas. The world is washing oil and gas.

8:47This is a supply chain problem because the strait is being shut down. and the world has to come together to get those straits open. Where is Russia? Where are the Brits? Where are the Chinese? Where are the Europeans in helping get that done? I think that's been a big problem for Trump is nobody seems to be helping.

9:08Piers Morgan:Well, one of the problems is he keeps trashing them all publicly, which is if you want to get people to help you, probably don't call them a bunch of morons all the time would be my starting point. Yeah, but we've helped. Look, we've helped them for 40. we spent$100 billion on the defense of Europe. So, I mean, for them to sit on their hands, I think Trump is right to say, maybe we're going to have to reinvestigate this relationship with Europe. Well, it could just be that a lot of European countries were not persuaded that Iran was about to imminently have a nuclear weapon. And the reason for that, I can speak for my country, the UK, although if I'd been prime minister, I would have absolutely allowed America to use our bases for any military action they wanted.

9:50Piers Morgan:I do think that we have quite long memories here of what happened with Iraq, where we were assured that Saddam Hussein are weapons of mass destruction. And we went to war. It cost enormous amount of money, enormous amount of lives lost, led to the rise of ISIS. It was pretty well a catastrophe. So I think people in Britain and others in Europe that went to war in Iraq over the issue of WMD are like, you know what, we're not persuaded. And they should be allowed to be not persuaded, in my opinion, without the president going completely berserk as he's done. Because I don't think that helps persuade anybody to help in the way that I think you reasonably put out a sort of narrative here that yes, of course, all the countries have a vested interest in the strait being reopened, ought to be working together to do it.

10:38Piers Morgan:But it is quite hard when the guy that started the war but led to it being shut is just trashing you all the time. Professor Zhang, let me bring you back into the debate here. Welcome back to Uncensored. We always get a great reaction when you come on. So thank you for sparing me some of your valuable time. Steve had mentioned there China and why China isn't doing more to help. It is interesting because China really gets more energy through the strait than anybody else in the world and therefore has a bigger vested interest, you would think, in getting it reopened as soon as possible. Why is China kind of sitting this out?

11:19Well, China is not sitting this out. We have the ceasefire in place because China did a lot of backdoor diplomacy in order to pressure the Iranians to attempt a ceasefire. This is out of character for China. China does not like to involve itself in other nations' affairs. And so I think without Chinese pressure, we would not have the IRGC agreeing with the CISAR in the first place. The issue is that the United States continues to be unreasonable in negotiations with the Iranians. The Iranians have done a lot in order to try to accommodate the Americans. But, you know, when J.D. Vance went to Pakistan for the first time to negotiate with the Iranians, basically it was a very heavy handed ultimatum to the Iranians.

12:09And after that, I think that the Iranians recognize that there really is no hope in negotiating with the Americans. The Americans want to escalate. Why the Americans want to escalate, we don't know. But we can expect that over the next few weeks, the escalation will increase. You know, Trump has talked about using U.S. naval ships to escort oil tankers through the Shrip of Hormuz. This is clearly a provocation, and we might have a Gulf of Token incident, which will allow Trump to justify a ground invasion. Right.

12:45Piers Morgan:And a ground invasion, Steve Keen, would be, to me, just pouring fuel onto what is already a burning fire of mayhem over there, which I think could be horrendous for the United States. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think the soldiers on the ships are having much the same reactions. We don't know whether the nuclear aircraft carrier is taken out by Iranian attacks or by sailors stuffing their own clothing into the sewerage system to block it and force it out of the conflict. Those are our two choices. You have probably the least willing American military in the history of America's military incursions supposed to go up against a country of 90 million people who know they face an existential risk.

13:31It's absolutely ludicrous to be talking about ground troops going into that part of the world. And I've had, you know, I'm not an expert in military matters either. We've all acknowledged that. But from what I've got from reports of people who I know are experts in that area, unless the Americans have Star Wars style weapons. The right window treatments change everything. Your sleep, your privacy, the way every room looks and feels. At Blinds.com, we've spent 30 years making it surprisingly simple to get exactly what your home needs. We've covered over 25 million windows and have 50 ,000 five-star reviews to prove we deliver.

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14:38It was actually an American attack within Vietnamese waters. All this stuff, America sets up these wars and then loses them.

14:47Piers Morgan:You've described Donald Trump as an anarchist who behaves like a mafia boss with no idea of consequences. And you've sent this message to world leaders, get rid of Trump, stop this. America has to concede defeat and step back to give us a chance to rebuild the world's physical infrastructure before global famine sets in. You added it's a clusterfuck coming out of America. If you're going to see regime change to stop this war, forget about seeing it in Iran. You need to see it in America. I mean, that's strong rhetorical stuff there. Just explain what you're getting at. Well, first of all, I mean, my perspective on Trump comes from having a personal relationship with somebody with narcissistic personality disorder.

15:32And everything, I mean, the one advantage of that relationship in the long term was I understood Donald Trump, I think. And that is that he simply wants to make himself the centre of attention. And it doesn't matter how you do it. make a centre of attention by giving a nice dance or by invading another country. He just wants to be the centre of attention. I think that's why he fell for Netanyahu's provocation, which 40 years of previous American presidents have resisted and went in in the belief that it was over in a couple of days. I mean, all the talk about, you know, we've got to get Iran to be reasonable, Iran, the Iranian regime, yada, yada, yada.

16:06The very first thing the Americans did was assassinate the top leadership of the country, including the father and I believe the wife of the new leader, you want to be taken seriously as somebody to negotiate with? That just tells you don't negotiate, defeat them on the ground. And just like Vietnam was a war where they brought an enormous firepower and lost to a guerrilla army, this is bringing an enormous power and taking against a political system which has broken itself into 31 heads of a hydra. so that you can't take it out collectively. So all America's tactics have backfired so far. They'll continue backfiring.

16:45The only way out is for Donald Trump to declare victory while conceding defeat.

16:51Piers Morgan:Stephen Moore, I mean, look, I can't imagine a scenario where Donald Trump tries to get out of this without at least presenting a case for total victory. That's his nature. But in terms of this war and the impact it's had on his legacy, How was the tariff war doing before all this? In other words, the Trumponomics, which he launched with a huge gusto, you know, a kind of year ago, how was that playing out, do you think, globally before this? In other words, you know, was his economic strategy, do you think, working? And has this put everything back? Or was it not really working? And was this added to the general sense of chaos?

17:38well first of all i just have to say i mean come on it seems like you all can't determine who's the good guy here and here's the evil and by the way you're the bad guys yeah exactly i mean that's my point if you actually think that we're the bad guys in the arena is the good guys you have a personal personality disorder my friend sorry and it really is amazing that you think that we're the villains here. This is a regime. And by the way, again, I wasn't even necessarily in favor of this incursion in the first place. But come on, this is a regime that was killing thousands and thousands, murdering their own people.

18:14This was a regime that's building a nuclear weapon. So how are we the bad guys by trying to save lives? And I do think, look, I think to Trump's credit, he really did view this as a humanitarian mission to save lives that were being slaughtered. Now, in terms our economy, look, you know, we've had now five and a half years of Trump's presidency with an incredibly strong economy. Trumponomics has worked. If it hadn't been for COVID, Trump would have been reelected with a 40-state re-election landslide. The economy was very strong going into 2026. And it's true that the Iran situation has really changed that picture dramatically, which is why Trump really needs to bring this to an end as quickly as possible.

18:55But by the way, I'm not I'm not just attacking Steve. I think there are a lot of foreign leaders, too, who can't seem to figure out who's the good guy and who's the bad guy here. That's very troubling to Americans. I was facing being conscripted to fight for freedom in Vietnam. And the one thing that threw me is, why am I being conscripted to fight for freedom? OK, you go into Vietnam, you attack it, your whole thing is about going to stop the communist invasion of Southeast Asia. Who was the first country Vietnam has a war with? China, the first and last war. that took that completely against what you thought was going to happen.

19:28Afghanistan, Iraq. I was against all those things. I was against them. Well, you should be against this one as well. Grow up. Okay, if you can't realize that America is the evil empire here, then you've... It's the United States. You're saying the United States is the evil empire. Yes, the United States began this. What country has invaded America? How many countries has America invaded? Please stop reading Hollywood scripts and realize which planet you're on. I seem to think that 9-11 was an attack on America. Maybe you don't agree with that. Yes, okay. That's which country I said before. Oops, you forgot about that one, right?

20:08No, I didn't forget. I said country. And no country did that. That was a rogue. The rogues came from Saudi Arabia, not from the bloody country you were raided in the results of it. You guys have got a Hollywood version of your own history. It's a joke from the outside. Nobody takes you seriously anymore. Get used to it. Before the evil empire, why is it every immigrant in the world wants to come to the United States? Nobody wants to go there now, mate. You are going down. You should be at the border. We have millions of people who are signing up to get visas to come to the United States. They don't want to go to any other country.

20:41They want to come to the US. From my point of view, let me be crystal clear,

20:47Piers Morgan:I do think Iran is an evil regime. for 47 years. It's been oppressive to its own people in a despicable way. And also it's been the key sponsor of terrorism through the Houthis, Tess Bala and Hamas through the last few decades. And we've all seen where that has led. And that's been part of the big picture problem. President Zhang, let me bring you back in here. People are looking at manufacturing resilience as one of the reasons why China ultimately will prevail here in the economic aspect of what is going on. China's moved beyond cheap labor to advanced automation. Steve Keen has noted that if global trade stops, China has the internal infrastructure to survive, whereas the West has outsourced its survival.

21:36Piers Morgan:Do you agree with that? Yeah, I mean, if you just look at the past couple months, China's been much more resilient and much more able to adapt to the new economic circumstance than other countries in Southeast Asia, especially the Philippines and Thailand. And Japan is also a lot of stress as well. So it seems like the Chinese government has been preparing for this eventuality for a long, long time. They've been very strategic. They've been very, very long term in their thinking. The issue is that the long term strategic scenario does not favor China because China is still an economy that depends on exports.

22:15And if there are these wars raging around the world, then it's going to be very hard for China to export its manufactured goods to the rest of the world. The second issue is that China consumes a lot of resources. Yes, I do understand that China has renewables, and I do know that China has a lot of inventory and stockpiles, but eventually all this is going to run out. So from a long-term strategic perspective, China is not as well adapted to a change as, say, maybe Russia or the United States.

22:44Piers Morgan:Will what's happened here with Iran, and actually, to a lesser degree, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has also been now, you know, four years in now, and it's becoming a real quagmire. Will what's happened deter China from invading Taiwan, for example? I think that given the current geopolitical outlook and given the fact that this situation in Iran is only going to escalate and this may have ripple effects throughout the world, I think that China is going to be much more cautious in its approach. In fact, we may see that China begins to become much more isolationist over the years. Yeah, I mean, that's what I would certainly be tempted to if I were them.