Big Picture.

Martin, Paul and John.

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Martin Wolf, the chief economics commentator of the Financial Times, recently sat down with Greg Jensen, co-CIO at Bridgewater Associates, for a podcast discussion about Mr. Wolf’s most recent book, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism.

As part of our arrangement with Bridgewater Associates, I cannot share the entire transcript of the podcast with you, but I can share excerpts. What follows is a question about the future from Mr. Jensen and Mr. Wolf’s answer.

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Greg Jensen

And so if you’re thinking about navigating the future, how do you see it playing out? How do you see all the tensions—the inter-country tensions between the left and the right and the cross-country tensions in the next 5 to 10 years—evolving?

Martin Wolf

Well, this may reflect my age. I wrote about this in the preface of my book, which is probably the best part of my book and very brief. I’m really frightened, is the honest answer. And no one would say I’m a cheerful optimist, but I’m not usually really frightened. And I’m frightened basically for the reasons you’ve laid out. I don’t know at all—obviously, I’m an outsider, but I followed it very, very closely, and I’ve lived in your country for 10 years—I have no sense of where American politics is going to go.

And it appears that, despite what seems a pretty good performance on the face of it in terms of economic output and all the rest of it—except for inflation, which is of course an issue—that this administration is not very popular. The next election will be very close. And as my friends have started to say, the question is whether Mr. Trump will be president or in prison or both. I find this impossible to contemplate. I don’t know how to work out what’s going on here. It also seems to me—this is not really about policy per se, but there are two aspects of where the Republicans are now which are transformative, revolutionary.