Interviews

Professor Steve Keen said people cannot survive an unsustainable capitalist system

The economist who warned of the 2008 crash told Diary of a CEO the Iran war could choke fertilizer through Hormuz and bring famine within months.

Professor Steve Keen said people cannot survive inside an unsustainable economic system. When Steven Bartlett asked on Diary of a CEO how ordinary people should protect themselves, Keen answered that individual fixes only work when the system around them is stable, and what we have now is not.

Keen is the Australian economist who in 2005 warned that rising private debt would trigger a global financial crisis three years before the 2008 crash. He is a visiting scholar at the University of Amsterdam and has spent decades arguing that mainstream models ignore money, debt, and energy. Bartlett brought him on as the U.S.-Israel war with Iran was disrupting the Strait of Hormuz.

Keen said the war threatened everyone on the planet, not only through oil prices. Oil, fertilizer, helium, and sulfuric acid all pass through the 21-kilometer choke point, he said, and Iran could decide which countries' ships move at all. Twenty to thirty percent of global fertilizer flows through the strait, much of it as a byproduct of the same Gulf gas fields that supply about thirty percent of the world's helium.

Cut helium and you cut semiconductors, Keen said. He cited helium analyst Phil Kornbluth's March 2026 warning of a two-to-six-month production shutdown, noting that South Korea sources sixty-five percent of its helium from Qatar and produces two-thirds of the world's memory chips. Without synthetic fertilizer from the Haber-Bosch process, Keen said, the biosphere might support one to two billion people, not eight.

If the war did not end quickly, Keen said, India could run out of fertilizer in two or three months and face famine, with global food output falling ten to twenty-five percent. Wealthy countries were not safe either. Australia keeps about thirty days of oil, he said, and when that ran out farms could not feed cities.

He called President Donald Trump's handling of the conflict a pump-and-dump scheme to drive oil prices up for friends and for himself. Bartlett asked whether Trump would send ground troops. Keen said yes, and put the probability above fifty percent, calling any landing a suicide mission against Iran's thirty-one provincial military commands.

Keen laid out five ways the war might end, from Iran destroying Gulf power infrastructure and making Saudi Arabia and Dubai uninhabitable to Iran disabling Israel's nuclear weapons. He said destroying Iran would require nuclear weapons and would mean "we're all gone."

Independent trade data has begun to match the supply-chain picture Keen described. In analysis published Aug. 4, the International Trade Centre reported that urea exports through Hormuz-dependent economies fell eighty-three percent by volume in April 2026, liquefied natural gas exports dropped ninety-five percent, and combined export volumes across twelve strategic products fell fifty-four percent.

Keen turned to the next crash he sees building. Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Oracle were on track to spend seven hundred twenty billion dollars on AI infrastructure in 2026 alone, he said, against less than twenty percent of their combined revenue, a five-to-one spend ratio he called historically unsustainable. Ninety percent of AI startups were already failing, he said, and he expected a severe contraction within twenty-four months.

Bartlett said he was hiring differently after watching entry-level white-collar recruiting fall, citing Anthropic's report of a thirteen-percent decline in entry-level hiring. Keen said AI could erase half of working-class jobs and framed the fork as Star Trek abundance or Hunger Games oligarchy. He backed universal basic income and said Bitcoin would go to zero because its energy cost would become politically unbearable.

On capitalism itself, Keen said competition had come to rule while cooperation was ignored, pushing investment toward short-term profit instead of infrastructure that lasts a century. He said China's blend of collective and individual focus was closer to what the West needed than America's model, though he stopped short of calling for communism and pointed instead to socialist cooperatives like Cadbury and Mondragon.

Keen closed by saying electing Trump was an enormous mistake and that the system was more fragile than leaders pretended, vulnerable to a Seneca cliff if war or biosphere limits broke assumed robustness. Bartlett surprised him with a birthday cake. Keen, turning seventy-three, said he hoped for peace in the Middle East and added that he was not sure he would see seventy-four.

Source video: Financial Crash Expert: He Predicted The 2008 Crash, Now He Says Capitalism Failed, It’s Too Late!