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FT Alphachat

Financial Timesftalphaville.ft.com
Alphachat is the conversational podcast about business and economics produced by the Financial Times in New York. Each week, FT hosts and guests delve into a new theme, with more wonkiness, humour and irreverence than you'll find anywhere else

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Episodes

Angela Nagle on the online culture wars

Angela Nagle, author of Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right, talks to FT Alphaville's Jemima Kelly about the online culture wars and the rise of the alt-right. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jun 28, 201937 min

Nouriel Roubini on the US-China Thucydides Trap

A number of geopolitical and financial risks are stalking the global economy, pointing to a possible recession in 2020. According to Nouriel Roubini, what is key among these risks is the US-China trade war and general protectionism in the global market. Izabella Kaminska talks to the economist and New York University Stern School of Business professor. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jun 21, 201942 min

Jay Shambaugh on the tools to fight the next recession

The economist and Brookings Institution senior fellow talks to FT contributor Megan Greene about the fiscal policies that lawmakers could arrange now that would automatically kick in when some of the early signs of a slowdown start to appear. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jun 14, 201941 min

Joel Mokyr and the curse of Adam

Man must work. But how man works matters. Brendan Greeley sat down with Joel Mokyr, an economist and economic historian at Northwestern University, at an event on the future of work at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. Policymakers tend to focus on the binary question of a job — do people have one, or not. But the quality of that work, the questions of meaning and satisfaction, are important to people, in a way that has political consequences. They wandered all the way back to Adam Smith, and ...

Jun 07, 201949 min

Will Davies on populism, data and experts

The political economist sits down with Alphaville's Jamie Powell and Thomas Hale to discuss how we should think about expertise in a post-truth world. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

May 31, 201943 min

Robert Kaplan on jobs, oil and credit

The president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas sits down with Brendan Greeley to discuss what a tight labour market could mean for retraining workers, what fracking has done to the price of oil and why he prefers to keep an eye on credit spreads instead of equity markets. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

May 24, 201950 min

Ajay Royan searches for the next growth frontier

What if the vast majority of the high-growth tech unicorns emerging from Silicon Valley are not really technology or innovation companies? What if they are highly politicised, zero-sum enterprises? That's what Ajay Royan, the Indian-born Canadian who co-founded Mithral Capital, along with Peter Thiel, thinks might be the problem at the heart of the Silicon Valley investment proposition. Izabella Kaminska asks him how his fund is trying to differentiate itself from that model by focusing on unlev...

May 17, 201946 min

Banking culture since the crisis

How has banking culture changed since the global financial crisis and what areas still need work? Brendan Greeley talks with three economics experts who posed that question in a recent report put out by the Group of Thirty consultants. He is joined by Elizabeth St-Onge of Oliver Wyman, Nicholas Le Pan, former superintendent of financial institutions for Canada, and Stuart Mackintosh, executive director of the Group of Thirty. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....

May 10, 201942 min

Kimberly Clausing makes the case for open economies

Economist Kimberly Clausing tells Brendan Greeley and Mark Blyth why greater trade, capital flows and immigration are the solution to more equitably dividing the economic pie. It's the subject of her book, "Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital". Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

May 03, 201945 min

Alphachat Live! Raghuram Rajan and Ashley Putnam on community

Until recently, economists have ignored the idea that communities matter for economic outcomes, leaving those questions to sociologists. But there is too much evidence to ignore: where you live has a profound influence on how you turn out. In a live conversation recorded at Penn Social, a bar in Washington DC, Raghuram Rajan, former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund and Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, talks about his new book, "The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State ...

Apr 26, 201937 min

The IMF's Tobias Adrian on stability

Tobias Adrian, formerly of the New York Fed, runs the Monetary and Capital Markets Department at the International Monetary Fund. Brendan and Colby sat down with him after publication of the IMF's Global Financial Stability Report. They talked about collateralised loan obligations, of course, but also about China and how the US faces risks just like any other country when hot capital flows in. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....

Apr 19, 201929 min

Bonus: IMF's Vitor Gaspar on debt

On the occasion of the release of the International Monetary Fund's Fiscal Monitor, Brendan talked to Vitor Gaspar, who runs the fund's Fiscal Affairs Department. Mr Gaspar, formerly of the Banco de Portugal, the European Commission and the European Central Bank, drew a distinction between "good" and "bad" spending. He also argued that a "competitive" economy isn't just an economy that pays low wages, and threaded a fine needle on whether Europe needs more infrastructure investment. And he respo...

Apr 18, 201923 min

Odette Lienau on the most complicated debt restructuring in history

Law professor Odette Lienau joins Colby and Brendan on the sidelines of the IMF spring meetings in Washington, DC to discuss the sovereign debt crises in Venezuela, Argentina and Mozambique. They also discuss why vulture funds could do some good. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Apr 12, 201934 min

Yanis Varoufakis: "Democracy is a very fragile flower"

Alphaville's Jemima Kelly and Izabella Kaminska sat down with Yanis Varoufakis, former finance minister of Greece and current organiser of a trans-European group of what he calls "radical Europeanists" — in favor of union, without deflation or austerity. Mr Varoufakis answers criticism from the left, pointing out that even if the euro or the EU were poorly conceived, leaving them now would have catastrophic consequences for the poor. He gives a brief history of economic thought, connecting Josep...

Apr 05, 201941 min

Brexit: Too late now to get the milk out of the tea

No matter what the British Parliament decides, for almost three years the UK, Ireland and the EU have been dealing with the reality of the Leave vote. Positions have hardened, investments have been foregone, and all the countries involved have become different places, in ways that cannot be undone. Brendan Greeley of FT Alphaville and Mark Blyth of the Rhodes Center at Brown discuss consequences with Stephen Kinsella, economist at the University of Limerick and Megan Greene, chief economist at M...

Mar 29, 201942 min

Immigration: comparing this wave to the last

Leah Boustan of Princeton and Maggie Peters of UCLA look at the wave of migrants to the US from Central America and compare it to the last great wave, from Europe in the late 19th century. Some things are the same: immigrant families are adopting "American" names at the same rates as before, for example. Some things are different: the speed of communication and container shipping mean that American companies prefer to get cheap labour through outsourcing, and won't lobby for increased immigratio...

Mar 22, 201942 min

Andrew Keen on the internet: misery is not the answer

Andrew Keen, author of Cult of the Amateur and more recently How to Fix the Future , sits down with FT Alphaville's Izabella Kaminska. They both tell the history of their own disenchantment with the internet, and discuss why the Elon Musk story has turned into a Shakespearean tragedy, while Jeff Bezos is more of a Bond villain. "When you do away with gatekeepers you get anarchy," says Mr Keen, but dystopian misery isn't the answer, either. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more informat...

Mar 15, 201941 min

Waltraud Schelkle and Ashoka Mody: Is the eurozone fixable?

Forget Brexit. Growth in the eurozone is slowing down, but not equally for all countries. Which leaves the continent with the same question it's had for a decade: is it capable of making policy flexible enough for all of its economies? Waltraud Schelkle of the London School of Economics argues that Europe's currencies always swung with the deutschmark, so the European Central Bank offers some level of control. Ashoka Mody of Princeton says the euro will never be flexible enough to let countries ...

Mar 08, 201940 min

What China wants: Brad Setser, and Freya Beamish

Even if the trade talks are settled, long-term friction will remain between China and the United States. China has an industrial policy which will see it strive to make more advanced products, such as aircraft and medical devices. The US wants to keep selling these kinds of high-value manufactured goods to China. It remains a fundamental issue for the two world economic powers. FT Alphaville's Brendan Greeley speaks first with Brad Stetser, the former US Treasury economist and China watcher, and...

Mar 01, 201945 min

Germany's China shock

Answering the question of whether Germany's export-driven model will ever change, and whether Germany's obsession with saving and budget surpluses will ever change. And how to say "Groundhog Day" in German. Wade Jacoby of Brigham Young University and Megan Greene of Manulife Investments join FTAlphaville's Brendan Greeley and Mark Blyth from the Rhodes Center. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Feb 22, 201938 min

Peter Norton on the history of paying for big projects

The United States may not have an infrastructure crisis. It may in fact have too much infrastructure. And what does that word "infrastructure" even mean, anyway? We talk about the history internal improvements, public works, and the power of a group that called itself The League of American Wheelmen. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Feb 15, 201937 min

Climate change is not a business cycle

Armon Rezai of the Vienna University of Economics and Business and Lint Barrage of Brown University talk to Colby and Mark about how climate change will affect home values and retirement portfolios — you know, middle-class wealth. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Feb 08, 201935 min

Adam Tooze on Davos, econ 101 and the unexpected importance of China in the global economy

Adam Tooze, economic historian and author of Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World , joins the FT’s Brendan Greeley and Brown University’s Mark Blyth to discuss how our politics got us to where we are today, why our ideas about how the economy works may not be fit for purpose, and the key role that China played during the Great Recession and continues to play today. They also discuss the central importance of global capital flows for understanding our world and why global l...

Feb 01, 201950 min

The history of what we now call opportunity zones

The 2017 tax cut in the US included a provision that would forgive capital gains taxes, if invested for ten years in an "opportunity zone" — a low-income area designated by a state governor. But the idea of encouraging investments in poor and mostly black areas has a long history. We talk to Mehrsa Baradaran, a law professor at the University of Georgia and Andrew Schrank, a sociologist at Brown University. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....

Jan 25, 201936 min

Olivier Blanchard on debt: “Relax. Don’t relax too much, but relax”

Author of the standard textbook on macroeconomics, former head of research for the International Monetary Fund, currently at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, Olivier Blanchard works in the place where economists and politicians attempt to talk to each other. He talked to us about how the financial crisis changed his thinking on models, why state debt isn’t always and everywhere a bad thing and why the best forecasts in the future might come from artificial intelligence. Hosted...

Jan 18, 201931 min

Adam Posen on central banks, China and the enduring power of the dollar

The economist and president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics joins FT Alphaville’s Colby Smith and Brown University’s Mark Blyth to discuss the politicking of central banking, the hurdles to finding a US-China trade war resolution and how China can manage the financial risks building in its economy. They also touch on the enduring power of the dollar and US markets. Colby Smith is a writer for FT Alphaville and Mark Blyth is the director of the William Rhodes Center for Inte...

Jan 11, 201935 min

Robert Shiller: market narratives are 'like diseases'

A bonus episode from the annual meeting of the American Economic Association in Atlanta this past weekend. Brendan Greeley caught up with Yale economist and Nobel laureate Robert Shiller, who argues that if you want to understand markets you have to understand stories — how they start and how they spread. They talked about the stories driving share prices down in December, about Jim Cramer and about the narrative power of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com...

Jan 08, 201922 min

What exactly is 'slack'?

Economists like to talk about the "slack" in the labour market. But how can we measure it, and what does it mean? The FT's Brendan Greeley hosts with guests Megan Greene, chief economist at Manulife Asset Management, Ioana Marinescu, economist and professor at the University of Pennsylvania and Mark Blyth, director of the William Rhodes Center for International Economics and Finance at the Watson Institute at Brown University. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....

Jan 05, 201936 min

Mariana Mazzucato on who creates value

The economist and University College London professor joins Alphaville's Jemima Kelly to discuss the question of value: who creates it and who makes use of it. She also lays out her argument for a rethinking of the relationship between markets and governments. It's the subject of her recent book, The value of everything: making and taking in the global economy . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dec 21, 201836 min

The math wizard who became a customer loyalty scheme guru

Economist Gary Loveman was teaching at Harvard Business School when he went to consult for the Harrah's casino chain in Las Vegas in the late 1990s. Despite knowing nothing about gambling, his insights on customer loyalty earned him a promotion to the chief executive job at the casino group. He took a company that traded at $14 a share and a decade later sold it to private equity for $90 a share. Gary Loveman talks to the FT's Sujeet Indap about how data science is helping executives draw in cus...

Dec 14, 201849 min
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