Can we make the finance industry fair? In Highly Discriminating: Why the City Isn’t Fair and Diversity Doesn’t Work (Bristol UP, 2022), Louise Ashley, Associate Professor and IHSS Fellow at Queen Mary University of London’s School of Business and Management, explores the history and practice of social mobility into one of Britain’s key professions. The book offers a history of the City and its evolution from a closed world of gentlemen to a seemingly open meritocracy. At the same time, the book ...
Nov 17, 2022•41 min•Ep. 332
Using previously unexplored and meticulously analyzed sources from China and to a lesser extent Japan, combined with those of Germany and the UK, Ghassan Moazzin provides a refreshing look at a number of levels: the workings of multinational banks, international networks of bankers, the interactions of Chinese and German empires with other state actors. In Foreign Banks and Global Finance in Modern China: Banking on the Chinese Frontier, 1870-1919 (Cambridge UP, 2022), Moazzin introduces the nov...
Nov 07, 2022•41 min•Ep. 50
A comprehensive and illuminating account of the history of credit in America, The Economy of Promises: Trust, Power & Credit in America (Princeton UP, 2022) by Northwestern University Professor Bruce Carruthers is a far-reaching study of credit in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. Synthesizing and surveying economic and social history, Bruce Carruthers examines how issues of trust stitched together the modern U.S. economy. In the case of credit, that trust involves a commitment by debto...
Nov 02, 2022•42 min•Ep. 43
How can you hide and spend billions of dollars? Many people hoping to do that go to London which is today considered the money laundering capital of the world. It’s the place where the world’s most corrupt individuals can park their money safely. How does that work? Where else does it happen and can anything be done about it? Owen Bennett Jones discusses the business of cleaning up dirty money with a journalist and author who has covered kleptocrats and their ill gotten gains for years, Oliver B...
Nov 01, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 37
It is easy to condemn obvious wrongdoers such as Elizabeth Holmes, Adam Neumann, Harvey Weinstein, and the Sackler family. But we rarely think about the many people who supported their unethical or criminal behavior. In each case there was a supporting cast of complicitors: business partners, employees, investors, news organizations, and others. And, whether we're aware of it or not, almost all of us have been complicit in the unethical behavior of others. In Complicit: How We Enable the Unethic...
Nov 01, 2022•27 min•Ep. 50
Dr. Ashley Sweetman works in cyber security for a London-based global bank and holds a PhD from the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. While studying for his PhD he spent a short time as Researcher-in-Residence at No. 10 Downing Street while working for The Strand Group in the Policy Institute at King's. Before this, Ashley studied History at Queen Mary, University of London. Ashley is a proud Welshman and was brought up in Neath, South Wales. He currently lives in North London....
Nov 01, 2022•51 min•Ep. 48
In this podcast Jakob Feinig introduces his ideas about how and when people's practices and institutions shape money and money creation. He provided deep insight into historical episodes to support his view. Towards the end, he comments on the challenges of digital currencies. Feinig is the author of Moral Economies of Money: Politics and the Monetary Constitution of Society (Stanford UP, 2022). Ideas discussed in the podcast that you might want to pursue further or clarify: Chartalism and Moder...
Oct 17, 2022•43 min•Ep. 45
In 2015, the anonymous leak of the Panama Papers brought to light millions of financial and legal documents exposing how the superrich hide their money using complex webs of offshore vehicles. Spiderweb Capitalism: How Global Elites Exploit Frontier Markets (Princeton UP, 2022) takes you inside this shadow economy, uncovering the mechanics behind the invisible, mundane networks of lawyers, accountants, company secretaries, and fixers who facilitate the illicit movement of wealth across borders a...
Oct 17, 2022•42 min•Ep. 49
Edward Chancellor's just published history of interest rates could not be better timed. As the world adjusts to rising rates after decades of falling ones, Chancellor's historical and sometimes polemical account of rates kept too low for too long seems all too prescient. Chancellor's The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2022) is a surprisingly relevant and accessible tool, not only investors but also everyone touched by interest rates. That's all of us. Daniel P...
Oct 06, 2022•47 min•Ep. 42
Today power is in the hands of Wall Street and Silicon Valley. How do we understand this transformation in power? And what can we do about it? We cannot change anything until we have a better understanding of how power works, who holds it, and why that matters. Through upgrading the concept of hegemony—understanding the importance of passive consent; the complexity of political interests; and the structural force of technology—Jeremy Gilbert and Alex Williams offer us an updated theory of power ...
Sep 29, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 319
Think economics is the "dismal science" with abstract formulas that have no impact on life as it is actually lived? Think again. In The Economists' Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society (Little Brown, 2019), Binyamin Appelbaum--former correspondent and now an editorial board member of the New York Times--brings to life how academic economists rose "from the basement" of banks and universities in the post-war period to have a direct impact on almost every aspect of our l...
Sep 22, 2022•41 min•Ep. 17
The Meddlers: Sovereignty, Empire, and the Birth of Global Economic Governance (Harvard University Press, 2022) presents a pioneering history that traces the origins of global economic governance—and the political conflicts it generates—to the aftermath of World War I. International economic institutions like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank exert incredible influence over the domestic policies of many states. These institutions date from the end of World War II and amassed power d...
Sep 21, 2022•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 61
According to A Problem of Fit: How the Complexity of College Pricing Hurts Students—and Universities (U Chicago Press, 2022) a college education doesn't come with a sticker price and perhaps, he argues, it should. Millions of Americans miss out on the economic benefits of a college education because of concerns around the costs. Financial aid systems offer limited help and produce uneven distributions. In the United States today, the systems meant to improve access to education have in fact adde...
Sep 06, 2022•50 min•Ep. 179
From one of the world's leading economists, a grand narrative of the century that made us richer than ever, yet left us unsatisfied Before 1870, humanity lived in dire poverty, with a slow crawl of invention offset by a growing population. Then came a great shift: invention sprinted forward, doubling our technological capabilities each generation and utterly transforming the economy again and again. Our ancestors would have presumed we would have used such powers to build utopia. But it was not ...
Sep 05, 2022•1 hr•Ep. 39
Kyle Hauptman (National Credit Union Administration Vice Chairman) speaks on his beginnings working in finance, as an economic policy advisor on the Mitt Romney Presidential campaign as well as in Congress before becoming Vice Chairman of the NCUA, one of the top U.S. financial regulators overseeing approximately 5,000 credit unions which count over 140 million members. Topics ranging from the history of credit unions, deposit insurance and financial regulation, along with how financial regulato...
Aug 31, 2022•28 min•Ep. 4
Incomes are stagnating, middle-class jobs are disappearing, economic growth is slowing, and the meager gains are mostly going to those who are already wealthy. More Americans than ever are frustrated by the direction in which we are headed. Understandable Economics: Because Understanding Our Economy Is Easier Than You Think and More Important Than You Know (Prometheus, 2022) aims to replace this frustration with a practical understanding of our economy and empower readers to identify and advocat...
Aug 31, 2022•57 min•Ep. 116
In this podcast, Amy Edwards, author of Are We Rich Yet?: The Rise of Mass Investment Culture in Contemporary Britain (U California Press, 2022), provides a fascinating journey into her own research and how she built a picture of a key moment of the 20th century. As a result, she brings together different strands of work such as cultural, business, economic and financial history. The book and podcast will be of interest to anyone old enough to remember the 1980s or whose current life has been sh...
Aug 31, 2022•56 min•Ep. 41
As global governments and regulators set an agenda for net zero carbon emissions, the focus on Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) criteria among investors, from pension scheme members to institutions, is on the rise. The ESG Investing Handbook: Insights and Developments in Environmental, Social and Governance Investment (Harriman House, 2022) is an indispensable guide to the history, developments and latest thinking into the future of ESG investing from some of the most influential names...
Aug 25, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 41
In Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets (Harper Business, 2022), Brett Scott tells an urgent and revelatory story about how the fusion of Big Finance and Big Tech requires “cloudmoney”—digital money underpinned by the banking sector—to replace physical cash. He dives beneath the surface of the global financial system to uncover a long-established lobbying infrastructure: an alliance of partners waging a covert war on cash. He explains the technical, political, and cultura...
Aug 24, 2022•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 115
Concentrated market power and the weakened sway of corporate stakeholders over management have emerged as leading concerns of American political economy. In his book Robbing Peter to Pay Paul: Power, Profits, and Productivity in Modern America (Yale UP, 2021), economic historian Samuel Milner provides a context for contemporary efforts to resolve these anxieties by examining the contest to control the distribution of corporate income during the mid‑twentieth century. During this “Golden Age of A...
Aug 17, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 38
The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution is Transforming Currencies and Finance (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2021) provides a cutting-edge look at how accelerating financial change, from the end of cash to the rise of cryptocurrencies, will transform economies for better and worse. We think we have seen financial innovation. We bank from laptops and buy coffee with the wave of a phone. But these are minor miracles compared with the dizzying experiments now underway arou...
Aug 16, 2022•40 min•Ep. 114
Providing your children with a good education is one of the best gifts you can give. But it’s not straightforward. Education costs and student loan debt are skyrocketing. In some cases, college costs upwards of $300,000 for four years. And calculations for financial aid and merit awards are complex and opaque. How do you find the best education options that fit your budget and are right for your child? And how do you save for your kids’ college without wrecking your own retirement, or putting yo...
Aug 10, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 40
How foreign lending weakens emerging nations In the nineteenth century, many developing countries turned to the credit houses of Europe for sovereign loans to balance their books and weather major fiscal shocks such as war. This reliance on external public finance offered emerging nations endless opportunities to overcome barriers to growth, but it also enabled rulers to bypass critical stages in institution building and political development. Pawned States: State Building in the Era of Internat...
Jul 28, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 37
Graduate students and newly-minted economists often find that while their time in graduate school taught them a lot about great research of the past and the methods needed to do their own research, they didn't learn that much about the other aspects of the job. How do you submit a paper to a journal? How do you respond to reviewer comments? How do you write referee reports for other people? How do you present you findings in clear and compelling way, whether in a paper or in a talk? Academic adv...
Jul 21, 2022•46 min•Ep. 111
In this searing and insightful critique, Adrienne Buller examines the fatal biases that have shaped the response of our governing institutions to climate and environmental breakdown, and asks: are the 'solutions' being proposed really solutions? Tracing the intricate connections between financial power, economic injustice and ecological crisis, she exposes the myopic economism and market-centric thinking presently undermining a future where all life can flourish. The Value of a Whale: On the Ill...
Jul 05, 2022•49 min•Ep. 70
Michael Pettis is Professor of Finance at Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management. He started his career in banking in 1987 just in time for the tidal wave of emerging market defaults and the birth of the Brady Bond restructurings. He has been a trader, investment banker, and advisor to countries on capital markets strategies all while teaching at Columbia University. Professor Pettis has authored four books (the most recently Trade Wars Are Class Wars (Yale University Press, 2021) wit...
Jun 28, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 39
Most humans are significantly richer than their ancestors. Humanity gained nearly all of its wealth in the last two centuries. How did this come to pass? In How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth (Polity, 2022), Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin dive into the many theories of why modern economic growth happened when and where it did. They discuss recently-advanced theories rooted in geography, politics, culture, demography, and colonialism. Pieces of each of these theorie...
Jun 09, 2022•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 33
Cannabis "legalization" hasn't lived up to the hype. Across North America, investors are reeling, tax collections are below projections, and people are pointing fingers. On the business side, companies have shut down, farms have failed, workers have lost their jobs, and consumers face high prices. Why has legal weed failed to deliver on many of its promises? Can Legal Weed Win?: The Blunt Realities of Cannabis Economics (U California Press, 2022) takes on the euphoric claims with straight dope a...
Jun 07, 2022•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 104
Elite colleges have long played a crucial role in maintaining social and class status in America while public universities have offered a major stepping-stone to new economic opportunities. However, as Charlie Eaton reveals in Bankers in the Ivory Tower: The Troubling Rise of Financiers in US Higher Education (U Chicago Press, 2022), finance has played a central role in the widening inequality in recent decades, both in American higher education and in American society at large. With federal and...
May 31, 2022•56 min•Ep. 167
Pierre Penet and Juan Flores Zendejas' book Sovereign Debt Diplomacies: Rethinking Sovereign Debt from Colonial Empires to Hegemony (Oxford UP. 2021) aims to revisit the meaning of sovereign debt in relation to colonial history and postcolonial developments. It offers three main contributions. The first contribution is historical. The volume historicizes a research field that has so far focused primarily on the post-1980 years. A focus on colonial debt from the 19th century building of colonial ...
May 31, 2022•1 hr•Ep. 32
