The machines have taken over.... For many operating in investment management, it can certainly seem that way: factor investing, algorithmic investing, dynamic hedging instruments, risk management derivatives driven by changes in market prices, etc. dominate much of the investment narrative. And now and again these supposedly superior investment approaches get blamed for causing big blow ups. If portfolio insurance led to a wave of computer selling in 1987, then the chaos generated by the models ...
Jul 16, 2019•28 min•Ep. 11
What can we learn from the financial crisis that brought Hitler to power? How did diplomatic deadlock fuel the rise of authoritarianism? Tobias Straumann shares vital insights with 1931: Debt, Crisis, and the Rise of Hitler (Oxford University Press, 2019). Through his fast-paced narrative, Straumann reveals how inflexible treaties created an inescapable debt trap that spawned Nazism. Caught between investor confidence and domestic political pressure, unrealistic agreements left decision makers l...
Jun 27, 2019•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 69
Think running an insurance company or a bank is hard? Try doing it as an African-American woman in the Jim Crow South. Shennette Garrett-Scott's new book, Banking on Freedom: Black Women in U.S. Finance Before the New Deal (Columbia University Press, 2019) tells the fascinating story of just such an endeavor, first the Independent Order of St. Luke, and then the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank, founded in Richmond in 1903. Along the way, she tells the tale of force-of-nature strong women, particular...
Jun 19, 2019•42 min•Ep. 9
In 1647, the French author Étienne Cleirac asserted in his book Les us, et coustumes de la mer that the credit instruments known as bills of exchange had been invented by Jews. In The Promise and Peril of Credit: What a Forgotten Legend about Jews and Finance Tells Us about the Making of European Commercial Society (Princeton University Press, 2019), Francesca Trivellato draws upon the economic, cultural, intellectual, and business history of the period to trace the origin of this myth and what ...
Jun 07, 2019•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 513
If you are reading this, you have probably run into the "Chicago" model at some point or another, in terms of public policy, orthodox modern finance, macro or micro economics, or any other arena where theoretical abstractions about human behavior (generally but not exclusively about or derived from economics) have been turned into specific and often highly rigid and mechanistic policy guidelines. That's the Chicago model. In Where Economics Went Wrong: Chicago's Abandonment of Classical Liberali...
Mar 11, 2019•43 min•Ep. 6
Recent economic crises have made the centrality of debt, and the instability it creates, increasingly apparent. In Beyond Debt: Islamic Experiments in Global Finance (University of Chicago Press, 2018), anthropologist Daromir Rudnyckyj illustrates how the Malaysian state, led by the central bank, is seeking to make the country’s capital Kuala Lumpur the central node of global financial activity conducted in accordance with Islam. Beyond Debt tracks efforts to re-center international finance in a...
Jan 24, 2019•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 103
Think that today's debates about the role of the Federal Reserve Bank, financial regulation, "too big to fail", etc. are new? Think again. Who should control banks, who should regulate banks, what should banks even do--these questions have been debated since the founding of the Republic. Replace CNBC's David Faber with Alexander Hamilton, and Joe Kernan with Thomas Jefferson (or James Madison) and the arguments about banking, moral hazard, and regulation would be largely the same, though the att...
Jan 11, 2019•57 min•Ep. 5
Lumbering late Tsarist Russia and international finance? Is there anything there? The Bolsheviks and finance? How can there be anything there? It turns out that the answer to both questions is yes. In Dr. Hassan Malik's meticulously researched new book, Bankers and Bolsheviks: International Finance and the Russian Revolution (Princeton University Press, 2018), the Tsarist government's relationship to foreign investors, mostly French bondholders, becomes a lens to judge the efficacy of Sergei Wit...
Jan 03, 2019•41 min•Ep. 4
You mean accounting has a history? Yes, it does, and it should matter to you, because the accounting profession, and the audit function that it serves, affects all the companies in your 401(k) program. Remember WorldCom, remember Enron? Every time a large holding of yours writes off the goodwill from a failed acquisition--there are too many examples to recite here--you've just had an accounting moment. In The Big Four: The Curious Past and Perilous Future of the Global Accounting Monopoly (Berre...
Dec 17, 2018•50 min•Ep. 3
Is microfinance the magic bullet that will end global poverty or is it yet another a form of predatory lending to the poor? In her new book Financializing Poverty: Labor and Risk in Indian Microfinance (Stanford University Press, 2018), Sohini Kar brings ethnography to bear on this urgent question. Drawing on fieldwork with a for-profit microfinance institution (MFI) and its intended beneficiaries in the Indian city of Kolkata, the book brings into view the perils of “financial inclusion” for th...
Nov 28, 2018•47 min•Ep. 86
The vast chasm between classical economics and the humanities is widely known and accepted. They are profoundly different disciplines with little to say to one another. Such is the accepted wisdom. Fortunately, Professors Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro, both of Northwestern University, disagree. In their new book, Cents and Sensibility: What Economics Can Learn from the Humanities (Princeton University Press, 2017), they argue that the mathematically rigid world of classical economics actu...
Nov 02, 2018•49 min
Today we spoke with with Dirk H. Ehnts to talk about his new book Modern Monetary Theory and European Macroeconomics (Routledge, 2017). This is a very accessible text for those interested in discovering how monetary policy works and those interested in approaching the debate on the challenges of the Euro area. We talked about the notions of endogenous and exogenous money and how central banks and commercial banks contribute to the creation of monetary aggregates. We discussed the difficulties of...
Oct 23, 2018•56 min
In his engaging and original book The Wisdom of Finance: Discovering Humanity in the World of Risk and Return (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), Harvard Professor Mihir A. Desai takes on the daunting task of explaining the world of finance through the prism of the humanities, yes the humanities. Using stories from literature, film, music, popular culture and daily life, Desai argues that rather than being an impenetrable jumble of algorithms used to strip the innocent of their money, the core co...
Sep 24, 2018•53 min
Of what use is history, particularly for economists and people in finance? If you’ve ever wondered about this, you should read Daniel Peris‘s book Getting Back to Business: Why Modern Portfolio Theory Fails Investors and How You Can Bring Common Sense to Your Portfolio (McGraw-Hill Education, 2018). Before he became a portfolio manager, Peris was a professional historian. He was trained as such, wrote books about such, and taught such. In Getting Back to Business, he brings his background in thi...
Aug 15, 2018•1 hr 9 min
We spoke with Ilene Grabel, Professor at the University of Denver and Co-director of the MA program in Global Finance, Trade & Economic Integration at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies. Ilene just published a very timely, interesting and important book on the evolution of the global financial governance and its institutions: When Things Don’t Fall Apart: Global Financial Governance and Developmental Finance in an Age of Productive Incoherence (MIT Press, 2017). In the foreword, Da...
Aug 07, 2018•54 min
I was joined in Oxford by Ben Clift, Professor of Political Economy, Deputy Head of Department and Director of Research at the Department of Politics and International Studies of the University of Warwick. Ben has just published a very important, timely and interesting book on the IMF: The IMF and the Politics of Austerity in the Wake of the Global Financial Crisis by Ben Clift (Oxford University Press, 2018). The book provides the first comprehensive analysis of major shifts in IMF fiscal polic...
Jun 15, 2018•46 min
In Austrian Reconstruction and the Collapse of Global Finance, 1921–1931 (Harvard University Press, 2018), Nathan Marcus, analyzes the events that took place around the financial crisis in Austria after World War I. When Austria was the first interwar country in Europe to suffer a hyperinflation the League of Nations stepped in to offer financial support and advice. But a total collapse of the financial system in 1931 couldn’t be avoided. Nathan Marcus offers a new perspective on the already wel...
May 08, 2018•58 min
Michael Sandel is Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government at Harvard University. Sandel is an internationally renowned political philosopher who Newsweek has lauded as “the world’s most relevant living philosopher.” His latest project is a video series titled What Money Can’t Buy, which has Michael and an international group of college students exploring the question “What, if anything, is wrong with a world in which everything is for sale?” You can view the series for free at whatmon...
Apr 26, 2018•31 min•Season 1Ep. 27
Tommie Shelby is Caldwell Titcomb Professor of African and African-American Studies, and Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. His research focuses on political equality and problems of economic, social, and criminal justice. His most recent book is Dark Ghettos: Injustice, Dissent, and Reform, which is published by Harvard University Press. The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Humility and Conviction in Publi...
Nov 30, 2017•33 min•Season 1Ep. 17
I was joined by Pasquale Tridico, Professor of Political Economy at Roma Tre University in Italy. His latest book, Inequality in Financial Capitalism, was published by Routledge in 2017. The issue of inequality has regained attention in the economic and political debate. This is due to both an increase in income inequality, in particular among rich countries but not only, and an increasing interest in this topic by researchers, policy makers and political movements. In this book, the author pres...
Nov 29, 2017•44 min
In the decades following the end of the Second World War, the British economy evolved from a manufacturing-based economy to one driven by service industries, most notably finance. As Aled Davies explains in his book The City of London and Social Democracy: The Political Economy of Finance in Post-war Britain (Oxford University Press, 2017), this shift posed a challenge to the prevailing concept of social democracy in Britain, one to which politicians, particularly those on the left, struggled to...
Sep 12, 2017•49 min
Almost 10 years after the great financial crisis, how has the finance industry regained its preeminent social position? In Trust, Power and Public Relations in Financial Markets (Routledge, 2017) Clea Bourne, a Lecturer in PR, Advertising and Marketing at Goldsmiths, University of London, explores the relationship between PR and different types of trust in finance. The book offers a nuanced understanding of trust, looking at both transparency and obfuscation for states, banks, stock markets and ...
May 02, 2017•50 min
Accounts of late-nineteenth-century US expansionism commonly refer to an open-door empire and an imperialism spurred by belief in free trade. In his new book The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade: The Anglo-American Struggle over Empire and Economic Globalization, 1846-1896 (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Marc-William Palen challenges this commonplace. Instead, he notes, American adherents to Richard Cobden’s free-trade philosophy faced off against and ultimately lost to a powerful version of prote...
Aug 30, 2016•42 min
Lawrence Jacobs and Desmond King are the authors of Fed Power: How Finance Wins (Oxford UP, 2016). Jacobs is the Walter F. and Joan Mondale Chair for Political Studies and Director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Government in the Hubert H. Humphrey School and the Department of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. King is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of American Government at the University of Oxford and Professorial Fellow, Nuffield College, Oxford. Lawrence Jacobs an...
Apr 27, 2016•23 min
What stories do we tell about finance? How does financial print culture shape our lives? Our guest today explores the narratives we have been told, and tell, about finance. A literary scholar, Leigh Claire La Berge writes about the representations of finance in years after 1979 and how many of the stories we tell about finance–that it is abstract and exceedingly complicated–took hold in this era. Leigh Claire La Berge is Assistant Professor of English in the Department of English at Borough of M...
Jan 27, 2016•50 min
Brett Scott is the author of The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money (Pluto Press, 2013). Scott is a journalist, urban deep ecologist, and Fellow at the Finance Innovation Lab. While much of Scott’s book focuses on explaining various aspects of the financial services section, the heart of the book is a call to action. Scott infuses this call with a variety of first-hand experiences as a campaigner for radical approaches to disrupt the sector. For this reason, the book ...
May 19, 2014•29 min
When you buy a stock, you’re buying a piece of a company. The funny thing is that most people who own stocks either don’t know that or, if they do, don’t act like owners. They could care less about the business itself. They don’t care whether it turns a profit, how big that profit is, or whether they are going to get a cut of the profit. All they care about is the stock price: up = good; down = bad. According to portfolio manager Daniel Peris, this narrow-minded focus on stock price is a real pr...
Jul 26, 2013•1 hr 9 min
[Re-posted with permission from Jenny Attiyeh’s ThoughtCast] Simon Johnson, the Professor of Entrepreneurship at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, is an outspoken critic of the US government response to the financial crisis. Now he takes on the “too big to fail” banks which continue to threaten our economy. In his latest book, called 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown (Pantheon, 2010), which he co-wr...
Sep 23, 2011•4 min
