Jeffrey Hooke 's The Myth of Private Equity: An Inside Look at Wall Street's Transformative Investments (Columbia Business School, 2021) is a scathing indictment of the high-flying world of private equity. Piece by piece, Hooke takes apart the PE value proposition and shows, instead of the claimed "higher returns and lower volatility", a startling record of poor performance, exorbitant fees, completely opaque reporting, and a network of enablers that allow the business model to proceed. Daniel P...
Oct 13, 2021•37 min•Ep. 34
Neoclassical economic theory shows that under the right conditions, prices alone can guide markets to efficient outcomes. But what if it it’s hard to find the right price? In many important markets, a buyer’s willingness to pay for one good (say, the right to use a certain part of the radio spectrum range in San Francisco) will depend on the price of another complementary good (the right to use that same spectrum in Los Angeles). The number of possible combinations can rapidly become incalculabl...
Oct 06, 2021•45 min•Ep. 80
In Who Gets What — and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design (Mariner Books, 2015), Nobel Memorial Prize Winner Alvin Roth explains his pioneering work in the study of matching markets such as kidney exchange, marriage, job placements for new doctors and new professors, and enrollments in schools or colleges. In these markets, “buyers” and “sellers” must each chose the other, and getting the prices right is only a small part of what makes for a successful transaction, if cash i...
Oct 05, 2021•59 min•Ep. 79
How can ideas from sociology help us understand history and economics? In Trade and Nation: How Companies and Politics Reshaped Economic Thought (Columbia UP, 2021), Emily Erikson , Associate Professor of Sociology at Yale and Academic Director of the Fox International Fellowship , explores the major shift, which occurred during the seventeenth century, in the history and philosophy of economics. The book combines computational methods from sociology with a detailed and close engagement with his...
Sep 15, 2021•38 min•Ep. 242
Few revolutions in economics have been as under-covered in general literature as the emergence and development of competition theory and policymaking. Political threats to break up the tech giants or restrain Russian gas pipelines make the headlines while academic lawyers churn out textbooks on 130 years of precedent and practicing lawyers test its limits. What has been missing is an up-to-date, general legislative and intellectual history of how and why politicians, lawyers, and economists in c...
Sep 07, 2021•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 78
Moving Beyond Modern Portfolio Theory: Investing that Matters (Routledge, 2021) tells the story of how Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT) revolutionized the investing world and the real economy, but is now showing its age. MPT has no mechanism to understand its impacts on the environmental, social and financial systems, nor any tools for investors to mitigate the havoc that systemic risks can wreck on their portfolios. It's time for MPT to evolve. The authors, Jon Lukomnik and James Hawley , propose ...
Sep 03, 2021•39 min•Ep. 33
In the late nineteenth century, as much of the world adopted some variant of the gold standard, China remained the most populous country still using silver. Yet China had no unified national currency; there was not one monetary standard but many. Silver coins circulated alongside chunks of silver and every transaction became an "encounter of wits." China and the End of Global Silver, 1873–1937 (Cornell UP, 2020) focuses on how officials, policy makers, bankers, merchants, academics, and journali...
Sep 01, 2021•1 hr 22 min•Ep. 12
Do you trust corporations? Do you trust politicians? Do you trust the science? Does anyone trust anyone anymore? In Why Trust Matters: An Economist's Guide to the Ties That Bind Us (Columbia UP, 2021), Professor Ben Ho reveals the surprising importance of trust to how we understand our day-to-day economic lives. Starting with the earliest societies and proceeding through the evolution of the modern economy, he explores its role across an astonishing range of institutions and practices, surveying...
Aug 26, 2021•57 min•Ep. 76
Statistical graphing was born in the seventeenth century as a scientific tool, but it quickly escaped all disciplinary bounds. Today graphics are ubiquitous in daily life. In their just-published A History of Data Visualization and Graphic Communication (Harvard UP, 2021), Michael Friendly and Howard Wainer detail the history of graphs and tables, how they help solve problems, and even changed the way we think. You'll never look at an excel chart the same way again.... Daniel Peris is Senior Vic...
Aug 23, 2021•56 min•Ep. 117
Is there an ideal portfolio of investment assets, one that perfectly balances risk and reward? In Pursuit of the Perfect Portfolio (Princeton UP, 2021) examines this question by profiling and interviewing ten of the most prominent figures in the finance world—Jack Bogle, Charley Ellis, Gene Fama, Marty Leibowitz, Harry Markowitz, Bob Merton, Myron Scholes, Bill Sharpe, Bob Shiller, and Jeremy Siegel. We learn about the personal and intellectual journeys of these luminaries—which include six Nobe...
Aug 02, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 21
In July 2021, nine summers after its then president saved the euro with three choice words (“whatever it takes”), the European Central Bank published the results of a thoroughgoing review of its strategy. A policy framework built for times when inflation posed a modest upside challenge had coped – but only just – with successive financial, sovereign-debt, banking and health crises that threatened chronically weak inflation at best and deflation at worst. Essential to the review was research cond...
Jul 28, 2021•47 min•Ep. 51
In a world that purports to know more about the future than any before it, why do we still need speculation? Insubstantial speculations – from utopian thinking to high-risk stock gambles – often provoke backlash, even when they prove prophetic. Why does this hypothetical way of thinking generate such controversy? Gayle Rogers, author of Speculation: A Cultural History from Aristotle to AI (Columbia UP, 2021), speaks with Pierre d’Alancaisez about the intellectual history of speculation: from the...
Jul 26, 2021•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 113
Americans rely on credit to provide for their food, clothing, shelter, transportation, and other daily necessities and the 2008 financial crisis demonstrated how they relied on private financial institutions that encouraged risky lending practices. Yet federal policy makers did little to change their approach to curbing risky lending practices and there was little political response from consumers or consumer groups. How can political scientists explain the behavior of government actors, interes...
Jul 19, 2021•58 min•Ep. 537
What can debt reveal to us about coloniality and its undoing? In Colonial Debts: The Case of Puerto Rico (Duke University Press, 2021), Rocío Zambrana theorizes the way debt has been used as a technique of neoliberal coloniality in Puerto Rico, producing profit from death on the island. With close attention to the material practices of protestors who have fought that destruction of life for the purposes of profit, Zambrana argues that decolonization entails political-economic subversion and tran...
Jun 24, 2021•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 255
In 1800 a Belfast linen merchant named Alexander Brown emigrated with his wife and eldest son to Baltimore. Today his family’s name lives on in the investment firm Brown Brothers Harriman, a company that has long played an outsized role in American history. As Zachary Karabell details in his book Inside Money: Brown Brothers Harriman and the American Way of Power (Penguin, 2021), a key factor in its endurance over the country’s long and often tumultuous financial history has been the importance ...
Jun 22, 2021•48 min•Ep. 1013
Why do many startups fail? Tom Eisenmann, Professor of Entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School realised that even he didn’t really know the answer, despite a lifetime teaching entrepreneurship, and decided to write a book to answer exactly that question. You can hear him go into detail on the NBN Entrepreneurship and Leadership Channel interviewed by experienced entrepreneurs Richard Lucas and Kimon Fountoukidis. Whether you want to start a business one day, or just have better conversations...
Jun 08, 2021•1 hr 24 min
In spite of Karl Marx's proclamation that money would become obsolete under Communism, the ruble remained a key feature of Soviet life. In fact, although Western economists typically concluded that money ultimately played a limited role in the Soviet Union, Kristy Ironside argues that money was both more important and more powerful than most histories have recognized. After the Second World War, money was resurrected as an essential tool of Soviet governance. Certainly, its importance was not lo...
Jun 02, 2021•56 min•Ep. 156
A War on Global Poverty: The Lost Promise of Redistribution and the Rise of Microcredit (Princeton UP, 2021) provides a fresh account of US involvement in campaigns to end global poverty in the 1970s and 1980s. From the decline of modernization programs to the rise of microcredit, Joanne Meyerowitz looks beyond familiar histories of development and explains why antipoverty programs increasingly focused on women as the deserving poor. When the United States joined the war on global poverty, econo...
May 27, 2021•27 min•Ep. 108
Can classical economics help figure out climate change and support policies that slow global warming? Yale Sterling Professor of Economics William Nordhaus thinks so. In his new book, The Spirit of Green: The Economics of Collisions and Contagions in a Crowded World (Princeton UP, 2021), Nordhaus tackles the "externality" that is pollution and carbon emissions. By making several adjustments to how we treat this externality in economic terms, it can be brought back into the "system" whereby sensi...
May 24, 2021•27 min•Ep. 32
I spoke with Bobby Lee about his book 'The promise of Bitcoin: The Future of Money and How It Can Work for You' (McGraw-Hill, 2021). Bobby Lee is a very interesting character, among the leading figures in the field of cryptocurrency. He is the founder and CEO of Ballet, a cryptocurrency startup. He is the cofounder of BTCC, the longest-running bitcoin exchange and leading financial platform worldwide. He also serves on the board of the Bitcoin Foundation, a nonprofit organization that has built ...
May 18, 2021•40 min•Ep. 67
The inside story of the world's most famous board game-a buried piece of American history with an epic scandal that continues today. The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World's Favorite Board Game (Bloomsbury, 2015) reveals the unknown story of how Monopoly came into existence, the reinvention of its history by Parker Brothers and multiple media outlets, the lost female originator of the game, and one man's lifelong obsession to tell the true story about the game's quest...
May 17, 2021•54 min•Ep. 984
I spoke with Prof. Tim Jackson about his latest book: Post Growth, Life after Capitalism , published by Polity Books in 2021. The book starts with a reflection on the event of the past few months. The success in 2019 of the school strikes for climate, the attention that Greta Thunberg received even in Davos, and the arrival of the pandemic that changed our priorities. Even the 2009 crisis challenged the degrowth movement when we experienced the consequences of the recession. I have asked how do ...
May 07, 2021•51 min•Ep. 65
For years, American Jewish philanthropy has been celebrated as the proudest product of Jewish endeavors in the United States, its virtues extending from the local to the global, the Jewish to the non-Jewish, and modest donations to vast endowments. Yet, as Lila Corwin Berman illuminates in The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex: The History of a Multibillion-Dollar Institution (Princeton University Press, 2020), the history of American Jewish philanthropy reveals the far more complicated real...
May 05, 2021•54 min•Ep. 219
In The Other Side of the Coin: Public Opinion toward Social Tax Expenditures (Russell Sage Foundation, 2021), political scientists Christopher Ellis and Christopher Faricy examine public opinion towards social tax expenditures—the other side of the American social welfare state—and their potential to expand support for such social investment. Tax expenditures seek to accomplish many of the goals of direct government expenditures, but they distribute money indirectly, through tax refunds or reduc...
May 04, 2021•37 min•Ep. 105
In this podcast Michael Blakey describes how as a strongly dyslexic child his relationship with schooling and formal education was very challenging. He credits his parents with putting him in environments where he developed a lot of resilience - going to boarding schools from the age of seven, and only later in life realising that this was unusual. His early experiences retailing sweets and vodka at school, led to large scale warehouse parties in the US, flipping real estate in London and making...
May 03, 2021•1 hr 29 min•Ep. 62
The emergence of individual and commercial insurance in Early Modern Europe required an understanding of probability. In Probable Justice: Rethinking the Politics of Risk (U Chicago Press, 2020), Rachel Friedman highlights the political thinking that developed side by side with the advances in statistical methods. By the 20th century, small scale, group insurance had become national programs with profound political implications. Friedman's work traces how what she calls probabilistic social insu...
Apr 20, 2021•42 min•Ep. 31
Following the 2008 financial crisis, the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy placed much greater focus on stabilizing the market than on helping struggling Americans. As a result, the richest Americans got a lot richer while the middle class shrank and economic and wealth inequality skyrocketed. In Engine of Inequality, Karen Petrou offers pragmatic solutions for creating more inclusive monetary policy and equality-enhancing financial regulation as quickly and painlessly as possible. Instead of pr...
Apr 13, 2021•34 min•Ep. 102
Mungo Keulemans talks about growing up in South Africa, working in the family business, his army experiences, his move to Europe, Japan and back to Europe. We hear about his entrepreneurial journey in the family business in Poland, and after its sale to one of the world’s leading companies, his time in the larger corporation and his return to entrepreneurial life leading to his investment and CEO role at PMR. The NBN Entrepreneurship and Leadership podcast aims to educate and entertain, sharing ...
Apr 12, 2021•1 hr 32 min•Ep. 59
Today I talked to Pedro Gustavo Teixeira about his new book The Legal History of the European Banking Union: How European Law Led to the Supranational Integration of the Single Financial Market (Hart, 2020) Since 1950, the political and economic integration of Europe has tended to accelerate through functional mini-unions: coal and steel, nuclear power, and – in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic - it could well be healthcare next. The most recent of these mini-federations is the European Bank...
Apr 12, 2021•45 min•Ep. 44
Today I talked to Adam Bryant about his new book (co-authored with Kevin Sharer), The CEO Test: Master the Challenges That Make or Break All Leaders (Harvard Business Press, 2021). Adam Bryant is managing director of Merryck & Co, a leadership development and mentoring firm. Before then, Adam was a journalist for 30 years, including at the New York Times where he authored the “Corner Office” column. He’s a speaker, teacher, and frequent contributor on CNBC. This episode is rooted in the seve...
Apr 08, 2021•35 min•Ep. 49
