In recent years, the absolute level of government debt around the world has risen dramatically. The Covid emergency unleashed a huge wave of public-sector spending in 2020 and beyond. Meanwhile, spending remains high for other reasons, including public investment on climate and energy-related issues. So what does that mean for policy going forward? What does it mean for central banks tasked with controlling inflation? University of California at Berkeley economist Barry Eichengreen presented a p...
Aug 29, 2023•38 min
In the global financial system, US Treasuries play a special role. They’re basically as close to cash as a financial asset can get and their yields act as the "risk-free" rate against which all other assets are measured. In other words, the US Treasury market is supposed to be the safest and most liquid in the world. But Treasuries have also been at the center of some pretty big financial events in recent years, including the March 2020 sell-off and the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank this year....
Aug 28, 2023•47 min
On Friday, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell gave his much-anticipated speech at the Kansas City Fed Monetary Policy Symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. While many were expecting some kind of academic or theoretical discussion, the text was straightforwardly about the current path of monetary policy. So what did we learn? What actually happens at Jackson Hole? And how did this year's event fit in with prior years? On this episode, we turn to two of our colleagues, Bloomberg Surveillance co-hos...
Aug 26, 2023•33 min
Bloomberg Surveillance comes to the Odd Lots podcast! Listen for a special edition of Bloomberg Surveillance from the Federal Reserve's annual symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Hear more from Bloomberg Surveillance on Apple or Spotify . Guests in this episode: Mohamed El-Erian, President of Queens' College Tracy Alloway, Co-Host of Odd Lots Patrick Harker, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia Kristalina Georgieva, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund See omnyst...
Aug 25, 2023•45 min
Tractor Supply Co. has grown from a small mail order business set up in the 1930s into the biggest farm and ranch retailer operating in the US. Along the way, its share price has soared from around $1 in the 1990s to well over $200 today. The company has managed to tap into a wave of enthusiasm for hobby farming, pet care and rural living, with its revenues jumping 70% between 2019 and 2022. So what accounts for the success of Tractor Supply, such that analysts have referred to it as "one of the...
Aug 24, 2023•45 min
The Chinese economy is in a slump. Industrial production is down. Retail sales are down. The property industry continues to struggle. The People's Bank of China just did a surprise rate cut. So what's driving the decline and what can the government do about it? On this episode of the podcast we speak with Zongyuan Zoe Liu, the Maurice R. Greenberg Fellow for China Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of the new book Sovereign Funds: How the Communist Party of China Finances...
Aug 21, 2023•45 min
There's a new class of weight-loss drugs in town. GLP-1 medications including Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro were created to treat diabetes but have since been found to suppress appetites and induce substantial weight loss. It's a big deal for the companies which make them, with shares of Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly all soaring in recent weeks. But the drugs could end up having a much broader economic impact too. On this episode, we speak with James van Geelen of Citrinitas Capital, about the secon...
Aug 17, 2023•55 min
Why do some countries become rich while others stagnate? And can you predict which countries become wealthy in advance of them actually increasing their collective GDP? The answer may lie in the complexity of each nation's domestic economy. On this episode we speak with Ricardo Hausmann, a professor and director of the Growth Lab at Harvard University. He helps us understand what economic complexity is, how it's measured, and the process by which countries can move from being less complex to mor...
Aug 14, 2023•51 min
There have been a number of news stories lately that seem straight out of science fiction. We've heard claims before Congress that the government is suppressing information regarding the existence of UFOs or aliens. There are computers that seem to think. And scientists in Korea claimed to have made an extraordinary breakthrough in the hunt for room temperature superconductivity. So how should we think about these things in terms of their potential impact on the economy? In addition to being a N...
Aug 11, 2023•48 min
Movie and TV productions have come to a nearly complete stop in Hollywood. Both the Screen Actors Guild and the Writers Guild of America are on strike, with the latter having halted work for the major studios over three months ago. What brought the industry to this point? What do the two opposing sides want? And how do these strikes fit into other labor actions that we're seeing this summer? On this episode, we speak with Lucas Shaw, entertainment reporter at Bloomberg and the author of the Scre...
Aug 10, 2023•47 min
On September 14, the contract between the United Auto Workers and the Big Three carmakers (GM, Ford and Stellantis) is expiring — and the possibility of a strike is real. This comes at a delicate time for multiple reasons. The labor market is tight, which means workers have other options. Inflation is high. And the auto industry is undergoing a major shift to the electric vehicle market, which may change the composition and pay of the labor force. The stakes are high. So what does the union want...
Aug 07, 2023•50 min
In the US, Tesla remains far and away the dominant maker of electric vehicles. But on a global scale, the situation is much more competitive. Over the last few years, Chinese EV makers have massively ramped up their export capacity and one in particular — BYD — sells more total vehicles (both pure EV and hybrid) than Tesla does. On this episode, we speak with Corey Cantor, an EV analyst at BloombergNEF about the competition between these two companies, China's EV strategy more broadly, the world...
Aug 03, 2023•49 min
A key plank of the Biden administration's "Bidenomics" involves stronger antitrust enforcement and we've seen the White House empower agencies like the Department of Justice to step up actions on monopolies and other behaviors that reduce competition. But what exactly counts as anti-competitive nowadays? And how does promoting competition sit alongside the administration's more proactive public investment and industrial policies? In this episode, we speak with Jonathan Kanter, assistant attorney...
Jul 31, 2023•59 min
When Silicon Valley Bank imploded, there was a lot of talk about the future of regional and community banks in the United States. Can they compete with the large, too-big-to-fail institutions? What will happen to their deposits and their cost of capital? But actually the challenges facing smaller banks long precede March's banking drama. Tensions have been building for years, and will likely continue to do so, even if things have stabilized over the last few months. On this episode, we speak wit...
Jul 27, 2023•46 min
Last year, as the Federal Reserve hiked rates to the highest levels in decades, there were lots of warnings about an imminent collapse in the US housing market. But home prices have only dipped slightly since then and now they're even recovering, stacking up three consecutive month-on-month gains. Not many people expected the most interest rate-sensitive portion of the economy to be this resilient. So what happened? Morgan Stanley housing strategist James Egan was one of few who was early to for...
Jul 24, 2023•38 min
Artificial Intelligence is all the rage right now and most of the investor excitement has so far been focused on the companies providing the hardware and computing power to actually run this new technology. So how does it all work and what does it actually take to run these complex models? On this episode, we speak with Brannin McBee, co-founder of CoreWeave, which provides cloud computing services based on GPUs, the type of chips pioneered by Nvidia and which have now become immensely popular f...
Jul 20, 2023•53 min
We're in the midst of an AI mania of sorts. In public markets, investors are placing bets on the companies perceived as being the winners of this new wave of computing. Companies that aren't even in "tech" are touting their AI bonafides. And of course, in private markets, every venture capitalist suddenly seems to be pivoting to AI in some way or another. But who will actually win? Will it be the big incumbents? Can those incumbents be disrupted? Will it be the companies who have access to uniqu...
Jul 17, 2023•58 min
Arizona recently announced new constraints on housing development in the areas around Phoenix. At issue is water rights and scarcity, which have been a challenge for the US Southwest for as long as people have been living there. That being said, the region is currently in the midst of a 25-year megadrought and when you combine that with booming growth, difficult choices may have to be made. But how do water rights get divided? Who holds them? How much is water worth to the housing developers, fa...
Jul 14, 2023•47 min
Due to a combination of drought, climate change and booming growth, Arizona is facing looming water scarcity. But for all the sprawl and population increase, the overwhelming amount of water used in the state is not consumed by residences, but rather farmers. So naturally, many argue that we should be doing less agriculture in the desert and move the production of cotton, alfalfa and various vegetables towards places with more rain. On this episode, we speak with Trevor Bales, the proprietor of ...
Jul 13, 2023•42 min
Richard Koo literally wrote the book on balance sheet recessions, or the idea that large levels of debt can weigh on future growth for years and even decades to come. Now, the Nomura Research Institute chief economist sees a similar risk emerging in China. The country has been struggling with vast levels of debt and slowing economic growth in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. In this episode, Koo discusses the signs he sees that a balance sheet recession is already underway as China's companies...
Jul 10, 2023•50 min
Big cities like New York have two real estate problems. Housing is scarce and office buildings are empty (or at least under-utilized.) So there would seem to be an obvious solution: turn the offices into homes. And indeed there has been a lot of talk lately about "office-to-resi" conversions. But it's very hard, for a wide variety of reasons. Zoning, financing, and then, of course, the operational aspects of the construction all need to be in place. So what does it take? On this episode, we spea...
Jul 06, 2023•46 min
President Biden recently made it clear that what we're seeing play out in the economy now is the result of "Bidenomics." The current expansion has defied the constant predictions of economic gloom. Every other day, it seems, some firm announces a new battery plant or semiconductor facility for the United States as a result of incentives from either the CHIPS Act or the Inflation Reduction Act. So what's next? How can we be confident the plants will be productive? And what is the Bidenomics view ...
Jul 04, 2023•31 min
Every industry is trying to figure out just how AI or Large Language Models can be used to do business. But Bridgewater Associates, the world's largest hedge fund, has already been at it for a long time. For years, it has explored AI and adjacent technologies in order to analyze data, test theories, develop novel investment strategies and help its employees make better decisions. But how does it actually use the tech in practice? And what's next going forward? On this episode, we speak with co-C...
Jul 03, 2023•58 min
Zoltan Pozsar has built a reputation for covering the intricacies of money markets. For the past eight years, he published those insights as a strategist at Credit Suisse. But in this episode of the Odd Lots podcast, Pozsar reveals his next career move following his departure from the Swiss bank earlier this year. He also gives us an update on his Bretton Woods III thesis, or the idea that the global financial system is going through a "monetary divorce" from US dollar hegemony and becoming more...
Jun 30, 2023•52 min
When the pandemic struck in 2020, the actor Ben McKenzie (who you might know from The OC and Gotham) had a lot of time on his hands. And like a lot of people, he suddenly got interested in crypto when an old friend of his pushed him to buy some Bitcoin. But unlike a lot of other people, McKenzie didn't rush out to buy it. Instead, he dusted off his old economics degree and decided to learn about how the industry really works. And what he learned shocked him. So he (along with his co-author Jacob...
Jun 29, 2023•50 min
More than a decade ago, GMO strategist James Montier published a paper predicting that corporate profit margins were destined to come down from "nosebleed" levels. Fast forward to 2023, and it's clear that hasn't happened as profit margins remain far above their long-term average. On this episode of the Odd Lots podcast, Montier explains what he got wrong back in 2012, why corporate profits have remained so stubbornly high, and what this could mean for stock valuations now. He also discusses the...
Jun 26, 2023•40 min
Saudi Arabia has been spending hundreds of millions of dollars snapping up international soccer stars in recent months, including legendary players like Cristiano Ronaldo and Karim Benzema, to boost the rosters of its Saudi Pro League. It's not the first time we've seen a country spend a lot of money to try to build up a domestic sports league, but it does have some key differences to previous attempts like we've seen in China, or in the US with Major League Soccer. For a start, the kingdom is s...
Jun 23, 2023•48 min
We're used to thinking of modern finance as practically synonymous with computers. Banks are basically just big collections of Excel spreadsheets, keeping track of who owes what to whom. And most trading nowadays is done by clicking a button on a screen. But how did all this work before we had this type of technology? And what can previous technological revolutions tell us about the direction of new ones, such as the potential deployment of artificial intelligence? In this episode, we speak with...
Jun 22, 2023•44 min
De-dollarization is all the rage right now, with lots of talk about whether the US currency will be able to maintain its dominant status in the global financial system. But regardless of what happens in the future, it's worth asking how we got to this point originally. How is it that the dollar came to dominate not just global trade flows but also became the currency of choice for things like buying oil? And why are there large pools of eurodollars sitting outside the United States? In this epis...
Jun 19, 2023•52 min
Steve Eisman is known for having bet against the housing market prior to the Great Financial Crisis in a trade immortalized by Michael Lewis in The Big Short . So what is he betting on now? In a special live episode of Odd Lots, recorded at the Bloomberg Invest summit, the Neuberger Berman portfolio manager discusses the recent banking turmoil (he thinks it's contained), the boom in anything related to AI, and his current bets on US manufacturing and infrastructure. He also talks about investing...
Jun 16, 2023•52 min
