Skanda Amarnath is the executive director of Employ America, an organization that advocates for strong labor markets. He recently published a research note titled "What Are You Expecting? How The Fed Slows Down Inflation Through The Labor Market", in which he and co-author Alex Williams explores how the Federal Reserve's tools work to influence employment outcomes and the prices of goods and services. Skanda joins Cardiff to discuss: — The definition of full employment — How to investigate all t...
Jun 16, 2022•47 min•Season 1Ep. 43
Martin Sandbu is European Economics Commentator at the Financial Times, where he also writes Free Lunch , a weekly newsletter about global economic policy. And he’s the author of The Economics of Belonging: A Radical Plan to Win Back the Left Behind and Achieve Prosperity for All , which has just been released in paperback. Martin joins Cardiff to discuss: – How the failures of the social market economy threaten political stability and undermine openness to the rest of the world – The pervasive ...
Jun 08, 2022•1 hr 8 min•Season 1Ep. 42
Economic historian Leah Boustan joins Cardiff to discuss her new book, "Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success", co-authored with Ran Abramitsky. This wonderful book complicates and in some cases contradicts many of the prevailing myths and impressions of how immigration works, and it does so using a fascinating and cutting-edge approach to gathering data. Leah and Cardiff talk about how modern immigration trends resemble those of America's prior immigration peak from 1880 ...
Jun 02, 2022•52 min•Season 1Ep. 41
Matt Klein, co-author of "Trade Wars are Class Wars" and old friend of the show, returns for another special collaborative episode. Matt writes the excellent Overshoot newsletter, where he is posting additional commentary and charts to accompany this chat with Cardiff. Check it out and subscribe! Matt is Cardiff's favorite economic-data sleuth, and on this episode they discuss: — The recovery of the US economy, and whether it really did reverse in the first quarter — What accounts for such high ...
May 26, 2022•1 hr 10 min•Season 1Ep. 40
Mary Childs—author of The Bond King , cohost of the Planet Money podcast, and dear pal of Cardiff and Aimee—joins The New Bazaar to discuss how finance is portrayed in culture and the arts. Mary is both a finance journalist and herself a recreational painter with a comprehensive knowledge of the art world, and Cardiff asked her to choose an example each of a movie, book, song, TV series, painter, and contemporary artist to chat about on the show. Below are her choices, with links embedded: MOVIE...
May 19, 2022•1 hr 8 min•Season 1Ep. 39
Cardiff speaks with Jeremiah Johnson, the co-founder and political director of The Neoliberal Project, to discuss the historical evolution of what it means to be Neoliberal, and why advocates and critics of Neoliberalism so often talk past each other. Jeremiah clarifies for Cardiff the current Neoliberal position on taxes, unions, healthcare, Universal Basic Income, privatization of public services, trade with China, the minimum wage, regulation, and more issues. They discuss the challenges of s...
May 12, 2022•1 hr 13 min•Season 1Ep. 38
This week, we're sharing an episode from our friends over at Cautionary Tales. On the show, Tim Harford tells tragic stories from the past, pointing out the valuable lessons in the greatest mistakes, disasters and fiascos. This episode tells the story of Sir Clive Sinclair, a computer whizz and business mogul to rival Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. He was a visionary who could do no wrong... until he tried to launch an electric vehicle. The C5 “electrically assisted pedal cycle" doesn't seem so outla...
May 05, 2022•38 min•Season 1Ep. 37
Jose Fernandez, chair of the economics department at the University of Louisville, has an unusually eclectic body of work. He speaks with Cardiff about his findings on topics like autism, suicide, and health. They also discuss how he has navigated a career in which he has chosen topics that are so personal to him. Related link: Jose Fernandez's research Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
Apr 28, 2022•59 min•Season 1Ep. 36
Jenny Schuetz is a scholar of the housing market, and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. She has a new book out called Fixer-Upper: How to Repair America's Broken Housing System. In her research and in her book, Jenny considers the housing market in all of its complexity, the reasons it’s broken for so many people, the entrenched barriers to fixing it – and some ideas that just might work. She and Cardiff cover all of this in their chat. Related links: Jenny Schuetz’s expert page at t...
Apr 21, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 35
Glamour is a misunderstood concept. A lot of people associate it with glossy pictures of movie stars and celebrities in ritzy settings, or with other concepts like charisma or dazzle. Glamour is something a little different. It’s mysterious and concealing. It’s an illusion and it can be deceptive, sometimes so in problematic ways. But whether we’re talking about a glamorous object or a glamorous person, glamour also provides a canvas on which people can project their own desires and longings. So...
Apr 14, 2022•1 hr 9 min•Season 1Ep. 34
Erich Schwartzel joins Cardiff to discuss his new book, "Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy". For the past couple of decades, the emergence of a huge middle class in China has become an incredibly attractive, and maybe even a necessary, market for Hollywood movies. But the Chinese government carefully censors what kinds of movies can be shown in China. So if you’re a Hollywood studio and you wanna get your movie shown in China, you have to go along with th...
Apr 07, 2022•1 hr 14 min•Season 1Ep. 33
Jacob Goldstein, author of "Money: The True Story of a Made-up Thing" and host of the new podcast "What's Your Problem?", joins Cardiff to discuss the surprising origins of money, and why now is a great time to start a podcast about solving problems. Related links: Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing What's Your Problem? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
Mar 31, 2022•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 32
Today’s episode is about something you might have noticed just by looking around you. Especially if you’re old enough. The economy has been shifting away from the material and towards the intangible -- things like data, design, personality, research, ways of expressing ourselves. The importance of these things has grown, reflected in the investments that businesses have made. More money now goes to branding, and research and development, training, and software, and the tech we love to use for pl...
Mar 17, 2022•54 min•Season 1Ep. 31
At first it was just Bitcoin. Now when someone refers to crypto, they might be talking about ethereum, NFTs, ICOs, smart contracts, DAOs, and a whole bunch of other technologies too numerous to mention. Stacy-Marie Ishmael, managing editor for crypto at Bloomberg, joins the show to un-befuddle Cardiff and explain the implications of this suite of technologies. Among other topics, they discuss: How a novice can begin learning about crypto Whether crypto goes too far towards decentralization The i...
Mar 10, 2022•1 hr 8 min•Season 1Ep. 30
John Kemp is senior market analyst at Reuters, where he specializes in oil and energy systems. Having covered these systems for the past quarter-century, John now publishes a newsletter, which happens to be Cardiff's favorite way to keep up with trends in global energy markets. This episode, recorded on the morning of Monday, February 28th, does touch on the astonishing and fast-moving events in Ukraine and Russia, but it is not principally about them. Nor is it mainly about the economic sanctio...
Mar 03, 2022•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 29
Max Frumes and Sujeet Indap are the authors of the book The Caesars Palace Coup: How a Billionaire Brawl Over the Famous Casino Exposed the Power and Greed of Wall Street . And the story they tell in the book is intense. Back in the mid-2000s, a private equity firm called Apollo bought Caesars, the company that owns casinos and hotels all over the country, like Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. The deal to buy Caesars was a leveraged buyout, also known as an LBO. Which just means that Apollo borrowed...
Feb 24, 2022•48 min•Season 1Ep. 28
Logan Mohtashami is the lead analyst at Housingwire, where he writes about the housing market and the US economy. And before that, he spent a few decades as a senior lending officer at a real estate company. Well before the pandemic, Logan was arguing that during the years 2020 to 2024, housing prices in the US would climb to troubling levels, the result of various coinciding trends in the economy. And that is exactly what's happened. In his chat with Cardiff, Logan explains the forces that have...
Feb 17, 2022•55 min•Season 1Ep. 27
Tara Watson is an economist and the co-author, with Kalee Thompson, of a new book, “The Border Within: The Economics of Immigration in an Age of Fear”. The "border within" refers to how immigration laws are applied to undocumented residents already living inside the country. And it also refers to how immigration laws, and how these laws are applied and enforced, can also create borders between people. Between neighbors. Between residents. Even between husband and wife, between parents and their ...
Feb 10, 2022•58 min•Season 1Ep. 26
Shira Ovide writes the excellent On Tech newsletter at the New York Times. On this episode of The New Bazaar, Shira tells Cardiff about the technology she wants to see in 2022, and whether the potential for technology to better connect the world was oversold. And they chat about the metaverse -- as Shira says, "What if we just called the ‘metaverse’ ...the internet?" -- and the lingering questions about its future. Also on the show: Do "bits" technologies like social media get too much attention...
Feb 03, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 25
More than two decades ago, economist Tyler Cowen published "In Praise of Commercial Culture" -- his first in a series of books about the relationship between the economy and culture. The book's thesis was simple, but at the time controversial -- that markets and commerce offer the best societal arrangement for promoting creativity and cultural novelty. The book was initially resisted by popular and academic presses and nearly didn't get published, threatening to undermine its own arguments. In t...
Jan 27, 2022•1 hr 13 min•Season 1Ep. 24
This week, we're sharing a special episode of a podcast we think you might like. It's called Cautionary Tales, and it's made by Tim Harford and the team at Pushkin Industries. You may remember Tim from our recent episode on economic storytelling. On his podcast, Tim draws on history and social science to vividly retell the stories of great crimes, accidents and disasters of the past - pointing out valuable lessons for us all from the dithering, death and destruction. In this episode, Tim tells t...
Jan 20, 2022•36 min•Season 1Ep. 23
Ben Ho’s latest book is called Why Trust Matters: An Economist’s Guide to the Ties that Bind . His chat with Cardiff is about exactly that: How the concept of trust applies to all kinds of different economic interactions that we experience throughout our lives. And the research that helps us understand why trust so often breaks down, and potentially how to build it back up. For example, how do you write a contract between two people or two companies that enhances trust rather than erodes it. Whe...
Jan 13, 2022•1 hr 7 min•Season 1Ep. 22
To wrap up 2021, The New Bazaar answers questions sent in by listeners. The episode also features, for the first time in front of the mic, executive producer Aimee Keane! Aimee and Cardiff take questions about pricing strategies, how they choose topics and guests for the show, the tricky tension between wonky and accessible, the Canadian vs the US economy, why the US economic growth has been weak since the 1970s, and more. Thanks so much to everyone for listening to us this year! We are taking a...
Dec 30, 2021•43 min•Season 1Ep. 21
Having guided Cardiff through the craft of economic storytelling in the prior episode, Tim Harford returns to explain the lessons of three economic stories from his own podcast, Cautionary Tales. Links: -- "The Truth about Hansel and Gretel" -- "Buried by the Wall Street Crash" -- "Florence Nightingale and her Geeks Declare War on Death" Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
Dec 24, 2021•23 min
Tim Harford is the author of numerous terrific economics books and the host of two great podcasts: “Cautionary Tales”, about what we should learn from big mistakes; and “More or Less”, about statistics. He also writes columns and essays for the Financial Times. And what sets Tim apart in all these different mediums is his exceptional storytelling. And when it comes to telling economic stories – stories that are meant to grab your attention, and keep you in suspense, and then ultimately land on a...
Dec 23, 2021•55 min•Season 1Ep. 20
Vicki Bogan is an economist who specializes in financial economics, household finance, and behavioral finance – in other words, a specialist in how people make investment decisions. Whether to invest in the stock market or the bond market; how much; and other kinds of investing too, like whether to pursue a graduate degree. And the things she has found that influence our investment decisions are often things we don’t really consider. Like the kinds of households we live in, our health, or even t...
Dec 16, 2021•46 min•Season 1Ep. 19
The labor market is in a weird place -- millions of fewer workers are employed than before the pandemic, yet millions of more jobs are available and wages are climbing fast. But there has been a lot of experimentation. Workers are quitting in near-record numbers. Working from home is an obvious example of an idea that many more companies are testing. New kinds of automation are taking the place of some jobs. More people are starting their own small businesses. Some companies are trying out a fou...
Dec 09, 2021•1 hr 5 min•Season 1Ep. 18
If you look at some of the big and mostly troubling economic trends in the overall US economy from the last three or four decades, the business of the sport of Mixed Martial Arts captures a stunning number of them: rising income and wealth inequality; increased firm concentration in some economic sectors, sometimes because they bought out their competition; the declining share of the money that companies make that goes to workers; the decline of unions; the gig economy; the lack of bargaining po...
Dec 02, 2021•1 hr 3 min•Season 1Ep. 17
Economists don’t just try to understand the economy. They also influence it. Because as they share their analysis and understanding of it, people and institutions and companies and politicians start to act differently -- precisely in response to that understanding of how the economy works. Which means that the economy itself then changes, and economists have to catch up and try to understand it again. That is one of the themes in a new book called Cogs and Monsters , by the economist Diane Coyle...
Nov 24, 2021•1 hr 4 min•Season 1Ep. 16
At least rhetorically, the politically conservative approach to economics was once associated with lower taxes, deregulation of the economy, cutting government spending, free trade and cutting the budget deficit (In reality, what conservatives have actually done when they have been in power has been different, but that was the governing philosophy). But all that seems to have changed in the last roughly half decade. There’s been a lingering and visible tension between the old-school free-market-...
Nov 18, 2021•1 hr 3 min•Season 1Ep. 15
