China has driven GDP based on heavy capital investment. When, at some point, that ends, and China's GDP growth falls dramatically, what will happen to the rest of the world? Not that much, argues Michael Pettis. Pettis is a leading thinker on international trade and investment flows. He is currently a nonresident senior fellow in the Carnegie Asia Program, based in Beijing, and also professor of finance at Peking University's Guanghua School of Management, where he specializes in Chinese financi...
Mar 04, 2018
Howard French is the author of two books on Africa and three books on China, with one of those books being about China's booming ties with Africa. The more recent Africa book, "China's Second Continent," is about the million Chinese who have emigrated to the African continent since the 1990s and what they mean for China and for Africa. His newest book, “Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China’s Push for Global Power,” is a meditation on China's historical self image and what...
Feb 09, 2018
In this far-ranging discussion, historian and corporate consultant Kenneth J. DeWoskin places China's 40-year reform period in historical perspective and makes sense of campaigns like the China Dream and the Belt and Road Initiative against the backdrop of China's massive debt. He compares China's economic development with that of Japan, Korea, and the Southeast Asian "Tigers" and looks ahead to where China will be in the next five years. Ken is a former partner for China Strategy and Business D...
Jan 26, 2018
In this interview, Tim Bergin, a former bond trader, talks about why both stock and bond market valuations are stretched by at least $50 trillion and what will happen when that begins to unwind. He does not envision a crisis like that of 2008, but asset owners will get a lot poorer. Tim has a particular focus on the Canadian economy and here discusses the real estate bubbles there and the ways in which banks and insurers are exposed to it. He looks at some long and short ideas that flow from the...
Jan 12, 2018•45 min•Season 2Ep. 1
Bob Wittbrot writes and comments on global-economic and financial issues on his " Deep-Throat-IPO " blog. He is the founder and owner of Bob Wittbrot & Associates, the "best" (in his slightly biased opinion) Insurance Agency in Cleveland Ohio, as well as a former CPA, Auditor & CFO. He's earned Graduate and Undergraduate degrees in Accounting and Finance from the University of Wisconsin. Here he talks about the post-global financial crisis world and how it has given rise to companies lik...
Dec 02, 2017•Season 1Ep. 11
Sahm Adrangi is the founder and managing partner of Kerrisdale Capital Management. He is most known for short selling and publishing research. He first made a name for himself shorting Chinese companies, but has since broadened his approach to invest in longs and other sectors. Sahm started his financial career in credit – performing high-yield debt refinancings and post-bankruptcy refinancings at Deutsche Bank, as well as advising creditor committees in bankruptcy and out-of-court restructuring...
Nov 10, 2017•Season 1Ep. 10
Roger Lowenstein is one of the great minds of the financial world and has been observing and writing about Wall Street now for four decades. Roger is author of a full shelf of best-selling books about Wall Street, from When Genius Failed to The End of Wall Street, and the newest, America's Bank. Acerbic, clear-thinking, and richly informed with historical knowledge, Roger brings a rare breadth of understanding to parsing what makes the markets work. In this discussion, he talks about the Fed and...
Oct 20, 2017•Season 1Ep. 9
Sander Gerber's Hudson Bay Capital has been sailing unmoored by the troubles that have beset most hedge funds this year, and that is due to the Hudson Bay "system," a rigorous method for "avoiding beta." In this episode, Sander talks about that method and how Hudson Bay makes its investment decisions. Hudson Bay Capital Management LP is an absolute-return, multi-strategy alternative investment firm, and Sander is its CEO and Chief Investment Officer. He became a member of the American Stock Exch...
Oct 06, 2017•34 min•Season 1Ep. 8
Since 2008, Jos Evans has been trading commodities. Few people on the planet know as much as he does about iron ore. In his trading career, he grew frustrated with the arcane world of Inter Dealer Brokers, the ~$6 billion industry that anonymizes transactions so that traders buying or selling large blocks of assets don't get front run by purpose-built algorithm robots that run around looking for big trades. Traders need the IDBs, but in the trading world, they are relative dinosaurs. Trades are ...
Sep 22, 2017•28 min•Season 1Ep. 7
William Bao Bean knows more than almost anyone about the Chinese internet. Currently the Managing Director of Chinaccelerator, a start-up accelerator based in Shanghai, William has been helping Chinese tech companies get started for nearly 15 years. He was one of the earliest and most plugged-in industry analysts, working at Deutsche Bank, Bank of America, and Bear Stearns, and he did private investing with Softbank China & India Holdings and SingTel Innov8. In this discussion, William talks...
Sep 08, 2017•49 min•Season 1Ep. 6
Jordan Moelis is one of a breed of young hedge fund managers--he founded Deep Field in his mid-twenties--who came up during the industry boom after the global financial crisis. Here he talks about some of the stresses and rewards of being directly answerable for results. He also takes a look at movies and entertainment, a specialty of Deep Field. Deep Field runs a concentrated portfolio of well-researched ideas.
Aug 25, 2017•35 min•Season 1Ep. 5
Snap-on's network of franchisees sell the premier line of auto-repair tool kits to mechanics all over America. But the market is pretty much saturated, and Snap-on is in denial. Since 2011, the company has committed that particularly American sin: binging on credit. Snap-on has been encouraging its franchisees to sell more and more using high-priced loans from the company's own Snap-on Credit division. Tim Murray thinks a lot of franchisees are mad as hell and aren't going to take this anymore. ...
Aug 12, 2017•32 min•Season 1Ep. 4
The price of food at the grocery store has been declining for two years and yet the price of the big packaged food companies on the stock exchanges has been rising. This opposition will not long stand. Evan Lorenz, one of the great financial journalists of that Wall Street sacred text, Grant's Interest Rate Observer, talks about Big Food and some clumsiness on the part of the usually deft investors 3G and Berkshire Hathaway.
Jul 29, 2017•30 min•Season 1Ep. 3
John Fichthorn, the founder of Dialectic Capital Management and now Head of Alternatives at B Riley, and John Barton, his long-time colleague and a Managing Director at B Riley, deeply experienced with finding, qualifying, and trading frauds, fads, and flim-flams, In this podcast, they offer lessons from the front lines of short-biased funds.
Jul 17, 2017•46 min•Season 1Ep. 2
China is trying to avoid the fact that its growth is chained to an ever more irrational load of debt and that the debt-intensity of growth becomes higher every year. Brian McCarthy manages a fund predicated on the idea that, far from rebalancing, China sees no other political options and will keep piling on debt until it hits a wall. That wall will entail a sharp devaluation of the RMB.
Jul 06, 2017•Season 1Ep. 1
