Odd Lots

Mostly, the world has been watching the price of oil skyrocket amid the war in Iran and the de facto closure of the Strait of Hormuz. But there's more than just oil that comes out of the region. Qatar is home to the world's largest natural gas field, and for now, it's been almost completely cut off from the rest of the world. Not only has Gulf gas supply been cut off, there's also damage to the co...

The war in Iran has been fought almost entirely in the skies, with both offensive missiles, as well as anti-missile defense systems. But the math is brutal. The war in Ukraine has already put a dent in American stockpiles, and now it is proving costly to protect American bases and their allies in the region against Iranian drones. On this episode, we speak with Tom Karako, a senior fellow and dire...

In the wake of the war in Iran, oil prices have shot up for everyone. But not all oil is exactly equal. And, obviously, a lot of Iranian oil goes to China specifically. Furthermore, because Iran’s oil is sanctioned, a lot of it winds up at China’s so-called “teapot” refineries, which tend to be smaller and owned by independent companies. On the other hand, China has famousl...

We tend to think of warfare in two distinct arenas: the physical and the digital. Increasingly, however, those lines are blurring. Last week, Iran launched drone strikes on data centers in the UAE and Bahrain. Israel has reportedly been hacking traffic lights in Tehran, and this week brought a suspected Iranian cyberattack on US medical device company Stryker, all underscoring long-held fears that...

We all know that the war with Iran has sent oil prices spiking. But it’s also pushing up the cost of all sorts of chemicals, including fertilizers like urea, ammonia and other nitrogen products that are essential for food production. This is all happening at the worst possible time — just before the spring planting season, when fertilizer is most needed. And while farmers have seen hig...

Oil has obviously spiked massively since the start of the war with Iran. And if you look at various end products, such as jet fuel, the surge is even more extreme. And if the war is prolonged, or if the Strait of Hormuz continues to be functionally blocked, then this could just be the start of an even bigger spike. On this episode, we speak with Rory Johnston, the author of the Commodity Context n...

Last year, we had Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev on the podcast to talk to us about his company's plans to tokenize shares of private companies. The idea is that retail investors want to participate in hot names like OpenAI and SpaceX, and that tokenizing private equity would allow this to happen. Right after our episode though, a number of companies expressed frustration at the idea, saying that they w...

A year ago, all of the talk was about how the big AI companies were wildly overvalued. Everyone was calling it a bubble. Fast forward to now, and a dominant idea in the markets is that AI is so powerful that all kinds of legacy businesses — particularly software — could go to zero. So where does the truth lie? And what now for AI valuations? On this episode, recorded live at the On Air...

With war breaking out in Iran, the price of oil is surging, in part due to the destruction of oil energy infrastructure, but also the ability of anything to get through the Strait of Hormuz. But it’s not just oil that moves through this key waterway — there are plenty of other goods, including metals and ingredients for fertilizer getting potentially constrained. It’s also not ju...

Lloyd Blankfein was CEO of Goldman Sachs for more than a decade, riding the trading boom to the top of the storied investment bank and steering it through the 2008 financial crisis. In his new memoir, Streetwise: Getting To and Through Goldman Sachs , he writes about his journey from public housing in Brooklyn to the pinnacle of Wall Street. So what's he up to now? And how does he see markets and...

The average person can enter a stock trade on their computer, hit refresh, and the trade is done. As fast as that seems, there are professional traders moving even faster, executing thousands of trades per second. Over the years, the need for speed got so intense that competing firms would aim to get their own systems closer and closer to the exchange's computers, so as to minimize the length of t...

'Bloomberg This Weekend' features unique conversations on business, news, lifestyle and culture. Join David Gura, Christina Ruffini and Lisa Mateo Saturdays and Sundays for discussions with business leaders, lawmakers and cultural icons.   Watch the show LIVE on Bloomberg Television from 7AM-10AM Eastern Time.    Listen to the show LIVE on Bloomberg Radio from 7AM-10AM Eastern...

Something very unusual happened in the market in the last week of February. It sold off, in part, thanks to an article on Substack. James van Geelen is the founder of Citrini Research, which published a piece a week ago titled, “The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis.” It was not written as a forecast of an imminent disaster, but rather as a scenario analysis in which AI capabilities lead...

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court ruled that Trump's "Liberation Day" tariffs were illegal . And now basically every importer who paid those tariffs will be rushing to get their refunds. But will businesses actually get paid? And how do they file a claim? And should consumers get refunded if a business passed the cost of the tariffs on to them? On this episode, we're rejoined by regular Odd Lo...

It's hard to imagine New York City becoming significantly more affordable as long as it remains so expensive to build things. Whether we're talking about new housing or transportation, the city is a famously expensive place to do construction. There are reports of subway elevators costing $100 million per station . Public bathrooms end up costing millions as well. One driver of costs is insurance,...

Alison Roman is a cult figure in the world of food media. She's written multiple hit cookbooks and several of her recipes have gone viral. And her newsletter is incredibly popular. Now, she's putting her name on consumer goods, recently launching a new line of high-end jarred tomato sauce called, appropriately, A Very Good Sauce, which she sells direct online. So what has she learned about the con...

NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani has certain ideas that make mainstream economists' head explode. Anything in the ballpark of rent control, specifically, is widely derided by defenders of the orthodoxy. But how did the orthodoxy become the orthodoxy? And how did the heterodoxy become the heterodoxy? On this episode, we speak with Jamee Moudud, a professor of economics at Sarah Lawrence College and author...

This year could be a big one for IPOs. From Anthropic to SpaceX to OpenAI, we could see some gigantic companies hit the public market. But of course, the big story is that big, thriving companies feel less and less pressure to go public. In a different era, private giants like Databricks and Stripe might've IPO'd a long time ago. So what's changed? Why are companies comfortable staying private for...

The start of the year has been an absolutely brutal one for software companies. There’s a big fear that the rise of AI and advanced coding models will pull the rug out from this industry. But even before these AI fears, software companies were seeing their growth slow. So how does the business actually work? And more importantly, what types of companies will actually survive the “SaaSp...

For years, DRAM -- or Dynamic Random Access Memory -- was kind of a sleepy, commoditized aspect of chip industry. Growth was steady, but modest, and prices just generally drifted lower. Suddenly all that's changed. AI has created voracious demand for DRAM and consumer facing companies are being forced to either curtail supply or raise prices due to exploding costs. But what is it about AI that con...

It’s an open secret that the Chinese government has engaged in a global campaign to acquire intellectual property from foreign rivals. At the center of that campaign is the Ministry of State Security, China’s elusive intelligence agency. The US has apprehended hundreds of people accused of giving information to the MSS, but the agency’s inner workings have been a mystery —...

The future is always tough to predict, but generally when it comes to inflation, a lot of the debate is about how long it will take the Federal Reserve to get back to its 2% target. In other words, people generally agree on the direction, but disagree on the speed. But our guest on this episode violently disagrees with the consensus direction. Peterson Institute President Adam Posen thinks inflati...

We are rapidly entering a world in which there are odds on virtually everything. During the recent Super Bowl, the big prediction market platforms didn't just offer bets on the game itself, but also on more exotic facets, such as the first song that Bad Bunny would sing, even who would join Bad Bunny in the performance. And while a lot of people thinks this looks like gambling, it's actually regul...

Ricardo Hausmann is a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and the director of Harvard's Growth Lab. We've talked to him multiple times in the past about the necessary preconditions for economies to grow and thrive. But in addition to his academic work, Hausmann was previously a policymaker in Venezuela, including a stint at the country's central bank prior to the election of Hugo Chavez. In th...

In less than three years, the amount of tokenized real-world assets has grown eightfold, to more than $30 billion across equities, fixed income, private assets, real estate and more. And that’s just the start of the tokenization revolution, experts predict, because of four main drivers:  Increased liquidity for illiquid assets, broader investor access, operational efficiency, and global...