Bubble Trouble: Laying Out Inconvenient Truths About How Business and Financial Markets Really Work

This week we get into portfolio theory, or lack of, as for many the rush to big tech and wilful ignorance of everything else Wall Street has to offer seems to be the rule as opposed to the exception. Why is that, and is it sustainable? For more on Bubble Trouble, including transcripts of the show, visit us online at http://bubbletroublepodcast.com You can learn more about Richard at https://www.li...

This week we’re going to keep on pricking bubbles with a fellow cynic of the sycophants and stenographers. Here to help us is David Trainer of New Constructs, whose company makes “robo-adjustments” to the reported accounts of 1000s of listed companies and tries to unearth the real financials behind the content marketing from company investor relations teams. For more on Bubble Trouble, including t...

Our guest this week is Hugh Hendry, a man who found fortunes walking the tightropes as booms turned to busts. Founder and CIO of Eclectica Asset Management, London, a Global Macro Hedge Fund, from 2002 to 2017, where its “high water mark” events were the early and successful identification of the gold bull market in 2003 and the housing debacle in the US in 2008. [Repeat from June, 2023.] Hosted o...

One of the giant iceberg industries - it's all around us but we don’t really see it - is advertising.  Frequently touted as the first to suffer, first to recover on the economic cycle, but also counter cyclical, since you need to sell harder in tougher times. Now we are seeing wobbles in economic data, some serious haircuts in tech exits and layoffs from the great and the good, it seems only...

With 340-odd days ahead, what are the smoke signals - good and bad - that you need to be aware of? Today we look forward, and make sense of the madness ahead of us in 2024. For more on Bubble Trouble, including transcripts of the show, visit us online at http://bubbletroublepodcast.com You can learn more about Richard at https://www.linkedin.com/in/richard-kramer-16306b2/ More on Will Page at: htt...

This week we’re in conversation with a special guest, someone who The Independent argued that he may be “the most influential man in British television.” Sir Peter Bazalegette. The man who brought Big Brother to our screens during his tenure at Endemol, steered the Arts Council England through a period of austerity and was recently chairman of the board of ITV. No one is better placed to make sens...

Today, we turn our attention to a massive credit bubble that burst and dumped toxic sewage in the form of shell companies and endless debt on public utilities. A scandal is unfolding at Thames Water - London’s waterworks that’s frankly been drowned in debt by the private equity owners. To twist this up a notch, we’re joined by the Northern Irish former punk singer Feargal Sharkey has turned his le...

This week we want to wrap up a stellar year of topics, guests and unimaginable bubbly behavior, and not just of the kind of champagne at holiday parties.  For more on Bubble Trouble, including transcripts of the show, visit us online at http://bubbletroublepodcast.com You can learn more about Richard at https://www.linkedin.com/in/richard-kramer-16306b2/ More on Will Page at: https://pivotale...

Economics wont get you a lot of spicy dates… but we delve into a fantastically accessible book that compliments this podcast like gin and tonic. This week we’re going to be in conversation with the authors of "Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles," an engaging tour of the last 300 years of bubbles. (Repeat from May 2023). For more on Bubble Trouble, including transcripts of the sho...

This week wrap up our conversation with Andy Fastow, the former CFO of Enron. [Part 2 of 2] For more on Bubble Trouble, including transcripts of the show, visit us online at http://bubbletroublepodcast.com You can learn more about Richard at https://www.linkedin.com/in/richard-kramer-16306b2/ More on Will Page at: https://pivotaleconomics.com (Times below correspond to the episode without consider...

This week we take you back to one of the biggest bubble bursting in living memory, Enron, which went from Americas 7th largest company to bankrupt within a year at the turn of the millennium. How many booms, busts, frauds and financial irregularities have we witnessed since? Now, 100 episodes in, we get to sit down and LEARN from Andy Fastow, the former CFO of Enron. We’ve wanted this guest on the...

This week we’re going to tap into a topic that’s been ignored to date - the excitement that surrounds the big three cloud services of Microsoft (Azure), Google (GCP) and the market leader Amazon AWS. Are we getting ahead of our skies about what is another form of storage, or is this a truly game changing way that organisations can transform everything that they do? We’re joined by Liam Maxwell and...

This week we turn to the unavoidable Mr Musk and his beached fail whale, X, formerly known as Twitter. Did he take something mediocre and make it worse? Was it deliverate sabotage, or willful ignorance? Blunder or bluster, megaphone or mega-fall from grace? Wiht us we have veteran tech journalist Alex Kantrowitz to help solve for X. For more on Bubble Trouble, including transcripts of the show, vi...

This week we look at that special "class" of investors who are busy raising their heads again to challenge management in a time of turmoil: the activist. Who are they, what gives them power and when they wield that power what’s the fall out. (Repeat) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week we look at one of the noisiest self promoters on the VC carnival barker circuit, a man who famously said software eats the world when he has stocked his portfolio with software companies, with some wild claims about techno optimism. With our skeptical hat on we look at what's behind this and unpack the fears and hopes for the revolution to come. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for...

This week we turn our attention back to private markets where Richard’s prior smoke signals may be bearing fruit. That is, we’re getting reports that private equity is playing pass the parcel: selling assets to themselves that they can’t exit and doing so at their own valuations. Marking your own homework? Delaying a bubble that’s sure to burst? Or is it simply remortgaging from one bank to anothe...

We know why you, our audience, listen to podcasts... to impress friends at dinner parties. Now waht about extending a 35 minute pod to a 15 hour audiobook? And that’s where we’re turning our attention to today, audiobooks have been in the news here in the UK (and Australia) with Spotify trying, a year after spending $135m buying a tiny company in Ohio, to get into that market. So listen up to a po...

This week, its just Will quizzing Richard with an ocean separating their microphones, as Will squeezes that thirty year veteran of the markets like a sponge to get us all up to speed on whether those bubbles are building everywhere in financial markets. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Bubble Trouble has spent 90+ episodes in the studios exposing sycophants and stenographers. More recently, we went from the studio to the stage, with both of us top billing the Financial Times Weekend Festival at Kenwood House. Richard’s panel, aptly titled ‘The new goldrush: how to make money out of tech.' So this week we want to get back to the show title - ‘Bubbles’ and ask: Is the bubble back?...

This week we turn to regulatory bubbles and the new buzz word: Gatekeepers! What are they, and what are they not and what gates do they actually keep? In forty five days, the European Commission drummed up an answer, while the US DoJ starts a court case about Google paying for search bar placements like Heinz beans play for shelf space in the grocery store. We’ve got 45 minutes with one of the bes...

This week James Ashton joins us to talk about the complicated dance around the re-listing of ARM in the first tech IPO in some time. Few IPOs come this big, and few have had to revise down their target market price so quickly. All chips are on red, and we’re ready to spin the wheel and see where this UK tech darling lands on the US NASDAQ. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more informatio...

You may have heard about the recent collaboration between Drake and The Weeknd that wasn't a real collaboration, but an AI-generated fake. This incident is a canary in the coalmine not just for the music industry, but any creator or rights holders across numberous industries. Joining us to discuss is Jessica Powell of AudioShake, an A.I. startup that builds sound separation software to help musici...

This week, the second of two episodes with Dan McCrum of the Financial Times about his investigative reporting into the massive fraud at the German financial firm Wirecard. (Repeat from October, 2022.) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week we have the first of two episodes with Dan McCrum of the Financial Times about his investigative reporting into the massive fraud at the German financial firm Wirecard. (Repeat from September, 2022.) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We continue our exploration into the dinner party topic of converation on everyone’s lips: AI with the first of many very special guests on the topic, Professor Chris Speed. This week, we take a design lens to the problems (and the solutions) that AI presents us with. (Repeat from April, 2023). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.