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

We don't do shameless plugs here on Bubble Trouble, but we're making an exception for our esteem co-host Will Page on the publication of the paperback edition of Tarzan Economics, renamed Pivot: Eight Principles for Transforming your Business in a Time of Disruption. (Repeat from January, 2023). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We’ve talked to some of the biggest names in AI, - Audioshake, Stability and Boomy but this week, we’re going to Mayk.it with Stefán Heinrich Henriquez - and his new start up Mayk.it. His plans appear to be making all the world a stage and musicians of us all. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When looking at today's issues of privacy, social media, and AI, we can draw a lot from the battles of the browsers over the past 30 years. To explore this, we welcome a close friend onto the show, the father of JavaScript and a Silicon Valley legend, Brendan Eich. Brendan left the CTO role of Mozilla firefox years ago and embarked on a journey to scale up a privacy-first browser and search busine...

We’ve talked to some of the biggest names in AI, but today, we want to get behind the controversy over Boomy, with co-founder Alex Mitchell. To date, Boomy “artists” have created 16 million “original” AI-generated songs. That’s more music than the iTunes Music Store had at its peak. And most of the Boomy songs, apparently, are now on Spotify available to stream after a controversial takedown episo...

This week we have a distinguished guest with an estimable track record at calling out the machinations and malfeasance behind the numbers: Stephen Clapham, the driving force of Behind the Balance Sheet, a podcast of the same name and education company. Stephen helps teach fund managers and others the tricks of financial chicanery and magical massaging of the numbers. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com...

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...

One of the giant bubbles of the last decades has clearly been, in many regions of the world, real estate. For this week's episode, we're looking forward, not backward with Dror Poleg, an economic historian and inspirational thinker who's figuring out how we work, where we work, and what work we might be doing in this post pandemic world. (Repeat from December, 2022) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/...

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/pri...

This week we want give a hat tip to the Financial Times, reporting on how the "Bank of England to review use of economic forecasts." As so often happens with the FT, the comments were even better than the article, which like us have been despairing for years about central bank economic models constantly getting wrongfooted by the real world. Asleep at the wheel or making the best of an impossible...

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week we catch up with the subject that is near and dear to our hearts: the business of podcasting. Will is fresh from two days at the industry's leading event in London where thousands of people got together to figure out can they actually make money from podcasting, an emerging new medium that is yet to find its footing as a commercial enterprise. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for m...

In recent episodes we’ve been boasting ”if there’s a bubble that burst, we pricked it first” but events at SBV caught us off guard. This bubble burst before our eyes and now the one word on the market's lips is contagion. But we’ve been here before, AND we’ll be here again - banks are being bailed out for their incompetence and central banks are scrambling to respond . (Repeat from March, 2023) Ho...

We’ve been training our respective brains on the dinner table topic de jour, artificial intelligence, for three episodes now and we’ve generated views about banking analyst notes, academia, mixtape culture. This week, we land one of the most important voices there is - a founder who built the first generative AI company on the block - jukedeck - to ByteDance and now finds himself in the front line...

This week, we want to lay out the current theatrics of the market - blink and you’ll have missed banks avoiding collapse and earnings beats and misses. So with eyes wide open, take your seats in the stalls so we get up and personal. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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...

Joining us this week is writer Kurt Andersen discussing his books Fantasyland and Evil Geniuses. (Repeat from March, 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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Today, we're treading deep in some chicken sh*t with Propublica investigative journalist Jesse Eisenger. (repeat from May, 2023) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week, we dig into some of the hype around AI, with the announcement from financial markets data provider powerhouse Bloomberg’s BloombergGPT, a 50-billion parameter large language model, purpose-built from scratch for finance. Is this the needle mover AI has been waiting for? We’re bubbling on the use cases: sentiment analyst, news story summaries, bespoke research. What does this mean for ou...

This week: concert tickets. Recently The Cure announced a series of shows in the US where the band wanted to keep prices low. But when fans bought low priced tickets, the end price was much higher than they expected. What gets paid for in the ticket and who gets paid for what? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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...

In recent episodes we’ve been boasting ”if there’s a bubble that burst, we pricked it first” but events at SBV caught us off guard. This bubble burst before our eyes and now the one word on the market's lips is contagion. But we’ve been here before, AND we’ll be here again - banks are being bailed out for their incompetence and central banks are scrambling to respond . Hosted on Acast. See acast.c...

This week we free-ride off Richard’s travels, meaning he mingled with over 100,000 Telco executives so we didn’t have to. When you gather the population of a small city into a conference venue for a whole week, there’s got to be some bubble trouble brewing amongst the telecom delegates. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week, sucking on subsidies. Government grants, fat contracts, tax credits, state aid, all the cash a company didn't generate on its own. Does it help? Or does it stoke up problems for a future date? (Repeat from October, 2021.) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week,we’re going to be discussing - read arguing - if the price is right. We’re back to that topic of inflation, where Will has been a self-proclaimed dove over recent months. Well the doves need to fly off as the hawks are coming into land - the hope parade needs a serenade. Prices are up and, in Richard's view, they’re staying up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.