Odd Lots

Last year was a bad one for the US wind power industry, with lots of cancelled projects, writedowns, and an overall reassessment of how the math behind these mega projects might shake out in an era of higher interest rates and supply chain disruptions. But despite all of that, renewable power from wind is still a big part of America's plans to transition towards cleaner energy, with billions of go...

What's the price of a hamburger? Well, it depends. Are you making the purchase on the spot? Did you order ahead using an app? Are you a frequent customer of the burger chain? With inflation having surged at the fastest rate in roughly four decades, there's suddenly a lot more interest in how companies figure out the most that they can charge you for a given purchase at that moment in time. As it t...

Over the past two weeks, two New York City office buildings have become major talking points in the market for commercial real estate. Troubles at 1740 Broadway led to the first loss in the AAA-rated tranche of a commercial mortgage bond since the financial crisis. Meanwhile, issues at 1440 Broadway recently propelled the serious delinquency rate for office loans to its highest level since early 2...

The modern electricity grid is a weird thing. The delivery of electricity is a natural monopoly, for kind of obvious reasons. Despite that, we still attempt to shoehorn market-based mechanisms into the system. Many utilities are shareholder-owned, yet heavily regulated. In many markets around the country, producers of natural gas, wind, coal, nuclear, solar and so on, compete to sell their electri...

The cost of solar has been plunging for years. Everyday there's a new headline about growing installation of renewables or batteries, or some other sign of progress when it comes to decarbonization. But there's still a long way to go and, in the meantime, the US continues to add new fossil fuel generation. So is there something wrong with the mechanisms we're using to change our energy mix? On thi...

The gambling industry in the US has exploded in recent years, and suffused every aspect of sports consumption. You can bet on who will win or lose just about any game in the world from your phone. In fact, you don't even have to just bet on games. You can bet on how many home runs a player will hit, or how many sets it will take to complete a given tennis match. So how does it all work? Who is set...

Remember GameStop? The poster-child for 2021's memestock mania recently surged almost 5x in a matter of days — and it was all catalyzed by a few tweets from Keith Gill, aka "Roaring Kitty." So what's going on? How similar and how different was this move to what captivated the world's attention three years ago? On this episode of Lots More, we speak with Luke Kawa, markets editor at Sherwood Media,...

The Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission have taken an invigorated approach to antitrust under the Biden administration, targeting companies for labor issues like non-competes, in addition to looking at more traditional measures of anti-competitive behavior, like higher pricing. But how does an economist examine the impact of monopoly practices on the overall economy, or take int...

We’re taking The Big Take to Asia. Each week, Bloomberg’s Oanh Ha tells a story from the home of the world's most dynamic economies - and the markets, tycoons and businesses that drive the ever-shifting region.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Multi-strategy hedge funds are all the rage right now. But there's also a lot of confusion about what exactly they do, and how the the so-called "pod shops" differ from more traditional hedge funds. In this episode of the podcast, we speak with Giuseppe 'Gappy' Paleologo, a long-time veteran of the space. In addition to writing books about quantitative finance, Gappy was director of risk and quant...

Copper has long been touted as a big winner from the world's drive towards electrification. All those electric vehicles and new grids need lots of the metal to work. At the same time, since it takes years for new copper mining capacity to actually come on stream, many people expect a long-term shortage of the metal to materialize. But despite all that excitement, copper prices actually fell over t...

Pierre Andurand made his name trading oil and other energy-related assets, but wild swings in the price of cocoa have recently lured the founder of Andurand Capital Management into a new market. He bet on cocoa earlier this year and saw the trade pay off as the price of the beans surged to a record $12,000 a ton. Prices have since fallen back to around $7,800, but Andurand sees scope for further u...

This week, we'll get fresh inflation data in the US, which will inevitably feed into the Federal Reserve's future decisions to raise, hold or lower benchmark interest rates. Meanwhile, the Biden administration is preparing to announce new tariffs aimed at curbing Chinese imports in key industries, including electric vehicles, batteries and solar cells. On this episode, we speak to Odd Lots favorit...

There's a lot going on in currency markets and global trade at the moment. The Japanese yen has been falling, even after authorities seemed to intervene to try to arrest the slide. Meanwhile, weakness in the Chinese yuan has helped boost that country's exports and is fueling talk of a new "China Shock" for the rest of the world, even as its economy continues to grapple with slower economic growth...

Hugh Hendry says the world is brimming with risks right now, from Chinese deflation, to the strength of the US dollar, to unrealized losses in US Treasuries held by the bank. In the new episode of the podcast, we speak with the former manager of the Eclectica hedge fund, who now writes and operates under the Acid Capitalist branding. Hendry, who now resides in St. Bart's, says that the most import...

The Federal Reserve has a lot of official statistics it can look at to try and gauge the state of the overall economy. But there's also room for incorporating on-the-ground anecdotes and real-time color. When it comes to collecting this kind of information, Richmond Fed President Tom Barkin might be the biggest road warrior on the FOMC. In mid-April, Odd Lots tagged alongside Barkin as he undertoo...

In 2022, Congress passed the CHIPS Act, which set aside tens of billions of dollars in loans and grants in order to encourage companies to build new semiconductor fabs in the United States. We're still very early in the process. It's going to be a long time before we know if the US will become a major player again in the production of advanced chips. But the process is well underway and the bulk o...

Breakthroughs in generative AI have created enormous opportunities for humans to learn from computers. We can use them to explain the news, understand historical concepts, fix our coding errors, and so forth. But of course, AI also has to learn from human. The technology digests enormous amounts of written text, and often relies on human feedback to calibrate its models. Luis von Ahn has been at t...

In the past, the most expensive housing in any major city would be connected in some way to the economics of the city itself. If the general market was weak, the high end was also weak. If the general market was strong, then the high end was strong. But increasingly in cities like NYC, Aspen, Dubai, Miami, and elsewhere, the ultra high end exists in a different market, where the rich splash around...

When most investors think of due diligence, they think of sifting through years of financial statements and crunching numbers to better understand a company's potential. Not many people think about interrogating senior executives and employees, and asking the right questions to figure out whether they're telling the truth about the business model. In this episode, we speak with Phil 'Dick' Houston...

 AI is all the rage right now. There are billions of dollars now flowing into the space, with large and small companies all competing to create the next big thing. But in addition to lots of money, building new AI models requires top-tier researchers. So, who's attracting the best? And what does it take to be considered top talent in AI anyway? On this episode we speak with Damien Ma, managing dir...

Over the last year or so, probably every venture capitalist has become interested in artificial intelligence. So people are still figuring out what types of business models actually work, and who will end up making money in the space. Josh Wolfe has been at it for a long time. As a co-founder and managing partner at Lux Capital, he's been involved in a number of deals in the space, and is already...

At the end of 2023, there was a lot of optimism that the US economy was on that glide path to a soft landing. But at least in the first quarter of this year, inflation has come in hotter than expected. So is this just a speedbump on the way back down to 2%? Or is this a new trajectory for inflation that will make the Federal Reserve rethink its existing approach? On this bonus episode of Odd Lots,...

On June 2, 2024, Mexicans will go to the polls to elect a successor to current President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. His chosen successor, former Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum, is the odds-on favorite. But what is AMLO’s legacy exactly? In some sense, economic growth under his administration has been robust. On the other hand, there’s been very little progress on domestic security. He also...

Over the last few years, users of the popular ADHD drug Adderall have been frustrated by regular shortages in getting their prescriptions filled. Various regulatory and supply chain factors have contributed to the inability of producers to keep up with demand. But this raises the question: why is there so much demand in the first place? How did a significant chunk of the labor force -- from tech w...