Odd Lots

The vast majority of urban apartments in the US are geared towards single occupants, couples without kids or maybe young professionals with roommates. It's hard to find apartments with the kind of layout that would fit families. Anyone who's gone looking for that type of space is probably familiar with bedrooms that look and feel like closets, or if you do find an apartment that has multiple good-...

The Federal Reserve has been raising benchmark borrowing rates at the fastest pace in decades, but the interest rate paid out to millions of people with bank accounts is still stuck at almost zero. According to data from Bankrate, the average interest rate on savings accounts is just 0.23%. So what's going on? Why have many banks so far avoided raising what they pay out to depositors even as the F...

It's been one year since Russia invaded Ukraine in an event that set off a chain reaction of both geopolitical and economic consequences. So what have we learned from the past twelve months? And what is the future of this ongoing conflict? On this episode, we speak with Robert Papp, a retired senior executive at the CIA about what to watch when it comes to the weeks and months ahead. Before joinin...

President Biden came into office with an incredibly slim legislative majority. And yet despite just 50 Democratic seats in the Senate, the first two years of Biden's Presidency saw the passage of some extremely ambitious laws. The potential exists for the infrastructure bill, the CHIPS Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act to reshape the economy in ways that we haven't seen in a long time. Brian De...

The US is in the middle of another debt ceiling fight. The expectation is that it will get lifted before we hit the so called "drop dead" date — but what happens if Congress does not authorize more debt financing? What are the options for the government? Does this automatically lead to default? And if the US does default on its debt, what does that mean for the financial system and the real econom...

The US labor market looks rock solid. The unemployment rate is at its lowest level in 50 years, while layoffs continue to trend downward. But there's one glaring exception and that's the tech industry. Nearly every major tech company has announced layoffs in the last few months, which is exactly the opposite of how things played out over the last decade, when the sector was a bright spot in an oth...

In the wake of the Great Financial Crisis, the work of John Maynard Keynes experienced a revival, as people sought answers to the problem of sluggish growth. In this cycle, sluggish growth isn't the problem. If anything, you hear business leaders and central bankers talking about the labor market being "too hot," and the need for the unemployment rate to rise. So what explains the current dynamic?...

The new season of Bloomberg's Foundering podcast retraces the life and gruesome death of John McAfee. In the 1980s and ’90s, the McAfee name was synonymous with computer antivirus software, and he helped establish the modern cybersecurity industry. But afterward, his life took a strange and dark turn. He was accused of murder, an allegation he denied, and then went on the lam. He sought to reinven...

The Federal Reserve raised interest rates at the fastest pace in decades in 2022. But despite the rapid shift in borrowing costs, not much in the financial system actually 'broke.' Stocks and other risk assets went down, but aside from a few issues like the gilt market drama in October, we didn't see a big systemic event. On this episode of Odd Lots, which was recorded live at the Credit Market St...

After a decade of dominance, 2022 saw tech stocks badly underperform the rest of the market. However, so far in 2023, tech stocks and other speculations have surged again. According to Steve Eisman, what we're seeing is the natural process by which a "paradigm shift" is playing out in stocks. Eisman, a portfolio manager at Neuberger Berman, won big betting against CDOs during the Great Financial C...

It was looking bad there for awhile for Team Transitory. Anyone who had previously even uttered the word "transitory" in regards to inflation was regretting having used it. But lately the term is creeping back in, particularly as inflation decelerates while the unemployment rate remains low. So was the transitory perspective right all along? And is the fabled "soft landing" actually here? Macquari...

Rent inflation went wild in 2021 and 2022, turning it into one of the most substantial drivers of overall inflation. But good news: it seems pretty clear that rents are now finally falling. Private sector measures, from companies like Apartment List and Zillow are starting to show a clear decline. So what's changed? How hard could rents drop? And could a renter in a place like New York City actual...

Southwest Airlines had a disastrous holiday season, thanks in part to a software bug that left crews out of place and grounded thousands of flights. But Southwest isn't alone in having software in the headlines lately. The New York Stock Exchange recently had a software error that caused weird pricing on stocks and the FAA had its own computer issue that grounded planes earlier this month. So what...

The price of eggs rose 60% in 2022, as measured by the Consumer Price Index. Meanwhile, wholesale egg prices are up 300% in the last year, creating a chart that looks almost parabolic. So what's going on? And is there any relief in sight? On this episode, we speak with Glenn Hickman, president of Hickman's Family Farms , an Arizona egg farm with roughly 10 million chickens. Glenn explains why egg...

Over the last year, numerous things have gone wrong for the crypto industry. (Too many to list.) But one thing we've learned is that there's an incredibly high degree of interconnectedness between various firms, all borrowing and lending from each other in a way that created a tremendous amount of fragility. A key entity in all this is GBTC, the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, which was one of the first...

In economics, there tends to be two dominant ways of thinking about inflation. Either you agree with Milton Friedman, who described inflation as always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon (the result of too much money printing). Or you're more of a New Keynesian who thinks that higher prices are all about the relationship between demand and capacity. In a new paper inspired by Odd Lots and the se...

While electric vehicle use is growing rapidly, the internal combustion engine remains completely dominant in the world of heavy trucks. At some point in the future, Tesla has a plan to commercialize an electric semi, but nobody really knows when. Meanwhile, other entities are looking to compete in the world of industrial vehicles. Chace Barber is a former trucker in the logging industry, which has...

The discount window at the Federal Reserve allows banks to borrow money at an above-market rate in exchange for high-quality collateral. The facility is always available to use, but typically nobody does. Not only is the borrowing costlier, there's also a "stigma" associated with its usage, since the perception is that if you use it your institution might be in some kind of financial distress. So...

The most recent jobs report has revived talk that the US economy might pull off the fabled "soft landing." Jobs are still growing nicely and the unemployment rate is at a 50-year low. But wages are decelerating and there are reasons to think that inflation is rolling over as well. So can Jerome Powell & Co. smoothly land the plane, so to speak? On this episode of Odd Lots we speak with Neil Du...

Thanks to work from home, and other trends, workers are being electronically monitored by their bosses like never before. But some industries have had experience with this for awhile. Truck drivers, in particular, have been under legally-required electronic monitoring for several years now. Not only are their hours and miles electronically logged, increasingly they're subject to facial cameras and...

Back in early 2021, Ryan Petersen was one of the first people we spoke to on the Odd Lots podcast about supply chain snarls and high shipping costs. The founder and co-CEO of Flexport has since gone on to become a go-to name in the world of logistics, making headlines after he tweeted about what could be done to fix congestion at the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles. (A Bloomberg Opinion column...

In this special episode, Tracy and Joe reach into the mailbag and take some questions about Odd Lots, and the things regularly covered on the show. We also hear from our producer Carmen Rodriguez, who joins as a guest host for the episode. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Odd Lots is seven years old now, having started in late 2015. When it began, we really didn't know what the show was going to be or be about. To end 2022, we decided to revisit our very first episode, when we interviewed our legendary Bloomberg colleague Tom Keene. We talked about how he got into the business, his musical career, hockey, mutual funds, and how he learned to do charts. But we begin...

Plastic is in almost everything and prices of polypropylene, polyethylene and a host of other polymers went nuts in 2021, surging to record highs. Now they've come crashing back down to Earth and have reached a two-year low. So what happened to send the price of plastics surging, and why are they falling now? Were plastics a perhaps under-appreciated source of inflation given that they go into pra...

We talk a lot about macroeconomic trends on the podcast. What's happening with inflation? Is the labor market too hot? Will there be a recession next year? On this episode of Odd Lots, we take a closer look at how one business is dealing with these economic trends right now, and what its experience says about the economy as a whole. Ken Jarosch is the owner of Jarosch Bakery, which has been operat...