Odd Lots

The hunt is on for a clinical therapy to prevent or treat COVID-19. But what’s the best way to go about this? How can governments accelerate this process? And what can governments do now to help a robust economic recovery? On this week’s Odd Lots, we speak with Bill Janeway, an economist and venture capitalist, who has written extensively on how the government can accelerate innovation by the priv...

In 2018, Columbia history professor Adam Tooze published his magisterial work “Crashed”, which framed the Great Financial Crisis as essentially a crisis of the global dollar system (as opposed to merely a housing bubble). Now we’re experiencing numerous systemic frailties all at the same time, amid extraordinary difficult times for the real economy, the financial system, and virtually every govern...

The fate of the economy remains extremely unclear. However there is little doubt that the Fed has taken dramatic steps to arrest the crisis. Not only has Jerome Powell’s Federal Reserve dusted off old tools that were designed during the last crisis, it’s engaged in unconventional actions, such as lending directly to municipal authorities, as well as becoming a player in the market for private sect...

With major economies around the world coming to a screeching halt, emerging markets are in a squeeze of historic proportions. Not only are they being buffeted by a domestic health crisis, but export industries are getting clobbered at the same time as access to dollars is drying up. On this episode, we speak with Brad Setser of the Council on Foreign Relations on the historic nature of this episod...

Commerce and payments are increasingly digital. This shift from physical to electronic is one that governments and businesses are eager to accelerate for a host of reasons. But what gets lost when we no longer have access to physical cash? On this episode, we speak with Rohan Grey, President of The Modern Money Network and the research director of the Digital Fiat Currency Institute about how gove...

At the end of March, Congress passed the CARES Act in an attempt to mitigate some of the massive economic devastation being caused by the coronavirus crisis. A key piece of the legislation includes grants for small businesses that keep employees on their payroll during the emergency. On this episode, we speak with Florida Senator Marco Rubio about the program, what's working, what isn't, and what...

With the U.S. economy going into a deep slump, the Federal government has attempted to counteract the pain by increasing spending. But for cities and states, it’s virtually impossible for them to run counter-cyclical fiscal policy. Furthermore, the crisis is draining local coffers due to public health expenditure and the collapse of tax revenue. This has already led to the start of a state and loc...

Earlier this year on Odd Lots, we did an episode about Korean structured investment products that were sold to retail investors, whose performance was tied to various market indices around the world. Crucially, those payouts were premised on there not being a major crash in those world markets. Obviously, we’ve seen quite the crash. So, for this week’s episode, we’ve gone back to Benn Eifert, the...

The commercial real estate market has been clobbered in this crisis, as restaurants and stores virtually shut down entirely throughout the month of March. On this week’s Odd Lots episode, we speak to Tom Barrack, the CEO of Colony Capital, on the crisis facing the industry, and what he feels needs to be done further to prevent the industry from going into a tailspin. See omnystudio.com/listener fo...

The plumbing of the financial system is coming under strain like never before. On this week’s podcast, we speak with two legendary experts on how the money system works: Zoltan Pozsar of Credit Suisse and Perry Mehrling of the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies. They explain the extreme level of stress we’re seeing, what the Fed has done to alleviate, what more needs to be done, and what...

In normal times, U.S. Treasuries are the ultimate safe haven. They are highly liquid and guaranteed to pay out. So when people want to hide out during periods of economic and financial market volatility, you can typically count on there being a strong bid for them. But in the last couple of weeks, the volatility has been so extreme, and the flight-to-cash so severe, that the market stopped behavin...

For a long time, people have been warning that corporate debt could be the major source of vulnerability in today's economy. And the market meltdown that we've been seeing since the beginning of March could make those fears a reality. On this week's podcast, we speak with frequent Odd Lots guest Chris White of Viable Markets, on how the extreme search for yield in recent years, combined with massi...

Markets around the world are so extremely volatile that nobody can think of any perfect precedent. There are shades of the Great Recession, 1987, the period in the wake of 9/11, and other moments of extreme turbulence. This week's special episode was recorded on Monday March 16 with Naufal Sanaullah, a macro strategist at EIA All Weather Alpha Partners. He walked us through his thinking on the mar...

Saudi Arabia recently announced that it was engaging in a full-on price war by pumping oil like crazy. At one point, after the move, the price of Brent Crude plunged 31%. This was a body blow to U.S. shale companies, who are already reeling from falling prices and tightening credit markets. On this week's episode of Odd Lots, we speak with Buddy Clark, a Houston lawyer at the offices of Haynes and...

The U.S. is on the verge of an economic crisis due to the coronavirus, as people and businesses aggressively pull back on spending. On this week's Odd Lots podcast, we speak with Claudia Sahm, the director of Macroeconomic Policy at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, about what the government can be doing right now to stop a recession. Claudia has done extensive research on exactly this t...

Questions continue to arise over the effect of passive investing, and whether or not it's somehow distorting the market. On this week's episode, we speak to Vincent Deluard, the Director of Global Macro for INTL FCStone Inc., who argues that the endless bid for ETFs have helped fuel a bubble in megacap stocks, which continue to outperform the market. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy informa...

In recent weeks, before the stock market plunged, a page on reddit called r/WallStreetBets suddenly started exhibiting enormous influence on a handful of stocks. The emergence of online chat rooms making huge wagers in the market calls to mind the message boards of the dotcom era. But this page is taking it to a new level. On this week's episode, we're joined by Bloomberg News reporter Luke Kawa,...

There are lots of famous debt crises in history, but the story of Iraq's government debt build-up in the 1980s and subsequent restructuring in the early 2000s is probably one of the most unusual. Iraq transformed from a net creditor to a net borrower in a single decade, tapping a bunch of unusual sources (including funds linked to the CIA) for money to finance war against Iran. All that borrowing...

Apple's recent revenue warning reminded the world of how exposed the company is to China, and in particular its factories. As the coronavirus continues to shutter huge swaths of the Chinese economy, this is a potential risk for numerous companies beyond just Apple. On this week's Odd Lots podcast, we speak with Dan Wang, a China tech industry analyst at Gavekal Dragonomics about how this, along wi...

One of the best recent movies was Uncut Gems, in which Adam Sandler plays a Diamond District jeweler with an addiction to gambling and risk. It turns out, one of the workers in Sandler's shop was played by an actual, real-life jewelry dealer. On this week's episode, we speak with Maksud Agadjani, the founder and owner of TraxNYC, which sells a range of items, from traditional bracelets and necklac...

Back in 2017, the World Bank issued the world's first pandemic bonds. The bonds are meant to shift some of the financial risk of a global pandemic on to investors, but they've been criticized for having 'triggers' that are too tough to generate payouts. Now, as the coronavirus outbreak continues to spread, it's worth looking at how these bonds are structured and what they can tell us about the fut...

Over the last decade or so, we've seen an incredible rise in so-called passive investing. While definitions differ over what this means, we've seen more and more money poured into index funds (which own every stock in a given basket). Meanwhile, money has been yanked away from money managers who attempt to select individual stocks. One school of thought argues that this is a positive, in part due...

There's a growing consensus that governments need to act more aggressively in using fiscal policy to stave off the next recession, and that monetary policy simply isn't powerful enough. But how do you actually go about it? What do you spend the money on, and how do you get politicians to disburse it in a timely manner? On this week's Odd Lots, we speak with Claudia Sahm, a former Fed economist who...

Even to this day, there are economists who don't understand money or don't think that money is an important aspect of the economy. They see the world as still operating essentially under a barter system, with money only there as a means of lubricating transactions. But this is precisely the opposite way you should be looking at things, according to this week's guest. Perry Mehrling is a Professor...

At the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, there was a lot of talk about the need to change the world's energy usage in order to address climate change. While it's easy to get cynical about business leaders and politicians talking about sustainability on a mountaintop in Switzerland, it turns out that a lot is already happening right now. On the latest Odd Lots episode, we speak with journalist...