Odd Lots

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Latest Episodes:

What Ben McKenzie Learned When He Started Investigating Crypto Jun 29, 2023

Show notes

When the pandemic struck in 2020, the actor Ben McKenzie (who you might know from The OC and Gotham) had a lot of time on his hands. And like a lot of people, he suddenly got interested in crypto when an old friend of his pushed him to buy some Bitcoin. But unlike a lot of other people, McKenzie didn't rush out to buy it. Instead, he dusted off his old economics degree and decided to learn about how the industry really works. And what he learned shocked him. So he (along with his co-author Jacob Silverman) spent the last few years writing a new book titled Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and The Golden Age Of Fraud. In an interview conducted live at the Bloomberg Invest summit, McKenzie explains why he thinks the industry is rotten and corrupt and designed in a way to enrich a small group of insiders at the expense of a large, misinformed and desperate public.

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James Montier Explains Why Corporate Profits Keep Going Up Jun 26, 2023

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More than a decade ago, GMO strategist James Montier published a paper predicting that corporate profit margins were destined to come down from "nosebleed" levels. Fast forward to 2023, and it's clear that hasn't happened as profit margins remain far above their long-term average. On this episode of the Odd Lots podcast, Montier explains what he got wrong back in 2012, why corporate profits have remained so stubbornly high, and what this could mean for stock valuations now. He also discusses the ongoing debate over whether high corporate earnings are fueling inflation, as well as revisiting the work of economist Michael Kalecki.

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Why Saudi Arabia Is Spending Millions on Soccer Stars Jun 23, 2023

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Saudi Arabia has been spending hundreds of millions of dollars snapping up international soccer stars in recent months, including legendary players like Cristiano Ronaldo and Karim Benzema, to boost the rosters of its Saudi Pro League. It's not the first time we've seen a country spend a lot of money to try to build up a domestic sports league, but it does have some key differences to previous attempts like we've seen in China, or in the US with Major League Soccer. For a start, the kingdom is spending a lot of money, opening up thorny questions about competition worldwide and Financial Fair Play rules in Europe, specifically. More importantly, it's also doing this at a governmental scale, with the kingdom's sovereign wealth fund and state-owned oil giant taking active roles. So what exactly is Saudi Arabia trying to accomplish and will it succeed? And what does this huge influx of money mean for soccer in the rest of the world? On this episode, we speak with Michael Caley and Mike Goodman, co-hosts of the Double Pivot Podcast, to discuss the big business of football and why turning a profit is not always the primary goal.

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This Is How Finance and Banking Worked Before Computers Jun 22, 2023

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We're used to thinking of modern finance as practically synonymous with computers. Banks are basically just big collections of Excel spreadsheets, keeping track of who owes what to whom. And most trading nowadays is done by clicking a button on a screen. But how did all this work before we had this type of technology? And what can previous technological revolutions tell us about the direction of new ones, such as the potential deployment of artificial intelligence? In this episode, we speak with Anne Murphy, history professor at the University of Portsmouth and the author of Virtuous Bankers: A Day in the Life of the Eighteenth-Century Bank of England, as well as John Handel, postdoctoral fellow at the University of Virginia McIntire School of Commerce. They walk us through just how banking and finance was done in the days before computers, telephones and even the telegraph.

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Josh Younger on the Surprising Origins of Eurodollars and Petrodollars Jun 19, 2023

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De-dollarization is all the rage right now, with lots of talk about whether the US currency will be able to maintain its dominant status in the global financial system. But regardless of what happens in the future, it's worth asking how we got to this point originally. How is it that the dollar came to dominate not just global trade flows but also became the currency of choice for things like buying oil? And why are there large pools of eurodollars sitting outside the United States? In this episode, we speak with Josh Younger, formerly of JPMorgan Chase and now a senior adviser at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, about the surprising policy decisions that went into creating eurodollars and petrodollars, and why they matter now.

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Steve Eisman on Banks, AI and His Next Big Bet Jun 16, 2023

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Steve Eisman is known for having bet against the housing market prior to the Great Financial Crisis in a trade immortalized by Michael Lewis in The Big Short. So what is he betting on now? In a special live episode of Odd Lots, recorded at the Bloomberg Invest summit, the Neuberger Berman portfolio manager discusses the recent banking turmoil (he thinks it's contained), the boom in anything related to AI, and his current bets on US manufacturing and infrastructure. He also talks about investing in rewiring the nation's electricity grid and why he thinks this theme has years left to play out.

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The Eyeball-Scanning Plan Designed to Save Us From AI Jun 15, 2023

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There are all kinds of societal concerns emerging out of the rise of artificial intelligence. Will it put us all out of work? Will fraudsters be able to use deepfakes — technology that can replicate our images and our voices — to scam us? We're in uncharted territory and nobody knows for sure how society will negotiate these risks. While many people are familiar with ChatGPT, its founder Sam Altman also co-founded Worldcoin, which aims to mitigate these risks. Enter: The Orb, an eyeball-scanning device that could provide everyone with a unique personal identifier. Think a global social security number, except you never have to share what it is with anyone. On this episode, we speak with Alex Blania, the CEO and co-founder of Tools For Humanity, the developer behind the Orb and the Worldcoin project, on his company's vision for how this tech can be used for things like proving one's humanness or collecting a Universal Basic Income in a world where AI predominates.

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This Is What Happens When Governments Build Software Jun 12, 2023

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There's a lot of frustration about the government's ability to build things in the US. Subways. Bridges. High-speed rail. Electricity transmission. But there's another crucial area where the public sector often struggles, and that is software. We saw it with the infamous rollout of Obamacare. We see it in the UX of the Treasury Direct website. And we saw it in the way state unemployment insurance systems broke during the pandemic. So why is it so hard for the public sector to build and maintain software? On this episode we speak with Jennifer Pahlka, the founder and former executive director of Code for America and author of the new book Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better, as well as Dave Guarino, who recently left the Department of Labor after working on upgrading the unemployment insurance system. Both have a long history of working on public sector software systems and they explain why the problem is so tricky.

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Brad Setser on How World Trade Changed In the Last Three Years Jun 09, 2023

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A lot has happened since we last spoke to Brad Setser in April 2020, towards the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. For a start, Setser was appointed to be a trade advisor in the Biden administration during a period of immense disruption. There was lots of talk about a potential reshuffling of the way the global economy works, and things like nearshoring and deglobalization. But some big predictions for the way world trade will function haven't come to fruition. For instance, the US is still running a current account deficit and China is still running a current account surplus. So in this episode, Setser returns to discuss what has and hasn't changed in global trade in the last three years. He's left the Biden administration and returned to the Council on Foreign Relations, where he's a senior fellow. He talks about everything from the US-China trade imbalance to the impact of sanctions on the world economy to China's electric vehicle and plane production, plus the future of the dollar.

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Isabella Weber on the Big Rethink of Inflation Jun 08, 2023

Show notes

Earlier this year, Odd Lots talked about the idea of companies taking advantage of bottlenecks and other disruptions to raise their prices. Since then, the notion of this type of corporate-led inflation has burst into the public discourse with central bankers and politicians all taking a closer look. But how does this type of inflation differ from more traditional economic interpretations of prices, and what are the implications for monetary and economic policy? In this episode, we talk once again to Isabella Weber, the UMass-Amherst economics professor who dubbed this phenomenon "sellers' inflation" in a paper published earlier this year. She talks about how the way we think about inflation is changing and her own experience of seeing public attitudes shift in real time.

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