Bethany McLean
speaker
391 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 2 Aug
Bethany McLean’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
your index fund isn't your index fund anymore.
Meaning that the S&P 500 index funds are heavily weighted toward the hyperscalers, so your index fund is a bet on the AI economy.
So if you think that your index fund is still helping you profit from a broad swath of the market, it's not.
Yeah.
And I think it's a really important issue for today because it's one that Kevin Walsh, the new Fed chair, is going to have to contend with.
There's much discussed is this issue of political independence, the Fed being independent from politicians.
Less discussed is the issue of financial dependence, the Fed being independent from Wall Street.
And the reality is, is that the Fed did not intend it this way.
But over the past couple of decades, going back to maybe even earlier, the bailout of this big hedge fund called Long-Term Capital Management, the Fed has been more and more a captive of Wall Street.
in that the Fed is afraid to let the market break.
And so the pandemic, you can argue that's exactly what the Fed needed to do because the market was breaking.
But nonetheless, it provided reassurance to Wall Street that when the proverbial whatever hits the fan, the Fed will always step in.
And that kind of belief in a backstop is what people call moral hazard.
And I think that it is not great.
And
I think it is a big risk for our financial system because every time the Fed pushes the boundaries of what it can do and pushes them further and further and further.
And the question is, how much further can they be pushed because the bailouts keep getting bigger in size?
So I think that's a real risk.
And the problem with that sort of policy is that it does benefit the big and the well-off, not the small and the less well-off.
So Fed policy really benefited big corporations that needed access to the debt market in the pandemic.
Showing 1–20 of 391 · page 1 of 20
Next →