Odd Lots
Episodes
The NYC Landlords Most Worried About Zohran Mamdani
21 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Probably the most controversial proposal from New York City Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani is his promise to freeze the rent on a substanti...
Why the Damage to Fed Independence May Have Already Been Done
19 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
There’s a long history of US presidents putting pressure on the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates, but the techniques have often been subt...
Mayor Eric Adams on the Future of New York City
18 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Incumbent NYC Mayor Eric Adams didn't run in the Democratic primary. But he'll be on the ballot in November, running as an independent against Zohran ...
What AI Is Already Doing to the Legal Industry
17 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
If there's one thing that lawyers do a lot of, it's spending a prodigious number of hours going through documents. And they're often very well compens...
Why US Banks Are Trying to Turn Themselves Into Super Apps
14 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Rohit Chopra is a former director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was created in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. In thi...
What NYC's Most Powerful CEOs Think About Zohran Mamdani
11 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
When socialist candidate Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic party's nomination for NYC mayor, top business leaders experienced a bout of hysteria. That...
How a Geopolitical Analyst Predicts the Outcome of War
10 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
For investors, geopolitical risks are always lurking as a factor that could upend trades for obvious reasons. When war breaks out, it's crucial to hav...
How You Get and Actually Keep a Job at a Multi-Strat Hedge Fund
07 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Multi-strategy hedge funds, composed of lots of individual portfolio managers, have seen assets under management boom in recent years, thanks to aston...
Emily Sundberg on How Nobody Is Coming to Save Gen Z
05 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What do young professionals in New York City actually think about money and capitalism? According to our guest Emily Sundberg, creator of the Feed Me ...
Nassim Taleb on Living a Good Life in an Age of Volatility
04 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Every day we're inundated with headlines that are seemingly unbelievable. Multiple major wars are ongoing. Politics is erratic. Markets are scrambling...
Charlie McElligott on How Long the Stock Market Rally Can Go
03 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Stocks plunged after the April 2 "Liberation Day," in one of the worst drawdowns in the market's history. Since then, however, we're basically back to...
The Greatest Ever Panel on the World's Most Important Market
02 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Okay, that's quite a title but we think it's justified! In this special episode — recorded live onstage at our June 26 event in New York City &m...
Robinhood's CEO on the Plan to Tokenize Everything
01 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Robinhood, the company known for first introducing commission-free trading, has now become a behemoth with all kinds of different business lines inclu...
Jim Chanos on the Nuttiness of 'Bitcoin Treasury Companies'
30 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
For awhile there was just MicroStrategy (which has since been renamed as Strategy.) It started buying Bitcoin, and then raised money to buy more Bitco...
The Biotech Start-Up Making Vaccines for Bees and Shrimp
28 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Think of a biotech company and most people will think of a business trying to come up with cures and treatments for human illnesses. There's not a lot...
Lots More on What's Going On in Iran's Markets
27 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Iran is a huge country with a sizable stock market. And yet, years of sanctions and other restrictions mean it’s tough to even look up its stock...
The Company That Wants To Bring Back Supersonic Jet Travel
26 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We talk all the time about the US attempting to become a powerhouse in advanced manufacturing, but a lot of it just sounds like talk that's not going ...
Zohran Mamdani, the Socialist Who Could Be NYC's New Mayor (Rerelease)
25 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Today's episode is a re-run of our interview from last month with Queens assemblyman Zohran Mamdani. On June 24, Mamdani won the first round of the De...
The Chinese Chip Giant That Could Be Nvidia's Biggest Threat
23 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Right now, Nvidia stock is back near its all-time highs, thanks to seemingly unquenchable demand for its AI chips. When it comes to profiting off of t...
Targeting Type 1 Diabetes (Sponsored Content)
22 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Madison Carter is a fearless investigative reporter. She takes no day for granted because she lives with type 1 diabetes (T1D). Dr. Doug Melton is a w...
Giuseppe Paleologo on Quant Investing at Multi-Strat Hedge Funds
21 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Quantitative investing is one of those terms that you hear all the time, but there's various explanations of what it actually means, or how quants act...
Zichen Wang's Exit Interview From America
20 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Zichen Wang is the writer of the Pekingnology newsletter, which translates important speeches and articles from China into English, and contextualize...
Gillian Tett on Complex Derivatives and the Fifth Stage of Capitalism
19 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
After the GFC, there was a lot of angst over the fact that so much effort and brainpower went into designing complex derivatives, and other financial ...
Jim Egan on the Mortgage Gap That's Dividing America
16 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Somehow, the American consumer remains quite strong. Despite higher interest rates, tariffs, general economic uncertainty and so forth, people are con...
The Big Gulf AI Deal That's Divided the White House
14 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Back in May, President Trump announced this big plan whereby American tech giants would participate in major AI projects in both Saudi Arabia and the ...
Trump Economic Advisor, Stephen Miran, on Tariffs and Tax Cuts
13 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Trump administration seems to have a lot of big ideas about reshaping America, including its economy. We've seen the unveiling (and delaying) of s...
Ricardo Hausmann on What it Takes to Win a Trade War
12 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The focus of Trump's trade policies is clearly China. There are tariffs on everyone, of course, but it's the growing Chinese manufacturing might, and ...
Vladislav Zubok on What the Cold War Actually Was
09 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
These days, it's common to talk about the emergence of a New Cold War that exists between the US and China. It's debatable whether or not this is a us...
Introducing: Everybody's Business
08 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Bloomberg Businessweek brings you a smart and fun chat show about all things...business. Hosted by award-winning business and economics journalists Ma...
A Major American Egg Farm Just Lost 90% of its Chickens
07 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Egg prices have come down a lot since their recent record and bird flu has largely faded from the headlines. But the epidemic is still raging and, per...
Lots More on What America's Busiest Port is Seeing from the Trade Tariffs
06 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We're about two months on from Liberation Day, and there's still a lot of confusion about what's going on with global trade. Some countries, like Chin...
Jersey City's Mayor on How the City Built So Much Housing
05 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
To some extent, at least in big cities, it feels as though the cost of housing is enveloping almost everything else in terms of politics right now. Bo...
Why It's So Hard for Apple to Move Production from China to India
02 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
President Trump wants Apple to make iPhones in America. The company itself has talked about — and to some extent already has been — moving...
How Do We Define a Currency?
31 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What is a currency? This turns out to be one of those questions we just kind of skip over because we don't have clear answers to it (and because econo...
Krishna Memani on Wall Street's Very Expensive "Free Lunch"
30 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We're told over and over again that the one "free lunch" in investing is diversification, and that you can improve your returns over time simply by in...
Michael Cembalest on Why AI Is the Stock Market Bet of the Century
29 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Michael Cembalest has been an investment analyst for almost 40 years and his research notes have drawn a cult following on Wall Street. He's known for...
Why Asset Allocators Love Multi-Strategy Hedge Funds
26 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Multi-strategy hedge funds have been having a moment with big asset allocators pouring billions of dollars into names like Millennium and Citadel. And...
Zohran Mamdani, the Socialist Who Could Be NYC's New Mayor
23 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We're just a month away from the hotly-contested Democratic primary for New York City Mayor. And one of the candidates -- Queens assemblyman Zohran Ma...
Why Interest Rates Are Shooting Up All Around the World
22 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
This week the big story in markets is the selloff in bonds. Yields on benchmark 10-year US Treasuries jumped 20 basis points from last Friday’s ...
Scott Bok on How Bankers Spread the Gospel of Capitalism
19 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
When we think about the prospect of deglobalization (whatever that means) we often think about it in terms of the goods economy. Supply chains get rer...
Atlanta Fed's Raphael Bostic on Monetary Policy During Extreme Uncertainty
16 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
This is obviously an extraordinarily difficult time to make economic forecasts. Nobody really knows how tariffs will affect the US economy. And beyond...
The Oil Industry's Double Whammy of Higher Costs and Lower Prices
15 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The new administration has a "drill, baby, drill" mantra and a much more liberal attitude towards the oil and gas industry than the last one. But that...
Perry Mehrling on Trump's Echoes of the Nixon Shock
14 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
There's been a lot of talk recently about parallels between Donald Trump's economic policies and the Nixon Shock of the early 1970s. That was when the...
Philip Diehl on the Booming Business of Gold Coins
12 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Gold prices have been booming and are near record highs. And seeing the line go up — especially during a period of so much uncertainty —&n...
Why the World Keeps Getting Shocked by China's Technological Progress
10 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Over the last several years, the world has watched as China edges close to or past the technological frontier in more and more areas. Earlier this yea...
Sarah LaFleur On the Existential Threat From the Tariffs
09 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
America's textile industry has famously declined over the years, with a bunch of production moving to lower-cost places like China, Vietnam, and Bangl...
How China Might Actually Handle a US Trade War
08 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
By now, everyone recognizes that the US and China are in the middle of a trade war, with the Trump administration having imposed tariffs of as much as...
The Tariff Buzzsaw Is Coming For Hardcore Gamers
07 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Every industry is going to be affected by the trade war in different ways. In many cases, we don't know how it's going to play out. Other industries a...
Brad Setser on the Big Surge in the Taiwanese Dollar
06 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
There are several markets that have really settled down since the tumult of early April. But strange, unusual things are still popping up, particularl...
Henry Blodget on AI, Dot-Coms, and What's Changed In 25 Years
05 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What does history say about how big the AI boom can get, and who will ultimately win out? When does a boom turn into a bubble that turns into a bust? ...
Chris Hughes on How to Craft a Thriving Market
03 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Over the last several years, both parties in the US have been drifting away from laissez-faire thinking about the economy, and more towards the view t...
What The 'Lentil King of Saskatchewan' Knows About World Trade
02 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We don't know what the end state for the tariffs are going to be, but inevitably there will be some shifts in the way that goods and dollars flow arou...
Blackstone's King of Hedge Funds on Alt Investing Right Now
01 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Everyone knows by now that college endowment funds have gone big on alternative investing, pouring billions of dollars into private equity and hedge f...
Some of America's Most Important Economic Data Is Decaying
30 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Gathering official economic data is a huge process in the best of times. But a bunch of different things have now combined to make that process even h...
What We Learned About Treasuries on the Night of April 8
28 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
When stocks are plunging in a typical market environment, people reach for safe haven assets like US Treasuries. But we've seen that phenomenon break ...
Lots More on How TikTok Options Traders Got Quiet
26 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Over the last few years, retail traders have gotten into options in a major way. Selling puts, buying calls, trading volatility — what used to b...
Anna Wong: Empty Shelves Are Coming Soon
25 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
If you look at most of the official hard data right now, there still isn't much evidence of a sharp downturn. Sure, all the surveys are abysmal, but t...
David Woo: What Trump Started is Worse Than a Trade War
24 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
For the most part, Americans haven't felt much pain yet from the tariffs that Donald Trump introduced (and then partially walked back) on April 2. The...
Big Take: What a Bacon, Egg and Cheese Teaches Us About the Economy
23 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
When it comes to measuring economic pain, the cost of a humble breakfast sandwich might not be top of mind. But Bloomberg has an index that tracks the...
This Is What President Biden's CHIPS Office Actually Did
23 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
One of the stated goals for the current trade war is to build more industrial capacity in the United States. So far there doesn't seem to be much of i...
Martin Wolf on Trump's Shakeup of the Global Order
21 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Martin Wolf has been called one of the world's most important economics commentators, and has for decades written in columns and his own books about t...
Here's Why Uncertainty Is An Economic Killer
20 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Here's Why is Bloomberg’s short explainer podcast, where we take one big news story and break it down in just a few minutes—with help from...
Why the Pentagon Fails Audits Year After Year After Year
19 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Last year, it was announced that the US Department of Defense had failed an audit for its seventh straight year, indicating an ongoing inability to tr...
Mitu Gulati on Whether Trump Could Restructure US Debt
18 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
US Treasuries are the most important market in the world. With some $29 trillion outstanding, they create the benchmark that informs basically every o...
Is This the End of the US Exceptionalism Trade?
17 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
For years and years now, there has been one winning trade: Go long the US versus the rest of the world. Thanks to tech dynamism and general pro-growth...
Javier Blas on China's Rare Earths Dominance
15 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Every time there is tension between the US and China, there are stories about China threatening to withhold exports of rare earth metals, which are su...
What an American Stove Maker Wants You to Know About US Manufacturing
14 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
One of the ironies of the tariffs is that, while ostensibly the goal is to reshore US manufacturing, it's actually been US makers of physical goods th...
Introducing: Stock Movers
13 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Check out the new Stock Movers Podcast from Bloomberg. Subscribe for five-minute reports on today's winners and losers in the stock market. Liste...
Jim Chanos on Who's Getting Caught Swimming Naked
12 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In a big bull market, people will overlook a lot. They'll suspend their disbelief. They'll buy into fantastical, unrealistic stories about the future....
Lots More on Why Neil Dutta Is Sticking With His Recession Call
11 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
On Wednesday, President Trump put a 90-day pause on reciprocal tariffs for every country except China. The market, which had been in a state of deep p...
Rob Kaplan on How the Fed Will Think about the Tariffs
10 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
On Wednesday, Trump pulled back from the brink on most of the reciprocal tariffs announced on April 2. The market surged. But we're still in an extrao...
Viktor Shvets on Trump's Historical, Revolutionary Moves
09 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How should we make sense of the Trump tariffs? They've been terrible for the stock market, obviously. Small businesses seem to hate them. Energy compa...
What Tariffs Are Doing to North American Freight
08 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Amidst Trump's dramatic tariff moves, trade in North America remains uncertain. The USMCA hasn't been completely ripped up, but the region is anxiousl...
What Trump's Tariffs Are Already Doing to World Trade
07 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
It was just last Wednesday that President Trump announced his new tariff schedule with the rest of the world. And it's already having an effect. Compa...
Tether's CEO Speaks on His Insanely Profitable Business
07 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Anything crypto-related is frequently greeted with a high degree of skepticism. Within that, one of the most controversial companies for a long time h...
Brad Setser on the Damage From Trump's Gigantic Tariff Shock
05 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
He needs no introduction: When trade is in the news, we speak with Brad Setser of the Council on Foreign Relations. Brad has been talking for awhile a...
Lots More on a Massive, Historical, Stagflationary Shock
04 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
On Wednesday, President Trump unveiled sweeping tariffs against almost every country in the world. The size and scope was far beyond what anyone was a...
Tim Geithner on How to Fight the Next Financial Crisis
03 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The 2008 financial crisis is fading into history, but the risks of something big happening again remain. In this episode, we speak with Tim Geithner, ...
The Growing Risk to Fed Independence That Wall St Isn't Watching
01 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Last month, Donald Trump fired the Federal Trade Commission's two Democratic commissioners. They have since filed suit, arguing that the law that crea...
Nick Denton's Big Bet Against the United States
31 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Legendary media mogul Nick Denton, the founder of Gawker, is done with the US. He’s leaving New York City for good, and moving with his family t...
The Last Time Investors Really Got Excited For Tech Infrastructure
28 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
One of the biggest questions hanging over the market right now is whether or not the seemingly unlimited appetite for more AI data center spending is ...
Why Brad Jacobs Is Spending $11 Billion on a Roofing Supply Business
27 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Brad Jacobs has made a fortune in his career buying and building big logistics companies, like United Rentals, Waste Management, XPO (trucking company...
Jim Millstein on the Massive Risks of Any 'Mar-a-Lago Accord'
24 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
President Trump wants higher tariffs, and he also wants more industrial production in the United States. This we know. In the meantime, a coterie of e...
Lots More With Charlie McElligott on the Sharp, Strange Selloff
21 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Last week, the US market sold off sharply. The S&P 500 fell as much as 3.6% on Monday alone, entering technical correction territory. Momentum tra...
The Great Jones Act Debate
20 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We finally did it. We finally did an episode on the Jones Act. For years on the podcast, we've been referencing this controversial law from 1920, whic...
FTC Chief Andrew Ferguson on the Trump Vision for Antitrust
17 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
When Donald Trump won in November, one of the things that Wall Street was excited about was an expected liberalization of merger rules. There was a po...
The Original Prediction Market Was Betting on the Pope
14 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Prediction markets are everywhere nowadays. You can go online and bet on political outcomes, or the weather, or how long Taylor Swift will stay togeth...
Is There an Extremely Simple Fix for Affordable Housing?
13 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Housing affordability remains one of the single greatest sources of economic stress. Even if inflation measures were to come down, the simple cost of ...
Cathie Wood on What Comes Next in AI and Big Tech
11 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Markets have been selling off, with shares of tech companies like Nvidia down almost 20% so far this year. But even before the recent selloff, DeepSee...
Here Comes the Booming Chinese Biotech Sector
10 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
You’ve heard about Chinese EVs. You’ve heard about Chinese batteries and solar panels. And recently you learned that China is near the cut...
Trump's NIH Cuts Send Shockwaves Through the Science World
08 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
One of the first moves made by the Trump administration was to change the nature of grants made by the National Institutes of Health. Under the new po...
We Just Saw Europe's Biggest Week in Decades
07 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
This week was a busy one and some of the most interesting things that happened came out of Europe, where policymakers announced up to €800 billio...
Eugene Fama and David Booth on the Birth of Modern Finance
06 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The 1970s were a pretty eventful time in markets. There was high inflation, the end of the gold standard, and a stock market crash. There was also a b...
Ray Dalio on the Coming Crisis in US Debt
03 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Almost whichever way you measure it, the US has a lot of debt. And, with the Trump administration recently proposing a budget that would see US debt l...
Lots More on the Growing Risks to the US Labor Market
28 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A week from today we will get the February jobs report and there are growing concerns that the US labor market is slowing. Already, the number of sect...
Goldman's Jared Cohen and George Lee on the Unprecedented Shocks in Geopolitics
27 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The first month of the Trump administration has been noisy and novel by basically any measure. But perhaps the biggest shockwaves have been in the rea...
Jim Bianco on What a 'Mar-a-Lago Accord' Could Mean for the Economy
25 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The so-called “Mar-a-Lago Accord” has suddenly become a hot topic on Wall Street, with some investors and analysts starting to take the id...
Here's What It Takes to Make a Great Company
24 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
People love listening to stories about making it big, and there are no shortage of success stories in the world of global business. There's TSMC, whic...
How Banks Turned Into Giant Synthetic Hedge Funds
21 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Hedge funds are notorious for making big and sometimes risky trades. Banks, meanwhile, are supposed to be a lot more boring by comparison — for ...
The Plan to Get America Building Big Ships Again
20 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The US is a dominant force in a number of important industries, but it's been lagging behind in one crucial area: shipbuilding. Today, there are about...