Odd Lots

Last year, when we talked to Martin Wolf, the global order seemed like it was being upended after President Trump unveiled his sweeping tariffs against nearly every US trading partner. A lot has happened since then. In fact, April 2025 seems almost quaint when compared to 2026 so far, from the Supreme Court's tariff ruling to the US-Israel war with Iran. The war's effect on the world's economy is at once stunning and utterly strange: even as the prices of major commodities — oil chief among them — rise, the markets seem unaffected, closing at record levels in recent weeks. Today we speak with Wolf, the chief economics commentator for the Financial Times, about all this chaos and why, so far, it seems disconnected from the logic of the market. There is, he says, a great deal of ruin in the world economy, but growth remains a constant fact of life. Why is that? There's no straightforward answer, but to begin understanding how we got here, Wolf takes us to the early 20th century and paints us a picture of the world after the two World Wars. We also talk about the "terrifying" power that the US wields over the globe, how a fragmented Europe is navigating anxious relationships with both the US and China, the Faustian bargain AI represents, and much more. Read more:Oil Inventories Falling at Record Pace on Iran War, IEA SaysUndersea Internet Cable Projects Are Getting Tangled in the Iran War Only http://Bloomberg.com subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox each week, plus unlimited access to the site and app. Subscribe at  bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots Subscribe to the Odd Lots NewsletterJoin the conversation: discord.gg/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In 2006, then-Senator Ted Stevens coined an infamous term for how to understand the internet: It's a "series of tubes." The funny thing is, that's a fairly accurate description. Underneath the world's oceans, miles and miles of fiber optic-cables send packets of information from one location to the next, serving as the backbone of the internet as know it. This infrastructure is delicate, too: Memorably, a 2022 volcanic eruption cut off the island of Tonga from web access for an extended period of time. Journalist Samanth Subramanian is the author of The Web Beneath the Waves: The Fragile Cables That Connect Our World, a book that explains, in detail, that the internet is not, and has never been, truly weightless or wireless. In fact, the system in place right now is pretty old school and resembles the telegraph cable network of yore. We talk to Subramanian about the strange contradictions of the undersea cable system, how much basic marine geography — like the Strait of Hormuz or the Suez Canal — informs where cables are laid, and how hard it is protect this vulnerable and vital infrastructure. Subscribe to the Odd Lots NewsletterJoin the conversation: discord.gg/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ever since Covid, central banks around the world have had the same problem. They have tools that are designed to modulate demand, but so many challenges have involved the supply side of the economy. Whether we're talking about supply chain disruptions, the war in Ukraine, and now the war in Iran, these are all issues for which monetary policy is of limited value. Of course, the temptation is to "look through" these events, recognizing the fact that these disruptions don't say much about the actual underlying state of the economy. But when we get one shock after another, it gets harder and harder to keep using words like "transitory." On this episode we speak with Megan Greene, an external member of the Monetary Policy Committee at the Bank of England. We talk about the compounding effects of all these shocks (including the trade war and Brexit), how she's thinking about the first- and second-order effects of each, and why for now, despite the underlying weakness of the UK economy, she remains squarely focused on the risks of higher inflation. Subscribe to the Odd Lots NewsletterJoin the conversation: discord.gg/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today's guest Mariana Mazzucato is one of our most requested. Mazzucato, a professor of economics at University College London and the founding director of its Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, specializes in the political economy of technological development and public sector investment. In our conversation, recorded in Madrid while at the Bloomberg CityLab conference, she explains her concept of the "mission economy," her definition of state capacity, how to prevent top talent from fleeing to the private sector, and whether consultants or governments should be blamed for inefficiencies and civic failures. It's a wide-ranging interview, one that covers everything from the initial public financing of Silicon Valley algorithms to the history of moonshots.Subscribe to the Odd Lots NewsletterJoin the conversation: discord.gg/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The residents of Allentown are still sore about that Billy Joel song. While it's true the Pennsylvania city became synonymous with deindustrialization after the US steel industry began its decline in the 1970s, Allentown should be known for more: In the 1950s, for instance, some of the first mass-produced transistors were made in the city, which were the precursor of today's semiconductors. The city is also a unique logistics and e-commerce hub — it's a day's drive from nearly 40 percent of the US population. Mayor Matthew Tuerk, who has held office since 2022, has made reindustrialization a focus of his mayorship. In today's episode, recorded in Madrid at the Bloomberg CityLab conference, we speak to Mayor Tuerk about the city's grand strategy for building back and sustaining its manufacturing base, implementing industrial policy on a local level, how rezoning has changed in the last decade, the political puzzle of data centers, recruiting companies to come to Allentown, de-risking the American supply chain, and our favorite new category of industry — weight-gaining industries — which Allentown specializes in. Read more:New Brookfield Venture May Restart Abandoned US Nuclear ProjectTexas Ranch Lures Futuristic Startups to Revive US ManufacturingSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Since Mayor Brandon Scott took office in 2020, he's fixated on a very visible problem in Baltimore: the tens of thousands of vacant homes that dot the city. It's hard to build new houses when there are so many that sit empty and unused. And the process of tracking down owners, convincing them to sell their vacant properties, and then converting those homes into usable housing supply is a tall task. In the last few years, the number of vacant homes in Baltimore has dropped from 16,000 to just over 11,800. On this episode — recorded in Madrid while we attended the Bloomberg CityLab conference — we speak to Mayor Scott about deindustrialization, redlining, and gun violence's historical effects on the current housing crisis, how his government identifies, block-by-block, redevelopment opportunities and matches projects with publicly-minded developers, and why Baltimore natives aren't huge fans of The Wire. Subscribe to the Odd Lots NewsletterJoin the conversation: discord.gg/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Two years ago, Citadel's Ken Griffin paid almost $45 million for a stegosaurus skeleton, making it the most expensive fossil ever sold at auction. So why are dinosaur bones joining the collections of millionaires instead of museums? How does the private market for fossils actually work? And how similar is it to the market for art and other antiquities? In this episode, we speak with Salomon Aaron, a director at London-based gallery David Aaron, where he is the gallery's in-house broker for dinosaur fossils. We talk about how fossils are found and priced, what it's like to work alongside dinosaur hunters, how his gallery identifies potential buyers, and why Joe thinks something about the birds-to-dinosaurs evolutionary pipeline is off. Subscribe to the Odd Lots NewsletterJoin the conversation: discord.gg/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has highlighted the potential for long-running theoretical chokepoints to turn into reality, with dramatic results for both geopolitics and the global economy. But the hypothetical scenario that policymakers have arguably been losing the most sleep over for decades is the prospect of a major conflict between China and Taiwan. So how likely is it, and what would such a conflict actually look like? On this episode, we speak with Eyck Freymann, author of the new book, Defending Taiwan: A Strategy to Prevent War With China, and a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. We discuss Xi Jinping's strategy, whether Taiwan's "silicon shield" of semiconductor manufacturing can last forever, the state of Taiwan's domestic politics, and what the US can do to deter such a conflict. Subscribe to the Odd Lots NewsletterJoin the conversation: discord.gg/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The last few decades have been marked by a number of megatrends in finance including the extraordinary growth of asset managers, the rising importance of technology, and the ascent of private markets. BlackRock, the world's biggest asset manager, is emblematic of all these developments. On this episode, we talk to BlackRock COO Rob Goldstein about the company's early technological history, the development of its famous risk management technology Aladdin, and how BlackRock is navigating being both a user and major provider of AI. We discuss his view of the 'SaaSpocalypse,' how BlackRock is thinking about token consumption and compute constraint, as well as the future of private markets. Subscribe to the Odd Lots NewsletterJoin the conversation: discord.gg/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Emanuel Derman was one of the pioneers of quantitative finance, having gone from studying physics to working on Wall Street in 1985. His memoir, My Life as a Quant, is a must-read book that tracks the evolution of finance in recent decades as it's become more and more driven by mathematics. In the latest episode of Odd Lots, Derman discusses his career, the difference between finance models and physics models, and where Wall Street is going next.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.