Omicron, the name of the new Covid-19 variant that has recently emerged, caused panic across the world and a selloff in risk on Friday. Following an influx of questions from The Hive, we held an urgent webinar to discuss the strain and its potential impacts on financial markets.

Professor Justin Stebbing of the Faculty of Medicine at Imperial College London joined us to provide his expert opinion. Justin has published in The Lancet new research on using AI to find drugs to treat COVID-19 and in Foreign Affairs on China's global role in vaccine distribution.

To explore the possible economic and financial market implications, Macro Hive CEO Bilal Hafeez and Senior Strategist Dominique Dwor-Frecaut provide their views.

Nancy Davis is the founder and managing partner of Quadratic Capital Management. She is the portfolio manager for The Quadratic Interest Rate Volatility and Inflation Hedge ETF (IVOL). She founded Quadratic Capital in 2013. She began her career at Goldman Sachs where she spent nearly ten years, the last seven with the proprietary trading group where she rose to become the Head of Credit, Derivatives and OTC Trading. Prior to starting Quadratic, she served as a portfolio manager at Highbridge Capital Management where she managed $500 million of capital in a derivatives only portfolio. She later served in a senior executive role at AllianceBernstein. In this podcast we discuss:

1. Why ETFs are attractive wrappers for active strategies
2. How best to capture true inflation risk
3. The pros and cons of investing in TIPs
4. How to think about spread exposure
5. Taking advantage of the shape of forward curve to fund option premium
6. How the IVOL strategy performed during COVID
7. Are real yields too low?
8. Risks for 2022 including stagflation

Edward Glaeser is Professor of Economics at Harvard University. He is perhaps the world's leading expert on cities. He recently authored, along with David Cutler, Survival of the City – Living and Thriving in the Age of Isolation. Edward leads the Urban Economics Working Group at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and co-leads the Cities Programme at the International Growth Center. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Public Administration. In this podcast we discuss:

1. What defines a city?
2. How have pandemics impacted cities across history?
3. Why are people healthier in cities than in rural areas?
4. Why is there large inequality within cities?
5. Importance of education
6. What led to the urban renaissance of the 1990s
7. Why didn't tech revolution end cities?
8. Will Zoom revolution change cities?
9. What lead to growth of Silicon Valley
10. Factors that drive gentrification
11. Three recommendations for helping cities.
12. Edward's book recommendations: The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Jacobs), Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (Cronon), Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 (Saxenian), Framing the Early Middle Ages (Wickham) and Origins of the European Economy (McCormick)

Rolf Strauch is Chief Economist and Management Board Member of the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) and the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), which he joined in July 2010. These entities provide financial assistance to euro-area countries experiencing financing problems. Rolf represents the ESM and EFSF in European fora and negotiates with Member States. Prior to this, Mr Strauch worked at the European Central Bank from 2000–2010 and served previously as an economist at the Deutsche Bundesbank. In this podcast we discuss:

1. How successful were the European rescue packages during the euro sovereign crisis?
2. How did the economic policy response to COVID of Europe compare to the US?
3. How the ESM is changing
4. Outlook around Europe's Next Generation EU stimulus
5. The growth of the common EU bonds and green bonds
6. How advanced is Europe's banking union?
7. Can Europe's capital markets grow to US levels?
8. Impact of Brexit on EU institutions
9. Euro-area growth outlook
10. Recommended books: The Globotics Upheaval (Baldwin)

Alex Gurevich is the Founder and CIO of HonTe Advisors, LLC. Alex has been involved in trading for over 20 years; holding various roles on Wall Street that included the launch of fixed income derivative trading franchises as well as running the macro book at JP Morgan. More recently, Alex has transformed his very successful family office into a global macro strategy suitable for institutional investors. He is the author of The Next Perfect Trade (2015) and soon to be published The Trades of March. Alex was born and raised in St. Petersburg, Russia and earned his PhD in mathematics from the University of Chicago. On this podcast we discuss:

1. How games like chess, go and poker can help your investing
2. Why sticking to take profits and stops is important
3. Which markets follow valuation
4. Alex's experience of trading COVID in March 2020 and lessons learned
5. How to think about the current inflation debate
6. US real yields could head lower
7. Recent front-end sell is overdone
8. Australia could be a stand-out market
9. Dollar view
10. Why equities don't follow the economic cycle
11. Books that influenced Alex: Lord of the Rings (Tolkien), On Being Certain (Burton)
12. Sci-fi book recommendations: Hyperion (Simmons), Ender's Game (Card), Rise of a Merchant Prince (Feist), The Dagger and the Coin (Abraham), Expanse (Corey)

Scott is the Founder and CEO of Masterworks, a platform for investing in art markets. Scott has been an active collector of contemporary art for more than fifteen years and has built an internationally-recognized collection of Abstract Expressionism that has included works by Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and more. In addition to Masterworks, Scott serves on the board of v2 ventures (Adparlor, Giant Media, Reachmobi, Amply, and Sellozo), Payability, and the Brooklyn Rail (a non-profit publication in the art industry). In this podcast we discuss:

1. What determines the value of art
2. Importance of gallery representation and marketing
3. How liquidity has evolved in the art market
4. Where the main buyers of art are from
5. How different segments of art market have performed
6. What the expected return of art is
7. How art correlates to other asset classes
8. When art has underperformed
9. Examples of artists whose art has performed well: from Basquiat to Gilliam
10. How investors can get exposure to art
11. Views on NFT
12. Books that influenced Scott: Thinking, Fast and Slow (Kahneman) and Competitive Strategy (Porter)

Azeem is the creator of Exponential View, a leading platform for in-depth tech analysis. His weekly newsletter is read by 200,000 people from around the world, and his podcast has featured guests including Yuval Noah Harari, Tony Blair and Kate Raworth. A member of the World Economic Forum's Global Futures Council, Azeem contributes to publications including the Financial Times, Wired and the MIT Technology Review. His new book is called Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do. In this podcast we discuss:

1. The four technologies driving exponential age
2. What's different between today and previous tech transitions
3. How tech companies defy conventional understanding
4. Why productivity has been low
5. Climate change and productivity
6. Understanding US/China/Europe tech rivalry
7. Importance of big tech in dealing with cyber risk
8. Books that influenced Azeem: Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital (Perez) and Letters to a Young Poet (Rilke)

Boris is one of the top macro thinkers in the market. He is a managing director at Goldman Sachs. Before GS, he was partner and portfolio manager at Rokos Capital Management, Fortress and Brevan Howard. Boris started his career on the sell-side which included working at UBS and Dresdner. Boris will be giving his personal opinions and not those of Goldman Sachs or any other organisations he is affiliated to. In this podcast, we discuss:

1. What is reverse goldilocks?
2. Parallels and differences to 1970s stagflation
3. The challenge of the current regime
4. How will policymakers respond?
5. What gives central banks credibility?
6. What does it mean for macro environment?
7. Views on China
8. How will equities, bonds and FX perform
9. Why terms of trade matter

Marc is author of Net Interest – a leading weekly newsletter on the world of finance. Before this, Marc spent ten years at leading hedge fund Lansdowne Partners, where he was a partner and portfolio manager. This was after he spent time on the sell-side working for Barclays Investment Bank (BZW), Schroders and then Credit Suisse, where he was head of the European banks research team. In this podcast we discuss:

1. How to predict financial crises
2. How are financials different from other companies
3. What do banks price-to-bank ratios tell us?
4. Can banks rebrand themselves as fintech?
5. What are the key fintech trends
6. How will credit evolve
7. Is the crypto challenge to finance real?
8. How to do well in angel investing
9. Why have private equity firms institutionalised better than hedge funds
10. What is the state of sell-side research?
11. Books that influenced Marc: Fooled by Randomness (Taleb), Origin of Wealth (Beinhocker) and The (Mis)Behaviour of Markets (Mandelbrot).

This episode is sponsored by Masterworks.

Dr. Anas Alhajji is a leading energy markets expert, and advises governments, companies, and financial institutions on energy markets. He focuses on oil and gas market outlook, energy geopolitics, energy security, and the impact of disruptive technologies on the supply and demand of energy. He is the Managing Partner at Energy Outlook Advisors LLC, and was previously the Chief Economist of NGP Energy Capital Management. He is also a contributing editor for top industry publication: World Oil. Before moving to industry, Anas taught economics at the University of Oklahoma, the Colorado School of Mines and Ohio Northern University. In this podcast we discuss:

1. False ideas around what drives oil prices
2. What supply and demand drivers matter
3. Why OPEC doesn't matter
4. Why peak oil is wrong
5. Why bearish oil demand forecasts on ESG/climate change are wrong
6. How governments and companies are not acting on carbon neutrality
7. How Iran oil supply has continued despite sanctions
8. Oil underinvestment in oil producing nations
9. Saudi, US and Russian oil supply outlook
10. The Arctic oil play
11. China's dominance in oil markets
12. The rise of private generators
13. Book that Anas rates: Kuwait in the Time of British Empire (Khajah)