While electric vehicle use is growing rapidly, the internal combustion engine remains completely dominant in the world of heavy trucks. At some point in the future, Tesla has a plan to commercialize an electric semi, but nobody really knows when. Meanwhile, other entities are looking to compete in the world of industrial vehicles. Chace Barber is a former trucker in the logging industry, which has some very different characteristics than the type of freight trucking you typically see on a highway. When you're driving over the Rocky Mountains, without easy proximity to mechanics, tow trucks or service stations, you need power and reliability. His company, Edison Motors, is building its own trucks with a hybrid diesel-electric approach that it sees as a better path forward. On this episode, we discuss the challenges of hauling logs, as well as how it's possible for a small entity to get in the game of building such large industrial equipment.

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The discount window at the Federal Reserve allows banks to borrow money at an above-market rate in exchange for high-quality collateral. The facility is always available to use, but typically nobody does. Not only is the borrowing costlier, there's also a "stigma" associated with its usage, since the perception is that if you use it your institution might be in some kind of financial distress. So why has some entity (or multiple entities) been using it lately? On this episode of the podcast, we speak with Bill Nelson, chief economist at the Bank Policy Institute and a former employee of the Federal Reserve who helped design and manage the discount window for 10 years. We discuss what the program is, its history and how it's used today.

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The most recent jobs report has revived talk that the US economy might pull off the fabled "soft landing." Jobs are still growing nicely and the unemployment rate is at a 50-year low. But wages are decelerating and there are reasons to think that inflation is rolling over as well. So can Jerome Powell & Co. smoothly land the plane, so to speak? On this episode of Odd Lots we speak with Neil Dutta, chief economist at Renaissance Macro Research, and Conor Sen, a columnist at Bloomberg Opinion, about the US macro situation, as well as the rental market and the impact of China's reopening.

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Thanks to work from home, and other trends, workers are being electronically monitored by their bosses like never before. But some industries have had experience with this for awhile. Truck drivers, in particular, have been under legally-required electronic monitoring for several years now. Not only are their hours and miles electronically logged, increasingly they're subject to facial cameras and other types of body monitoring. On this episode, we speak with Karen Levy, a professor at Cornell and the author of "Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance" to discuss how surveillance works within the trucking industry, and what it means for everyone else.

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Back in early 2021, Ryan Petersen was one of the first people we spoke to on the Odd Lots podcast about supply chain snarls and high shipping costs. The founder and co-CEO of Flexport has since gone on to become a go-to name in the world of logistics, making headlines after he tweeted about what could be done to fix congestion at the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles. (A Bloomberg Opinion columnist called it the "tweetstorm that saved Christmas.") But fast forward two years and it seems like we're on the verge of a sharp reversal for the shipping industry, with freight rates now plunging and container traffic to the US down almost 20% last month. On this episode, we talk catch up with Petersen to talk about what he's seeing in the industry right now.

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In this special episode, Tracy and Joe reach into the mailbag and take some questions about Odd Lots, and the things regularly covered on the show. We also hear from our producer Carmen Rodriguez, who joins as a guest host for the episode.

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Odd Lots is seven years old now, having started in late 2015. When it began, we really didn't know what the show was going to be or be about. To end 2022, we decided to revisit our very first episode, when we interviewed our legendary Bloomberg colleague Tom Keene. We talked about how he got into the business, his musical career, hockey, mutual funds, and how he learned to do charts. But we begin with newly recorded discussion about the origins of the podcast and how long ago this first episode now feels. Original version was published November 6th, 2015.

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Plastic is in almost everything and prices of polypropylene, polyethylene and a host of other polymers went nuts in 2021, surging to record highs. Now they've come crashing back down to Earth and have reached a two-year low. So what happened to send the price of plastics surging, and why are they falling now? Were plastics a perhaps under-appreciated source of inflation given that they go into practically everything? And where does plastic come from anyway? On this episode of the Odd Lots podcast, we speak to Bank of America Commodities Strategist Warren Russell about the wild ride for plastics over the past couple of years, and what it means for the future of the petrochemicals industry.

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We talk a lot about macroeconomic trends on the podcast. What's happening with inflation? Is the labor market too hot? Will there be a recession next year? On this episode of Odd Lots, we take a closer look at how one business is dealing with these economic trends right now, and what its experience says about the economy as a whole. Ken Jarosch is the owner of Jarosch Bakery, which has been operating in the suburbs of Chicago for more than five decades. He's been dealing on the ground with all the things we talk about on the show: supply chains, commodity prices, labor forces. We discuss how he sets pricing for cookies, cakes and donuts as input costs surge, whether he's hiring new workers today, and if he's seeing any slowdown in customer demand.

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Last week was a big one. On Tuesday, we got a CPI report that came in substantially cooler than expected. Then on Wednesday, the Fed hiked 50 basis points, which was a step down from the series of 75 basis point hikes that we had been getting at recent meetings. So where do things stand now? When will we get a proper pivot? When will the Fed feel confident that inflation has been defeated. We spoke with two macro guests: Jon Turek, founder of JST Advisors and author of the Cheap Convexity Blog, as well as Tim Duy, Chief US Economist at SGH Macro as well as a Professor of Practice in economics at the University or Oregon. They gave as their readings on inflation, the Fed, and what to watch at the start of 2023. 

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