Odd Lots

By Bloomberg

What's Odd Lots about?

Bloomberg's Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway explore the most interesting topics in finance, markets and economics. Join the conversation every Monday and Thursday.

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Why Insurers Are Pulling Ou...

09.25.2023

This year has seen a spate of insurance companies announcing that they're leaving markets like Florida and California, citing the increased risk of natural disasters, such as floods and wildfires. Elsewhere, premiums for certain types of insurance are skyrocketing — ...

Odd Lots episodes:

09.25.2023 Why Insurers Are Pulling Out of High-Risk Areas This year has seen a spate of insurance companies announcing that they're leaving markets like Florida and California, citing the increased risk of natural disasters, such as floods and wildfires. Elsewhere, premiums for certain types of insurance are skyrocketing — ...
09.22.2023 Steven Rattner on the UAW Strike and the Challenges of Bidenomics When the US auto industry needed a restructuring or bailout in 2009, the Obama administration tapped former banker and investor Steven Rattner to lead the effort. As the government's "car czar," he helped shape an agreement that saw the United ...
09.21.2023 Morgan Housel on the New Way We Think About Money When generations undergo any kind of collective life-changing event, it shapes how people think about money -- and how they think about spending and investing. Past upheavals like the Great Depression, the World Wars, the inflation of the 1970s, and ...
09.18.2023 Oaktree's Wayne Dahl on Credit Markets Right Now In theory, the Federal Reserve operates by tightening the supply of credit. Or at least making it more close. Yet so far, despite the rate hikes, the economy has remained resilient. And credit spreads have remained surprisingly tight. So what's ...
09.15.2023 Lots More With Neil Dutta For those who can't get enough Odd Lots, we're now offering you... "Lots More." This new podcast show, appearing on Fridays, will see hosts Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal chatting with some of your favorite Odd Lots guests about the ...
09.14.2023 Senator Chris Coons on How to Fix Our Response to Avian Flu Last year, consumers around the country experienced an explosion in the price of eggs, in part due to an outbreak of avian flu. Since then, egg prices have come back down to more normal levels. But what did we learn ...
09.13.2023 Bill Gross on the End of the Great Bond Bull Market Bill Gross became known as the Bond King during his legendary, multi-decade run at Pimco, eventually growing the company to manage trillions of dollars. Of course, that success coincided with a remarkable bond bull market -- a bull market that ...
09.11.2023 What Rising Rates and Surging Insurance Prices Are Doing to Real Estate In some respects, the real estate market has been surprisingly resilient in the face of rising interest rates. Homebuilders have generally performed well and home prices have not tumbled the way many might have expected. But looked at in another ...
09.07.2023 Self-Driving Cars Might Finally Be For Real This Time A decade ago, there was a lot of hype about self driving cars. In fact, there was more interest in self-driving cars than there was in electric vehicles, in terms of the future of the auto industry. But progress in ...
09.04.2023 This Is How New York City Gets Its Produce Certain people claim that New York City has a reputation for... not having the best fruits and vegetables. This is a controversial point and not everyone agrees. But regardless of where you stand on this hot button issue, getting produce ...
08.31.2023 Hyun Song Shin on the New Financial Stability Risks At Jackson Hole, the Kansas City Fed's annual gathering for economists and central bankers, there's a lot of focus on the short-term path of monetary policy. But, of course, the Economic Symposium is supposed to be about long-term policy frameworks. ...
08.30.2023 Adam Posen Has a Warning on the Danger of Bidenomics The Biden administration has undertaken an aggressive effort to revitalize domestic manufacturing, particularly in areas like semiconductors and green technology. The reasons are manifold. The pandemic exposed frailties in the supply chain. Climate concerns have accelerated the urgency around the ...
08.29.2023 Barry Eichengreen on the New Era of High Government Debt In recent years, the absolute level of government debt around the world has risen dramatically. The Covid emergency unleashed a huge wave of public-sector spending in 2020 and beyond. Meanwhile, spending remains high for other reasons, including public investment on ...
08.28.2023 Darrell Duffie On How to Fix the World’s Most Important Market In the global financial system, US Treasuries play a special role. They’re basically as close to cash as a financial asset can get and their yields act as the "risk-free" rate against which all other assets are measured. In other ...
08.26.2023 This Is What We Just Learned In Jackson Hole On Friday, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell gave his much-anticipated speech at the Kansas City Fed Monetary Policy Symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. While many were expecting some kind of academic or theoretical discussion, the text was straightforwardly about the ...
08.25.2023 BONUS EPISODE: Bloomberg Surveillance in Jackson Hole Bloomberg Surveillance comes to the Odd Lots podcast! Listen for a special edition of Bloomberg Surveillance from the Federal Reserve's annual symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Hear more from Bloomberg Surveillance on Apple or Spotify. Guests in this episode: Mohamed ...
08.24.2023 Why Tractor Supply Is One of the Most Interesting Retailers On the Planet Tractor Supply Co. has grown from a small mail order business set up in the 1930s into the biggest farm and ranch retailer operating in the US. Along the way, its share price has soared from around $1 in the ...
08.21.2023 The Four Big Structural Forces Holding Back China's Economy The Chinese economy is in a slump. Industrial production is down. Retail sales are down. The property industry continues to struggle. The People's Bank of China just did a surprise rate cut. So what's driving the decline and what can ...
08.17.2023 Here's How the New Weight Loss Drugs Could Change Everything There's a new class of weight-loss drugs in town. GLP-1 medications including Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro were created to treat diabetes but have since been found to suppress appetites and induce substantial weight loss. It's a big deal for the ...
08.14.2023 How Economic Complexity Explains Which Countries Become Rich Why do some countries become rich while others stagnate? And can you predict which countries become wealthy in advance of them actually increasing their collective GDP? The answer may lie in the complexity of each nation's domestic economy. On this ...
08.11.2023 Paul Krugman on UFOs, AI and Room Temperature Superconductors There have been a number of news stories lately that seem straight out of science fiction. We've heard claims before Congress that the government is suppressing information regarding the existence of UFOs or aliens. There are computers that seem to ...
08.10.2023 The Two Strikes That Ground Hollywood to a Halt Movie and TV productions have come to a nearly complete stop in Hollywood. Both the Screen Actors Guild and the Writers Guild of America are on strike, with the latter having halted work for the major studios over three months ...
08.07.2023 What the UAW Wants From Its Fight With the Big Three On September 14, the contract between the United Auto Workers and the Big Three carmakers (GM, Ford and Stellantis) is expiring — and the possibility of a strike is real. This comes at a delicate time for multiple reasons. The ...
08.03.2023 The Chinese EV Maker That's Selling More Cars Than Tesla In the US, Tesla remains far and away the dominant maker of electric vehicles. But on a global scale, the situation is much more competitive. Over the last few years, Chinese EV makers have massively ramped up their export capacity ...
07.31.2023 DOJ's Jonathan Kanter on the Bidenomics Approach to Antitrust A key plank of the Biden administration's "Bidenomics" involves stronger antitrust enforcement and we've seen the White House empower agencies like the Department of Justice to step up actions on monopolies and other behaviors that reduce competition. But what exactly ...
07.27.2023 The Massive Shift Underway in the US Banking System When Silicon Valley Bank imploded, there was a lot of talk about the future of regional and community banks in the United States. Can they compete with the large, too-big-to-fail institutions? What will happen to their deposits and their cost ...
07.24.2023 Are We About to See the Shortest Housing Cycle Ever? Last year, as the Federal Reserve hiked rates to the highest levels in decades, there were lots of warnings about an imminent collapse in the US housing market. But home prices have only dipped slightly since then and now they're ...
07.20.2023 How to Build the Ultimate GPU Cloud to Power AI Artificial Intelligence is all the rage right now and most of the investor excitement has so far been focused on the companies providing the hardware and computing power to actually run this new technology. So how does it all work ...
07.17.2023 Josh Wolfe on Where Investors Will Make Money in AI We're in the midst of an AI mania of sorts. In public markets, investors are placing bets on the companies perceived as being the winners of this new wave of computing. Companies that aren't even in "tech" are touting their ...
07.14.2023 Understanding the Real Fight Over Water in Arizona Arizona recently announced new constraints on housing development in the areas around Phoenix. At issue is water rights and scarcity, which have been a challenge for the US Southwest for as long as people have been living there. That being ...
07.13.2023 An Arizona Farmer on How to Grow Alfalfa in the Middle of the Desert Due to a combination of drought, climate change and booming growth, Arizona is facing looming water scarcity. But for all the sprawl and population increase, the overwhelming amount of water used in the state is not consumed by residences, but ...
07.10.2023 Richard Koo on China's Risk of 'Japanification' Richard Koo literally wrote the book on balance sheet recessions, or the idea that large levels of debt can weigh on future growth for years and even decades to come. Now, the Nomura Research Institute chief economist sees a similar ...
07.06.2023 What It Really Takes to Convert an Office Building Into Apartments Big cities like New York have two real estate problems. Housing is scarce and office buildings are empty (or at least under-utilized.) So there would seem to be an obvious solution: turn the offices into homes. And indeed there has ...
07.04.2023 Jared Bernstein on the Next Stage of Bidenomics President Biden recently made it clear that what we're seeing play out in the economy now is the result of "Bidenomics." The current expansion has defied the constant predictions of economic gloom. Every other day, it seems, some firm announces ...
07.03.2023 Bridgewater's Greg Jensen on AI, Inflation and What Markets Are Getting Wrong Every industry is trying to figure out just how AI or Large Language Models can be used to do business. But Bridgewater Associates, the world's largest hedge fund, has already been at it for a long time. For years, it ...
06.30.2023 Zoltan Pozsar on His Next Big Move and the Coming Monetary Divorce Zoltan Pozsar has built a reputation for covering the intricacies of money markets. For the past eight years, he published those insights as a strategist at Credit Suisse. But in this episode of the Odd Lots podcast, Pozsar reveals his ...
06.29.2023 What Ben McKenzie Learned When He Started Investigating Crypto When the pandemic struck in 2020, the actor Ben McKenzie (who you might know from The OC and Gotham) had a lot of time on his hands. And like a lot of people, he suddenly got interested in crypto when ...
06.26.2023 James Montier Explains Why Corporate Profits Keep Going Up More than a decade ago, GMO strategist James Montier published a paper predicting that corporate profit margins were destined to come down from "nosebleed" levels. Fast forward to 2023, and it's clear that hasn't happened as profit margins remain far ...
06.23.2023 Why Saudi Arabia Is Spending Millions on Soccer Stars Saudi Arabia has been spending hundreds of millions of dollars snapping up international soccer stars in recent months, including legendary players like Cristiano Ronaldo and Karim Benzema, to boost the rosters of its Saudi Pro League. It's not the first ...
06.22.2023 This Is How Finance and Banking Worked Before Computers We're used to thinking of modern finance as practically synonymous with computers. Banks are basically just big collections of Excel spreadsheets, keeping track of who owes what to whom. And most trading nowadays is done by clicking a button on ...
06.19.2023 Josh Younger on the Surprising Origins of Eurodollars and Petrodollars De-dollarization is all the rage right now, with lots of talk about whether the US currency will be able to maintain its dominant status in the global financial system. But regardless of what happens in the future, it's worth asking ...
06.16.2023 Steve Eisman on Banks, AI and His Next Big Bet Steve Eisman is known for having bet against the housing market prior to the Great Financial Crisis in a trade immortalized by Michael Lewis in The Big Short. So what is he betting on now? In a special live episode ...
06.15.2023 The Eyeball-Scanning Plan Designed to Save Us From AI There are all kinds of societal concerns emerging out of the rise of artificial intelligence. Will it put us all out of work? Will fraudsters be able to use deepfakes — technology that can replicate our images and our voices ...
06.12.2023 This Is What Happens When Governments Build Software There's a lot of frustration about the government's ability to build things in the US. Subways. Bridges. High-speed rail. Electricity transmission. But there's another crucial area where the public sector often struggles, and that is software. We saw it with ...
06.09.2023 Brad Setser on How World Trade Changed In the Last Three Years A lot has happened since we last spoke to Brad Setser in April 2020, towards the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. For a start, Setser was appointed to be a trade advisor in the Biden administration during a period of ...
06.08.2023 Isabella Weber on the Big Rethink of Inflation Earlier this year, Odd Lots talked about the idea of companies taking advantage of bottlenecks and other disruptions to raise their prices. Since then, the notion of this type of corporate-led inflation has burst into the public discourse with central ...
06.05.2023 Jim Grant Sees an Era of Higher Rates That Could Last For Years If you think interest rates seem high right now, you might be operating with too short of a perspective. For a longer-term perspective, you'd want to talk to someone like Jim Grant. On this episode of the Odd Lots podcast, ...
06.01.2023 Counterfeiting Scandals Keep Slamming the Commodities Market Earlier this year, it emerged that the London Metals Exchange had been holding a bunch of bags filled with stones instead of the nickel needed to back trades for major commodities players, including Trafigura. Before that, commodities trader Mercuria was ...
05.29.2023 This Is How We'll Know If the CHIPS Act Is Working The US government is spending billions of dollars to build out state-of-the-art domestic semiconductor manufacturing capacity. But spending money is no guarantee of success. In fact, there are already worries that the CHIPS Act passed by the Biden administration isn't ...
05.25.2023 Slack Founder Stewart Butterfield on AI, Software, and the End of the Tech Boom Stewart Butterfield has been at the forefront of two epochal turning points for tech. First, he was the co-founder of the photo sharing site Flickr, that was one of the defining brands of the so-called Web 2.0 and the world ...

Older episodes

Odd Lots

What's Odd Lots about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Odd Lots episodes:

Why Insurers Are Pulling Out of High-Risk Areas

Steven Rattner on the UAW Strike and the Challenges of Bidenomics

Morgan Housel on the New Way We Think About Money

Oaktree's Wayne Dahl on Credit Markets Right Now

Lots More With Neil Dutta

Senator Chris Coons on How to Fix Our Response to Avian Flu

Bill Gross on the End of the Great Bond Bull Market

What Rising Rates and Surging Insurance Prices Are Doing to Real Estate

Self-Driving Cars Might Finally Be For Real This Time

This Is How New York City Gets Its Produce

Hyun Song Shin on the New Financial Stability Risks

Adam Posen Has a Warning on the Danger of Bidenomics

Barry Eichengreen on the New Era of High Government Debt

Darrell Duffie On How to Fix the World’s Most Important Market

This Is What We Just Learned In Jackson Hole

BONUS EPISODE: Bloomberg Surveillance in Jackson Hole

Why Tractor Supply Is One of the Most Interesting Retailers On the Planet

The Four Big Structural Forces Holding Back China's Economy

Here's How the New Weight Loss Drugs Could Change Everything

How Economic Complexity Explains Which Countries Become Rich

Paul Krugman on UFOs, AI and Room Temperature Superconductors

The Two Strikes That Ground Hollywood to a Halt

What the UAW Wants From Its Fight With the Big Three

The Chinese EV Maker That's Selling More Cars Than Tesla

DOJ's Jonathan Kanter on the Bidenomics Approach to Antitrust

The Massive Shift Underway in the US Banking System

Are We About to See the Shortest Housing Cycle Ever?

How to Build the Ultimate GPU Cloud to Power AI

Josh Wolfe on Where Investors Will Make Money in AI

Understanding the Real Fight Over Water in Arizona

An Arizona Farmer on How to Grow Alfalfa in the Middle of the Desert

Richard Koo on China's Risk of 'Japanification'

What It Really Takes to Convert an Office Building Into Apartments

Jared Bernstein on the Next Stage of Bidenomics

Bridgewater's Greg Jensen on AI, Inflation and What Markets Are Getting Wrong

Zoltan Pozsar on His Next Big Move and the Coming Monetary Divorce

What Ben McKenzie Learned When He Started Investigating Crypto

James Montier Explains Why Corporate Profits Keep Going Up

Why Saudi Arabia Is Spending Millions on Soccer Stars

This Is How Finance and Banking Worked Before Computers

Josh Younger on the Surprising Origins of Eurodollars and Petrodollars

Steve Eisman on Banks, AI and His Next Big Bet

The Eyeball-Scanning Plan Designed to Save Us From AI

This Is What Happens When Governments Build Software

Brad Setser on How World Trade Changed In the Last Three Years

Isabella Weber on the Big Rethink of Inflation

Jim Grant Sees an Era of Higher Rates That Could Last For Years

Counterfeiting Scandals Keep Slamming the Commodities Market

This Is How We'll Know If the CHIPS Act Is Working

Slack Founder Stewart Butterfield on AI, Software, and the End of the Tech Boom

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