Last week, the US joined forces with Japan to try to stop the yen’s slide. It’s the first time the two sides have intervened in the Japanese currency in 15 years, and in many ways it was an unprecedented and unusual move, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent choosing to sell euros (as opposed to dollars) and the use of a little-known Federal Reserve repo facility. So why did the yen’s value drop so precipitously in the first place? And will this intervention be enough to stop it? Brad Setser, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, explains why the Bank of Japan initially refrained from raising rates, why East Asian currencies (not just the yen) have been so weak lately, the improving fiscal outlook for Japan, and what to look out for next.

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Bloomberg Opinion columnist David Fickling tells us you can think of tungsten mining as “a century old prediction market for war.” As he writes in a recent piece, tungsten is “a super-element that can determine the fate of nations.” While the commercial market for tungsten is fairly small, it can be crucial in war manufacturing, due to its high density and melting point. He learned more about tungsten mining, and its increasing geopolitical necessity, during a visit to Australia's Dolphin Mine, which has a history of opening up during times of war, and then closing again during times of peace. He explains to us why investors are once again interested in tungsten mining and why it's been so hard (over the last century) to sustain production outside of China.

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Insurers have quietly become a major driver of the private credit boom, with numerous private equity shops striking deals with insurance companies or buying them outright. But the entanglement with private credit is also changing the insurance industry itself, raising a number of questions about risk and regulation. Today we speak to Andrew Granato and Pranjal Drall, authors of a new paper, “Private Credit's State Backstop: How Private Equity Socializes Risk Through Insurers," examining the relationship between private credit and insurance. Granato (an assistant professor at the UT Austin Law School) and Drall (JD-PhD student in Financial Economics at Yale) talk to us about how PE got so interested in insurance in the first place, how both sides benefit from the relationship, and why taxpayers might ultimately be on the hook.

Read more:
Blue Owl Surges as Leaders Stress It’s More Than a Direct Lender
Ares $29 Billion Private Credit Fund Sees Uptick in Non-Accruals

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After the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the country's new leaders — religious and political — promised to redistribute the country's wealth and made moves to make Iran independent from western influence and business interests. In the decades since, Iran's economy completely transformed, and it is closer to what Yeganeh Torbati and Bozorgmehr Sharafedin describe as a "mafia state," where fealty to various factions is baked into the country's political economy. In their new book Stolen Revolution: Betrayal and Hope in Modern Iran they trace the massive changes Iran's political economy has undergone since the revolution, and they speak to us today about this history, how average Iranians navigate everyday cronyism, how Iranian leaders treated the country's burgeoning tech sector, and why the recent peace talks might not change all that much about how the country's economy currently operates.

Read more:
A New Age of Missiles Reshapes Battlefields Around The World
US War With Iran Set to Drag On for Months Over Hormuz Deadlock

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It's pretty obvious by now that globalization has fallen out of favor. And while many pundits have deemed economic globalism dead, we are still figuring out what to call this new era. Branko Milanovic's chosen phrase is "national market liberalism," a term that sums up how a world once defined by the free movement of capital has begun to contract as the most powerful governments have come to favor mercantilism and nationalism. In his new book, The Great Global Transformation: The United States, China, and the Remaking of the World Economic Order, the famed economist explains what comes after globalization. He talks to us about China's economic evolution, the pressure it has put on elites in the West, and much more.

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Over the next two decades, more than $100 trillion will change hands in the greatest wealth transfer in history. This is a massive opportunity for financial advisors, both new and established. This conversation provides detailed, research-backed information and practical advice for financial advisors who are considering their next move. Produced by Bloomberg Media Studios and Prudential Financial, this roundtable discussion provides clear and honest perspectives on the changes that are coming.

Guests on the show include:
David Blanchett, Head of Retirement Research with Prudential Financial, and Portfolio Manager with PGIM
Brittney Castro, CFP, AAMS, CRPC, Financial Expert and Speaker
Chelsea Ransom-Cooper, Co-Founder and Chief Financial Planning Officer with Zenith Wealth Partners
Maggie Lake, Financial Journalist

Research sources:
Cerulli Associates: U.S. High-Net-Worth and Ultra-High-Net-Worth Markets, 2024
Cerulli Associates: The Cerulli Edge, U.S. Retail Investor, 2023
Alliance for Lifetime Income: Protected Retirement Income and Planning Study, 2024
Prudential Communications: Global Retirement Pulse Survey, 2025

For more about this series visit us at:
https://sponsored.bloomberg.com/media/prudential/the-great-client-transfer 

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When the fast food industry began booming in the 1950s, it did so via a new business model known as the franchise. This model allowed independent operators to license trademarks from a business like McDonald's or Dunkin Donuts, and it soon spread across the country, with huge consequences for how Americans are employed. Legal battles fought by franchises eventually opened the door to what's now known as the gig economy, allowing Uber drivers to be treated in much the same way as the operator of a local Chick-fil-A. To better understand the history of the franchise model, we speak with Brian Callaci, chief economist of the Open Markets Institute, and author of the book Chains of Command: The Rise and Cruel Reign of the Franchise Economy. Callaci helps break down how the franchise model works, how franchise contracts are structured to precisely dictate how franchisees are supposed to run their businesses, the relationship between the franchise model and gig work, as well as how franchises pioneered worker surveillance.

Read more:
Taco Bell Traffic Sinks After Lettuce Tied to Parasite Cases
Chicken Back on Menu as Cyber-Hit Nichirei Restores Operations

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There used to be a time when the latest product release from Apple was a huge deal. But lately, it's been kind of 'meh,' and a lot of the hype in the tech world has been directed at companies doing things with AI. For better or worse, Apple seems to have largely missed the AI boom. But there are signs things might be changing. In addition to appointing John Ternus as the new CEO to replace Tim Cook, Apple is expected to unleash a slate of new products, including AirPods with cameras and foldable phones. Meanwhile, it's also raising prices on a bunch of its devices for the first time in its history, thanks to a shortage of memory. So can Apple recapture the hype and find new products to entice customers? In this episode we speak with Mark Gurman, managing editor for consumer tech at Bloomberg and one of the world's most prominent Apple-watchers. We talk to him about Apple's AI strategy, the origins of the OpenAI and Apple legal battle, what to expect with Ternus in the CEO seat, and when and why iPhones stopped being a sexy piece of hardware.

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2026 has been, in terms of software, the year everyone is talking about Claude Code. Indeed, Anthropic's coding agent incited a market scare — and helped usher in the era of vibe coding — through its promise of streamlining software development for both pros and amateurs. Famously, Claude Code began as a side project of Anthropic led by Boris Cherny, who speaks to us today about the early days of Claude Code and how he and his team approach building an agentic coding tool. We also talk about the business aims of a harness like Claude Code, safety and alignment research, the specific skillset he looks for in engineers now that code writing is a deemphasized skill, and what happens when Claude Code feels more like a co-worker than a tool.

Read more:
For Software Engineers, the AI Reckoning Is Already Here
Dimon Warns of Broad Mythos Access, Calling It a Real Issue

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Last August, President Trump made the unprecedented choice of moving to fire Fed governor Lisa Cook. The administration claimed she was being terminated with cause, citing an ongoing investigation in alleged mortgage fraud committed by Cook. The legal battle between Cook and the administration has been tangled in the courts for the last year, eventually reaching the Supreme Court. This June, in a 5-4 decision, the court ruled in favor of Cook. However at the same time, in a different case, the court allowed the President to fire individual members of the FTC, undermining its role as quasi-independent body not beholden to the executive branch. So what are the implications here? How can the court change the status of a body like the FTC while allowing the Fed to continue operating as is? And for how long will the Fed maintain some amount of operational autonomy? On this episode we speak with Columbia Law School's Lev Menand who just wrote a piece on these two cases for Just Security called The Federal Reserve Exception to the Slaughter Rule as well as Nathan Tankus (writer and president of Notes on the Crises). The two of them lay out the consequences of these two decisions and they dig into the generations-long legal history, starting with Alexander Hamilton, that explains how we got here.

Read more: Can Trump Still Fire Lisa Cook After Her Supreme Court Win?

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