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 been a lot of talk lately about "office-to-resi" conversions. But it's very hard, for a wide variety of reasons. Zoning, financing, and then, of course, the operational aspects of the construction all need to be in place. So what does it take? On this episode, we speak with Joey Chilelli, managing director at the Vanbarton Group, a firm that's been involved with these projects for a decade and long before the pandemic upended both real estate markets. We discuss the challenges involved in actually pulling off these complex projects.

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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 a new battery plant or semiconductor facility for the United States as a result of incentives from either the CHIPS Act or the Inflation Reduction Act. So what's next? How can we be confident the plants will be productive? And what is the Bidenomics view of global trade? To learn more, we speak with Jared Bernstein, the head of the White House Council of Economic Advisors. We discuss the key pillars of the White House economic agenda, and how these ambitious policy measures are being implemented.

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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 has explored AI and adjacent technologies in order to analyze data, test theories, develop novel investment strategies and help its employees make better decisions. But how does it actually use the tech in practice? And what's next going forward? On this episode, we speak with co-CIO Greg Jensen about both the possibilities and limitations of these advances. We also discuss markets and macro, and why he believes that investors are still too optimistic about the Federal Reserve's ability to get inflation back to target. 

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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 next career move following his departure from the Swiss bank earlier this year. He also gives us an update on his Bretton Woods III thesis, or the idea that the global financial system is going through a "monetary divorce" from US dollar hegemony and becoming more multi-polar. He also gives us his take on the recent banking crisis and what it means for global funding markets going forward.

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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 an old friend of his pushed him to buy some Bitcoin. But unlike a lot of other people, McKenzie didn't rush out to buy it. Instead, he dusted off his old economics degree and decided to learn about how the industry really works. And what he learned shocked him. So he (along with his co-author Jacob Silverman) spent the last few years writing a new book titled Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and The Golden Age Of Fraud. In an interview conducted live at the Bloomberg Invest summit, McKenzie explains why he thinks the industry is rotten and corrupt and designed in a way to enrich a small group of insiders at the expense of a large, misinformed and desperate public. 

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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 above their long-term average. On this episode of the Odd Lots podcast, Montier explains what he got wrong back in 2012, why corporate profits have remained so stubbornly high, and what this could mean for stock valuations now. He also discusses the ongoing debate over whether high corporate earnings are fueling inflation, as well as revisiting the work of economist Michael Kalecki.

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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 time we've seen a country spend a lot of money to try to build up a domestic sports league, but it does have some key differences to previous attempts like we've seen in China, or in the US with Major League Soccer. For a start, the kingdom is spending a lot of money, opening up thorny questions about competition worldwide and Financial Fair Play rules in Europe, specifically. More importantly, it's also doing this at a governmental scale, with the kingdom's sovereign wealth fund and state-owned oil giant taking active roles. So what exactly is Saudi Arabia trying to accomplish and will it succeed? And what does this huge influx of money mean for soccer in the rest of the world? On this episode, we speak with Michael Caley and Mike Goodman, co-hosts of the Double Pivot Podcast, to discuss the big business of football and why turning a profit is not always the primary goal.

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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 a screen. But how did all this work before we had this type of technology? And what can previous technological revolutions tell us about the direction of new ones, such as the potential deployment of artificial intelligence? In this episode, we speak with Anne Murphy, history professor at the University of Portsmouth and the author of Virtuous Bankers: A Day in the Life of the Eighteenth-Century Bank of England, as well as John Handel, postdoctoral fellow at the University of Virginia McIntire School of Commerce. They walk us through just how banking and finance was done in the days before computers, telephones and even the telegraph.

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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 how we got to this point originally. How is it that the dollar came to dominate not just global trade flows but also became the currency of choice for things like buying oil? And why are there large pools of eurodollars sitting outside the United States? In this episode, we speak with Josh Younger, formerly of JPMorgan Chase and now a senior adviser at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, about the surprising policy decisions that went into creating eurodollars and petrodollars, and why they matter now.

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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 of Odd Lots, recorded at the Bloomberg Invest summit, the Neuberger Berman portfolio manager discusses the recent banking turmoil (he thinks it's contained), the boom in anything related to AI, and his current bets on US manufacturing and infrastructure. He also talks about investing in rewiring the nation's electricity grid and why he thinks this theme has years left to play out.

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