PFI Talks

One of the world's top monetary historians Michael D. Bordo, Professor at Rutgers University, sees alarming parallels between today and the catastrophic 1930s.KEY POINTSThe "Wily Coyote Moment"· Markets running on air over a fiscal cliff - haven't looked down yet· Sudden crisis could hit when confidence breaksFed Under Attack· Trump pressuring Fed just like Nixon did in the 1970s (led to runaway inflation)· Attempt to fire Lisa Cook threatens central bank independencePerfect Storm Brewing· Unsustainable debt + protectionism + potential tech bubble· Globalization reversing like it did 100 years ago· "All the bad policies from the 1930s are coming back"What Must Be Done· Keep central banks independent and credible· Focus only on price stability· Remember: nationalism and protectionism led to disaster before"I find the current era extremely worrisome. In some ways it reminds me of the 1930s."Michael D. Bordo is a Board of Governors Professor of Economics and director of the Center for Monetary and Financial History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey.Interview conducted by Jiri Zatloukal, Prague Finance Institute

John H. Cochrane is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and an adjunct scholar of the CATO Institute.

Before joining Hoover, Cochrane was a Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, and earlier at its Economics Department. Cochrane earned a bachelor’s degree in physics at MIT and his PhD in economics at the University of California at Berkeley. He was a junior staff economist on the Council of Economic Advisers (1982–83).

Cochrane’s recent publications include the book Asset Pricing and articles on dynamics in stock and bond markets, the volatility of exchange rates, the term structure of interest rates, the returns to venture capital, liquidity premiums in stock prices, the relation between stock prices and business cycles, and option pricing when investors can’t perfectly hedge. His monetary economics publications include articles on the relationship between deficits and inflation, the effects of monetary policy, and the fiscal theory of the price level. He has also written articles on macroeconomics, health insurance, time-series econometrics, financial regulation, and other topics. He was a coauthor of The Squam Lake Report. His Asset Pricing PhD class is available online via Coursera.

Cochrane frequently contributes editorial opinion essays to the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg.com, and other publications. He maintains the Grumpy Economist blog.

Leoš Rousek, the Head Of Corporate Communications at PPF Group (https://www.ppf.eu/en) and contributor of PFI Talks, talked with John Cochrane.

Historian and investment strategist Edward Chancellor draws parallels between the current surge in tech giants — the Magnificent 7 — and past speculative bubbles such as the 19th-century British railway mania and the 1990s internet boom. He warns of overvaluation fuelled by massive investments in artificial intelligence.

Explore how rising interest rates, a soaring national debt – what Chancellor calls the "debt supercycle" – and the Federal Reserve’s repeated crisis interventions may be setting the stage for a more severe financial crash.

In this episode of PFI Talks, conducted by Jiří Zatloukal, Chancellor also discusses the contrasting impacts on U.S. residential versus commercial real estate, the rise in gold prices as a market “Armageddon” bet, and the economic consequences of deglobalization accelerated by tariffs and shifting capital flows under the Trump administration.

Štěpán Drábek je mladý český ekonom a popularizátor vědy. Působí jako makroekonomický analytik v Prague Finance Institute. Je autorem monografie o inflaci, která byla oceněna Učenou společností ČR. Nyní pracuje na překladu největšího díla nobelisty F. A. Hayeka The Constitution of Liberty.

William N. Goetzmann is the Edwin J. Beinecke Professor of Finance and Management Studies and Faculty Director of the International Center for Finance at the Yale School of Management. He is an expert on a diverse range of investments. His past work includes studies of stock market predictability, hedge funds and survival biases in performance measurement. His current research focuses on alternative investing, factor investing, behavioral finance and the art market.

Professor Goetzmann has written and co-authored a number of books, including Modern Portfolio Theory and Investment Analysis (Wiley, 2014), The Origins of Value: The Financial Innovations that Created Modern Capital Markets (Oxford, 2005), The Great Mirror of Folly: Finance, Culture and the Crash of 1720 (Yale, 2013) and most recently, Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible (Princeton, 2016).

Leoš Rousek, the Head Of Corporate Communications at PPF Group (https://www.ppf.eu/en) and contributor of PFI Talks, talked with William Goetzmann.

Renowned economist Branko Milanović joins Prague Finance Institute to discuss the end of neoliberal globalization, the rise of China as both a geopolitical and economic rival, and the global reshuffling of income. He explores how China’s growing middle class is overtaking parts of the Western population and what that means for domestic stability in rich democracies. From shifting forms of capitalism to the "citizenship premium," Milanović offers deep insights into the transformation of the global economic order.

The interview was conducted by Jiří Zatloukal, Financial Journalist.

In this in-depth interview from the PFI Talks series by the Prague Finance Institute, renowned economist Maurice Obstfeld — Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, former Chief Economist of the IMF, and former adviser to President Obama — issues a stark warning: America’s rising debt, eroding fiscal discipline, and political gridlock are creating systemic risks far beyond its borders.As the world continues to rely on the dollar and U.S. Treasury markets for stability, Obstfeld explains why this "exorbitant privilege" may no longer be sustainable. From the weakening foundations of the dollar’s dominance to the global consequences of U.S. policy paralysis, Obstfeld paints a sobering picture: “We are in the eye of the storm.”What you’ll learn in this interview:• Why U.S. fiscal policy threatens global financial stability• How the dollar’s safe-haven status could be undermined• The dangers of political dysfunction and growing inequality• Whether the world is quietly preparing to move away from the dollar system• What policy changes are urgently needed to avoid a future crisis

Jiri Zatloukal, a financial journalist and contributor to PFI Talks, talked with Maurice Obsfeld.

Kenneth Rogoff is Maurits C. Boas Professor at Harvard University, and former chief economist at the IMF. His influential 2009 book with Carmen Reinhart, This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, shows the remarkable quantitative similarities across time and countries in the roots and aftermath of debt and financial crises. Rogoff is also known for his pioneering work on central bank independence, and on exchange rates. He is co-author of the widely-used graduate text, Foundations of International Macroeconomics.

His 2016 book The Curse of Cash looks at the past, present and future of currency from standardized coinage to crypto-currencies. His monthly syndicated column on global economic issues is published in over 50 countries.

Rogoff’s 2025 book Our Dollar, Your Problem: An Insider’s View of Seven Turbulent Decades of Global Finance and the Road Ahead offers a sweeping view of the post-war rise of the dollar, the challenges the rest of the world has in dealing with it, and how this experience can help inform the contours of the evolving new global financial system.

Rogoff is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has long ranked among the top dozen most cited economists, and is an international grandmaster of chess.

Leoš Rousek, the Head Of Corporate Communications at PPF Group (https://www.ppf.eu/en) and contributor of PFI Talks, talked with Kenneth Rogoff.

Anat R. Admati is the George G.C. Parker Professor of Finance and Economics at Stanford Graduate School of Business and a senior fellow at Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. Her disciplinary interests lie in the interaction of business, law and policy, and specifically governance and accountability mechanisms in the private sector and in government. Admati is also Faculty Director of the Corporations and Society Initiative at the GSB, whose mission is to raise awareness and increase understanding of the complex interactions among people, corporations and governments.

Since 2010, Admati has been engaged in the policy debates around the globe related to financial regulations and corporate accountability. Her insights have been featured in media outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, the Financial Times, CNN, and PBS. In 2014, Admati was named by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world and by Foreign Policy Magazine as among 100 global thinkers.

Admati has written academic papers on information dissemination in financial markets, portfolio management, financial contracting, corporate governance, and banking. She is the co-author, with Martin Hellwig, of the award-winning and highly acclaimed book, The Bankers’ New Clothes: What’s Wrong with Banking and What to Do about It (Princeton Press 2013). A 10th anniversary update will be published in 2023.

Admati holds BSc from the Hebrew University, MA, MPhil, and PhD from Yale University and an honorary doctorate from University of Zurich. She is a fellow of the Econometric Society, the recipient of multiple fellowships, research grants, and paper recognition, and is a past board member of the American Finance Association. She has served on a number of editorial boards and is a former member of the FDIC’s Systemic Resolution Advisory Committee, the CFTC’s Market Risk Advisory Committee, and visiting scholar at the International Monetary Fund.

Leoš Rousek, the Head Of Corporate Communications at PPF Group (https://www.ppf.eu/en) and contributor of PFI Talks, talked with Anat Admati.

Rafał Brzoska is the founder and CEO of InPost, a logistics company that operates over over 25 000 parcel lockers throughout Poland, constituting the largest business structure of this type in the country

Brzoska started out by founding Integer Group in 1999, which distributed leaflets. Seven years later, he started InPost, which operates automated lockers that allow customers to drop off and collect packages anytime of the day.

The company went public in Amsterdam in January 2021, raising over $3 billion in its IPO.

In 2023, he was awarded the Knight's Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta by President Andrzej Duda at the Belweder Palace for his "outstanding contributions to the development of Polish economy as well as his social and charity activism".