Why you should watch: Chile is writing a new Constitution; Colombia and Brazil face deeply polarizing elections. Peru's new(ish) government has seen three cabinets and four finance ministers in six months... And then there's Venezuela and Nicaragua, two essentially failed states. And Argentina - though it got a break from the IMF. And what about Bukele's Bitcoin experiment in El Salvador. Oh, don't forget Mexico... Latin America matters - and it faces a tough year as it recovers from a bad dose of Covid at a time of rising interest rates and supply chain disruption. Two former finance ministers discuss the outlook.

Moderator: Andrew Hilton (Director, CSFI)

Andrés Velasco is currently dean of the School of Public Policy at the London School of Economics. He is a former Professor of International Finance at the Kennedy School, who served as Finance Minister in Chile from 2006 to 2010, and was a Presidential candidate in 2013. He subsequently spent four years as a Professor of Practise at Columbia, before coming to London.

Manuel Hinds enjoyed two terms as Finance Minister in El Salvador, winning the Manhattan Institute's Hayek Prize in 2010. In the 1980s, he was a Division Chief at the World Bank in Washington, and was subsequently a Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He has consulted extensively for the Bank and Fund, and is the author of many books, most recently 'In Defense of Liberal Democracy'.

Why you should watch: The world is changing; societies are changing. But is capitalism changing? And, if it is changing, is it changing in a way that meshes with the broader economic and social changes? This book argues that we are at a tipping point, in which 'financialized capitalism' (in which shareholder value and financial returns rule the roost) is morphing into what the author calls 'political capitalism' - a form of capitalism that reflects the fact that, in the modern world, every corporate decision is a political decision. Some companies get it right; others don't. Those that do will thrive; those that don't will find themselves increasingly out of step with their 'citizen consumers'.

Moderator: Andrew Hilton (Director, CSFI)

Joe Zammit-Lucia is a man of many parts. Originally a gastro-enterologist (trained at the Royal Free), he has been an 'entrepreneur, an investor, a leadership adviser and a commentator' - also an author of several business books. He has (he says) 'lived and worked in the UK, Germany, France, the US, Spain, the Netherlands and Malta'. He also set up RADIX, a think-tank of the 'radical center', which is based in Amsterdam with many great and good from the UK economic establishment on its various boards. This book, published by Bloomsbury, is out this week.

Explainer: Argentine debt - back to the 80s? With Prof Danny Leipziger (GWU)

Why you should watch: For economists of a certain age, Argentina is the gift that goes on giving. For the IMF, it is a recurring nightmare. And for investment bankers (who actually bought into Argentina's 100-year bond issue in 2017), it ought to be a lesson that they are not as smart as they think they are. Come March, Buenos Aires is supposed to repay US$45 billion to the IMF. It won't happen - not least because the country's total reserves are only around US$35 billion. But will Argentina risk arrears with the Fund? Or will the Fund blink? This brief Explainer explores the options - another currency board, dollarisation, a technocratic administration? Or just more of the same old same old muddling through?

Danny Leipziger is Professor of Practice in International Business at George Washington University in DC, and MD of the University's Growth Dialogue. He is a former V-P at the World Bank, where he headed the Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Network, having previously been chief economist for the Southern Cone region. He was educated at CCNY and at Brown, from which he has a PhD in economics. He is the author of around a dozen books, and many articles on debt and development.

Explainer: What's going on with El Salvador's Bitcoin experiment? With Ramiro Blazquez (BancTrust)

Why you should watch: On June 9 last year, President Nayib Bukele announced that Bitcoin will be legal tender in El Salvador - a country which had abandoned its own currency a few years before, in favour of the US dollar. El Salvador is not exactly an economic powerhouse - nor is it a model of fiscal probity. Indeed, with a debt ratio of around 90%, its finances were already under stress. So, what has happened - and what chance does Bukele have of raising the billion dollar BTC bond that a little-known consultancy, Blockstream, is promoting on his behalf? And how do the IMF and the Biden Administration view developments in a country that, after all, is the source of a significant proportion of the Central American migrants who have become such a potent political issue in the US?

Ramiro Blazquez is head of research and strategy at BancTrust & Co in Buenos Aires. He previously worked with the IMF in Argentina, and was a Chevening Scholar in the UK before spending ten years with HSBC as an Andean economist and as a Senior Economist on Latin America. He is associated with Canning House in London and with Torcuato Di Tella University in BA.

Web 3.0: An Explainer, with Martin Walker, Center for Evidence Based Management

Why you should watch: Web 3 (or Web 3.0) is as powerful a buzzword these days as DeFi - and it is just as hard to pin down. What does it mean? How does it differ from Web 2.0 or Web 1.0 - or the Internet as we know and love it?  Martin Walker tries to explain the history of the term, which he sees primarily as a marketing ploy, and how it is closely related to promotion of the Ethereum blockchain. Andrew Hilton rolls his eyes - but persists in the belief that there must be something there, if only he was smart enough to understand it.

Moderator: Andrew Hilton (Director, CSFI)

Martin Walker is currently head of product management for securities finance and collateral management at Broadridge Financial Solutions. He was formerly involved with product development at the R3 Consortium and a strategy adviser to HSBC. Before that, he worked in the City with Dresdner Kleinwort, and RBS. He has an MSc from Imperial in computer science.

'The Future of Money: How the digital revolution is transforming currencies and finance'. An interview with the author of this important new book, Eswar Prasad.

Why you should watch: This new book (published by Harvard UP) tackles four big issues: What impact the rapid growth of FinTech is having (and where it is likely to be most successful); whether Bitcoin and blockchain will ever live up to the hype; why central banks, large and small, are placing their bets on CBDCs; and what all of this means for the global financial system - and for the dollar's hegemony. Prof. Prased is strongly supportive of FinTech, particularly in the EM space. He is also strongly supportive of blockchain's potential - albeit more than a bit sceptical about Bitcoin itself. As for CBDCs, he sees them as pretty much inevitable. That said, the combination is still unlikely to overturn a global financial system that is based on the institutions and rule of law that underpin the US dollar. For anyone who really wants to understand FinTech, DeFi, the world of cryptos and CBDCs, this is the place to start.

Moderator: Andrew Hilton (Director, CSFI)

Eswar Prasad is the Tolani Senior Professor of Economics at Cornell in Ithaca, NY and a senior fellow at Brookings in Washington, DC. He is a former chief of financial studies and chief of the China division at the IMF. Originally educated in Madras (now Chennai), he also studied at Brown University, and received his PhD from the University of Chicago.

'Cogs and Monsters: What economics is and what it should be'. An interview with the author, Prof. Diane Coyle

Why you should watch: Diane Coyle has spent the last 25 years (since publication of her first book, The Weightless World) re-thinking economics - what it is as a discipline, where its limitations are, how we should use its insights, and how it could be brought more into line with the world as we actually know it. She has been a major force behind key changes in the academic curriculum, and has been at the forefront of efforts to broaden the interdisciplinary nature of economic policy-making. As someone who has been actively involved in UK competition policy, she has also had the opportunity to see first-hand just how difficult it is to change an institutional mindset. Her latest book is both a checklist of progress made and of the problems that still remain, and a powerful plea for a wholesale re-engineering of the discipline to bring it into line with the fundamental changes that digitalisation has wrought.

Diane Coyle is the Bennett Professor of Public Policy at Cambridge, a post she took on in 2018 having previously been Professor of Economics at Manchester. She was educated at Oxford and Harvard, from which she received her PhD. After a spell in HMTreasury, she joined the private sector, eventually moving into journalism, with the Investors Chronicle and the Independent. She is a former member of the Competition Commission and a Vice-chair of the BBC Trust, as well as a senior independent member of the ESRC Council. She is also the MD of an independent consultancy, Enlightenment Economics.

Why you should watch: Coinbase made US$1.6 billion in the second quarter, up from US$32 million year-on-year. Binance and FTX (which has just moved its HQ from Hong Kong to the Bahamas) are on track for a billion bucks - and FTX alone is now valued at US$25 billion. Madness? Or is there something solid behind these mega-numbers? And what do regulators think? The FT's currency guru gives her thoughts.

Moderator: Andrew Hilton (Director, CSFI)

Panelist:

Eva Szalay - Hungarian by birth - is the currency correspondent at the FT, which she joined three years ago. She was previously Editor of FX Week, and before that was a reporter at Dow Jones. She was educated at Queen Mary, University of London.

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'Trillions: How a band of Wall St renegades invented the index fund...' A discussion with the author of this new book, Robin Wigglesworth, and with Charlotte Ransom and Elroy Dimson.

Why you should watch: The FT's global finance correspondent, Robin Wigglesworth, has just published an important book on the origins of index investing, passive investing, ETFs - call it what you will - and on the way it has revolutionised personal finance in the US and globally. It is not 'ETFs for dummies'; it is a narrative with heroes and villains - from academia, from second tier brokerages, and from the equivalent of the family garage. Wigglesworth is not starry-eyed; there are problems - including the new power of the raters, the proliferation of niche/themed ETFs, the special issues around bond ETFs and the sheer size of the market. But there is no doubt that the savings to customers from the shift from active to passive investment strategies have been massive - and that is likely to continue.

Moderators: Andrew Hilton (Director, CSFI) & Leighton Hughes (FinTech Lead, CSFI)

Panellists:

Robin Wigglesworth is the FT's global finance correspondent, based in Oslo, and its US markets editor. He is a former capital markets correspondent and Gulf correspondent for the FT, as well as a former Nordic correspondent for Bloomberg.

Charlotte Ransom has been the CEO of Netwealth Investments since she co-founded it seven years ago. She was previously a partner at Goldman Sachs, having begun her career at JP Morgan. Netwealth's pitch is simple: 'Meeting your investment needs at a fraction of the industry cost.'

Elroy Dimson is chairman of the Centre for Endowment Asset Management at Cambridge's Judge School, as well as a member of the Gonville & Caius investment committee. He is also Chairman of the Advisory Board at FTSE Russell and an Emeritus Professor at LBS, where he spent much of his distinguished academic career.

Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam
The author, Vivek Ramaswamy, talks to the CSFI’s Jane Fuller
 
Why you should watch: Ramaswamy’s critique of the “Woke industrial complex” covers the self-serving do-goodery of big business, its unholy alliance with government and the need to separate capitalism from democracy. He takes a convincing swipe at “The Silicon Leviathan” and suggests some remedies – other than break-up. He believes that Wokeness is like a religion and should be treated as such, including protecting heretics. He ends his combative contribution to free speech with a plea for Americans to respect each other’s views – e pluribus unum.

Vivek Ramaswamy is chairman and founder of Roivant Sciences, a biotech business. He has also co-founded a technology company and been a partner at an investment firm. He grew up in Ohio and is a graduate of Harvard University and Yale Law School.