Odd Lots
Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway take you on a not-so random weekly walk through hot topics in markets, finance and economics.
Subscribe via Apple Podcasts This year, everyone's become aware of the hollowing out of U.S. semiconductor manufacturing capacity. Whether it's the rise of TSMC, the stumbles at …
There's probably nobody better at synthesizing massive events like Columbia professor Adam Tooze. His book Crashed, which came out in 2018, was proba…
It's not often that lumber becomes a national obsession. But this year it has. Thanks to a combination of factors, including diminished sawmill capac…
There's a huge question mark at the moment about whether markets are at some sort of important turning point. For instance, we've seen big amounts of…
It's a weird moment for the markets. The big stock indices are near all time highs. And yet there have been some high profile meltdowns and blowups. …
Whenever the government is engaging in fiscal or monetary expansion, people like to invoke the history of Weimar Germany and how soon we might all go…
When GameStop shares skyrocketed earlier this year, numerous pundits were quick to ascribe political significance to the whole thing. Was it a rebell…
The U.S. Treasury market is the biggest, most liquid market in the world. Its smooth functioning is also crucial to the economy and the financial sys…
In the modern age, we expect to be able to turn on our computers, enter in a ticker, and know the actual price of a financial instrument, such as a s…
The Ever Given has been freed from the Suez Canal. But the whole situation was indicative of a broader issue in global supply chains: increasingly la…
When the GameStop and Robinhood story exploded at the end of January, suddenly everyone took an interest in market structure, and things like payment…
What is the connection between the big trend in interest rates over the last several years and the cost of climate change mitigation? This is a quest…
Over the last several weeks, we've seen major developments in the macro situation. The vaccine rollout has accelerated. We've gotten a stimulus. The …
In a sense, Modern Monetary Theory has won. This is not because policy measures are necessarily in line with what MMT adherents would prescribe. Rath…
For decades, the dominant economic philosophy of the United States has been that fiscal policy should be relatively inert, and that the Fed should be…
By some measures, the Chinese economy did better in 2020 than just about anywhere else. For one thing, it actually grew last year. Also because of th…
Bob Dylan did it last year. Shakira did it in January. More and more famous musicians are selling off the rights to their back catalogs to investors.…
The Treasury market just experienced what some might call a tantrum. Across the yield curve, we saw rates shoot up. And it's not even clear why it ha…
SPACs, sometimes referred to as blank check companies, are incredibly hot. After being a sort of sleepy and sometimes sketchy backwater of the financ…
There are a lot of hot areas in the market, which everybody knows. Stocks are obviously hot, as are industrial commodities like copper. Agricultural …
The world is facing a chip shortage. Numerous companies, including the auto sector, are facing an inability to get semiconductors, hampering their ab…
As you might have heard, so-called value investing has not had a good run. At least from a quantitative standpoint, strategies that aim to buy low-va…
During the worst of the pandemic, people loaded up on staples from their grocery store. Shelf-stable food items, beverages, canned tuna, canned soup,…
When you think about the big winners in the stock market over the past couple of decades, you might think about Amazon or Apple or some other tech wi…
In a world dominated by passive investing on one end and retail YOLO traders on the other, there aren't many star fund managers these days. There's o…
Bitcoin, and crypto more broadly, have been on a huge tear lately. Then, with the chaos surrounding GameStop, there's been more discussion about whet…
It's been a weird several days in the market. What started with a short squeeze in GameStop, driven by Reddit traders, somehow morphed into a huge su…
We know that retail activity, much of it on Robinhood, has been surging since last spring when the lockdowns began. But just how big of an impact is …
The GameStop short squeeze is one of the most extraordinary events to ever happen in markets. But does it have political significance? Some are sayin…
We're seeing historic change happening in real time in the chip industry. The old leaders are going away, and new players and new models are emerging…
Everyone is talking about GameStop. The physical games retailer that was left for dead has been one of the hottest stocks of the year, surging well o…
We've been talking a lot on the podcast about semiconductors. The stumble of Intel. The general troubles with US manufacturing, and, of course, the r…
In every conversation about computer chips, it always comes back to the dominant player: Taiwan Semiconductor. Founded in the 1980s, it's far and awa…
It goes without saying that 2020 was a year like no other when it comes to the markets. A historic crash, and then a raging recovery, all set against…
The coronavirus crisis snarled global shipping in early 2020 as borders were closed, but lots of people expected it to improve as vessels returned to…
The U.S. was once a manufacturing leader in semiconductors. That's no longer the case, given the rise of contract manufacturing and outsourcing, the …
One of the surprising developments in the last year was the boom in SPACs. The so-called blank check companies raised more money in 2020 than they ha…
We're in a rare moment where chess is popular in the United States. There are two big factors driving it. One is the smash hit Netflix show "The Quee…
It's been pointed out that, after the Black Death in Europe, real wages surged because there was such a shortage of labor in the aftermath. But what …
Economics is all about improving living standards, but rarely does the dismal science deal with social justice or talk about how a lack of it could a…
2020 has been an absolutely extraordinary year for the economy. In March, we saw the fastest economic contraction in history with an extraordinary su…
This past summer, the business intelligence software company MicroStrategy made waves when it put some of its extra cash into Bitcoin. Then, as Bitco…
We talk a lot about quantitative trading on the podcast, but typically from a rather big picture perspective, and not at the level of actually buildi…
On a recent episode of Odd Lots, we talked about Intel, and how the former dominant American semiconductor company was stumbling. But big things are …
It's obviously been an extraordinary year for markets and the economy for reasons that don't need stating at this point. But what does 2021 have in s…
It's no secret that some African nations went on a borrowing spree in recent years, tapping both international markets and sovereign lenders such as …
For years, the IMF was generally of the view that free trade was good, and that open capital flows were also good. But in recent years, the latter vi…
With developed economies still operating well below pre-crisis levels, central banks face substantial pressure to pursue stimulative policies on an o…
For years, Intel has been the pre-eminent U.S. semiconductor company. But lately, the company has stumbled. This past summer, shares in the company p…