Odd Lots

Oil has obviously spiked massively since the start of the war with Iran. And if you look at various end products, such as jet fuel, the surge is even more extreme. And if the war is prolonged, or if the Strait of Hormuz continues to be functionally blocked, then this could just be the start of an even bigger spike. On this episode, we speak with Rory Johnston, the author of the Commodity Context news...

Last year, we had Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev on the podcast to talk to us about his company's plans to tokenize shares of private companies. The idea is that retail investors want to participate in hot names like OpenAI and SpaceX, and that tokenizing private equity would allow this to happen. Right...

A year ago, all of the talk was about how the big AI companies were wildly overvalued. Everyone was calling it a bubble. Fast forward to now, and a dominant idea in the markets is that AI is so powerful that all kinds of legacy businesses — particularly software — could go to zero. So where does the truth lie? And what now for AI valuations? On this episode, recorded live at the On Air podcast festival in Brooklyn on Fe...

With war breaking out in Iran, the price of oil is surging, in part due to the destruction of oil energy infrastructure, but also the ability of anything to get through the Strait of Hormuz. But it’s not just oil that moves through this key waterway — there are plenty of other goods, including metals and ingredients for fertilizer getting potentially constrained. It’s also not just the risk of violence itself that...

Lloyd Blankfein was CEO of Goldman Sachs for more than a decade, riding the trading boom to the top of the storied investment bank and steering it through the 2008 financial crisis. In his new memoir, Streetwise: Getting To a...

The average person can enter a stock trade on their computer, hit refresh, and the trade is done. As fast as that seems, there are professional traders moving even faster, executing thousands of trades per second. Over the years, the need for speed got so intense that competing firms would aim to get their own systems closer and closer to the exchange's computers, so as to minimize the length of the wires and get their trades in ev...

'Bloomberg This Weekend' features unique conversations on business, news, lifestyle and culture. Join David Gura, Christina Ruffini and Lisa Mateo Saturdays and Sundays for discussions with business leaders, lawmakers and cultural icons.  

Watch the show LIVE on Bloomberg Television from 7AM-10AM Eastern Time.   
Listen to the show LIVE on Bloomberg Radio from 7AM-10AM Eastern Time.   

Something very unusual happened in the market in the last week of February. It sold off, in part, thanks to an article on Substack. James van Geelen is the founder of Citrini Research, which published a piece a week ago titled, “The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis.” It was not written as a forecast of an imminent disaster, but rather as a scenario analysis in which AI capabilities lead to...

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court ruled that Trump's "Liberation Day" tariffs were illegal. And now basically every importer who paid those tariffs will be rushing to get their refunds. But will businesses actually get paid? And how do they file a claim? And should consumers get refunded if a business passed the cost of the tariffs on to them? On this episode, we're rejoined by regular Odd Lots guest Ryan Petersen, the CEO of F...

It's hard to imagine New York City becoming significantly more affordable as long as it remains so expensive to build things. Whether we're talking about new housing or transportation, the city is a famously expensive place to do construction. There are reports of subway elevators costing $100 million per station. Public bathrooms end up costing millions as well. One driver of costs is insurance, which is a major national issue, bu...

Alison Roman is a cult figure in the world of food media. She's written multiple hit cookbooks and several of her recipes have gone viral. And her newsletter is incredibly popular. Now, she's putting her name on consumer goods, recently launching a new line of high-end jarred tomato sauce called, appropriately, A Very Good Sauce, which she sells direct online. So what has she learned about the consumer goods industry and its supply...

NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani has certain ideas that make mainstream economists' head explode. Anything in the ballpark of rent control, specifically, is widely derided by defenders of the orthodoxy. But how did the orthodoxy become the orthodoxy? And how did the heterodoxy become the heterodoxy? On th...

This year could be a big one for IPOs. From Anthropic to SpaceX to OpenAI, we could see some gigantic companies hit the public market. But of course, the big story is that big, thriving companies feel less and less pressure to go public. In a different era, private giants like Databricks and Strip...

The start of the year has been an absolutely brutal one for software companies. There’s a big fear that the rise of AI and advanced coding models will pull the rug out from this industry. But even before these AI fears, software companies were seeing their growth slow. So how does the business actually work? And more importantly, what types of companies will actually survive the “SaaSpocalypse”? (Or maybe “t...

For years, DRAM -- or Dynamic Random Access Memory -- was kind of a sleepy, commoditized aspect of chip industry. Growth was steady, but modest, and prices just generally drifted lower. Suddenly all that's changed. AI has created voracious demand for DRAM and consumer facing companies are being forced to either curtail supply or raise prices due to exploding costs. But what is it about AI that consumes so much memory, and when will...

It’s an open secret that the Chinese government has engaged in a global campaign to acquire intellectual property from foreign rivals. At the center of that campaign is the Ministry of State Security, China’s elusive intelligence agency. The US has apprehended hundreds of people accused of giving information to the MSS, but the agency’s inner workings have been a mystery — until now.

Today, we’re bring...

The future is always tough to predict, but generally when it comes to inflation, a lot of the debate is about how long it will take the Federal Reserve to get back to its 2% target. In other words, people generally agree on the direction, but disagree on the speed. But our guest on this episode violently disagrees with the consensus direction. Peterson Institute President Adam Posen thinks inflation will be back at 4% by the end of...

We are rapidly entering a world in which there are odds on virtually everything. During the recent Super Bowl, the big prediction market platforms didn't just offer bets on the game itself, but also on more exotic facets, such as the first song that Bad Bunny would sing, even who would join Bad Bu...

Ricardo Hausmann is a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and the director of Harvard's Growth Lab. We've talked to him multiple times in the past about the necessary preconditions for economies to grow and thrive. But in addition to his academic work, Hausmann was previously a policymaker in Venezuela, including a stint at the country's central bank prior to the election of Hugo Chavez. In this conversation, we talk about how ...