Odd Lots

The Trump administration says it wants to kick start private investment in Venezuela now that it's captured Maduro. And Ukraine is eventually going to need a massive rebuild. But what is it like for a big multinational to actually operate in these types of places? In this episode, we speak with Jeff Kazin and Mike Rohlfsen, the cofounders of agricultural consultancy AgrisAcademy and former long-time Cargill employees. Jeff previous...

One of the mega-themes of the economy is that the big keep getting bigger. You see it in technology, where the megacap software companies are outperforming their smaller peers. And you see it in finance, where the world's biggest banks keep growing their share within the industry. Across multiple fields, there are clear advantages to size and scale that keep accruing. But what does it take to get to the very top, and what are the r...

We talk all the time about private credit. And we increasingly talk about it from the perspective of the AI buildout, and how all of these datacenters are being financed. But why did the space get so big in the first place, and what does its history indicate for the future of the asset class? On this episode, we speak with Michael Zawadzki, the Global CIO for Blackstone Credit and Insurance. Michael&...

Earlier this week, we saw something unusual happen in markets. The S&P 500 fell 2%, US Treasury yields rose, and the dollar simultaneously declined. This trifecta of market moves has rekindled talk of the "Sell America" trade as investors worry about the Trump administrations threats to take o...

In the AI industry, there's always a hot new thing. First it was ChatGPT. Then it was the image generators. There was the DeepSeek moment. In the latter half of last year, everyone was excited about how good Google's Gemini was. In January 2026, the new hot thing everyone is talking about is Claud...

One of the extraordinary elements of the civil unrest taking place in Iran is that it's almost impossible to know what's going on. There's a virtually complete news blackout, in part because of the government shutting down the internet. What this means in practice right now is that someone on the outside can't even know for sure whether the Iranian stock market has been trading lately, or whether it's been halted. And then of cours...

One thing we can all agree on is that demand for energy, and in particular electricity, is growing by leaps and bounds. But past that, there is going to be a debate about who is best positioned, and who will really make money from this trend. Will it be companies digging up raw commodities? Will i...

Even before Trump's victory in 2024, it was becoming clear that the Fed would come under political pressure like never before. The first year of the new administration bore that out. Not only had Fed Chairman Jerome Powell come under tremendous pressure over interest rate policy and the cost of office renovations, Trump has tried to fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook. The Cook case will soon be argued in fro...

For a long time, you could make plenty of money and sleep easy at night with a simple 60/40 portfolio. You put 60% of your money in stocks and 40% in Treasuries. The stocks generally went up. The Treasuries cushioned you during times of volatility and provided income. Then we got the worst inflation in 40 years, and the Treasury part of those portfolios got obliterated. So does it still work? And if not, how should an investor thin...

In some sense, the arrest of Maduro is nothing unusual. For over 200 years, the US viewed the entirety of the Western hemisphere as its legitimate domain for intervention. And of course, there's a long history of the US getting involved with Latin America specifically. But what is the Monroe Doctrine? And how does Trump's foreign policy fit into it. On this episode, we speak with Greg Grandin, a pro...

There are a bunch of questions right now about the future of Venezuela, and one of the big ones is what's going to happen to its circa $170 billion pile of debt. Some investors have been snapping up defaulted Venezuelan bonds, betting that a future restructuring could hand them a hefty payout. Oth...

Venezuela is sitting on, by some measures, the biggest oil reserves in the world. And yet, in the immediate wake of Maduro's capture by US forces, the actual price of oil has moved very little. So what gives? And what are the stakes for the industry? On this episode, we speak with Gregory Brew, a senior analyst at the Eurasia Group. Greg has the perfect background for this conversation, because in a...

Every year, regional Federal Reserve banks host some of the most substantive — and under-the-radar — events in the central banking world: research conferences. Behind the formal papers and dense macro models, this is where much of the Fed’s intellectual groundwork for monetary policy first starts to take shape. On this episode, we take you inside the Boston Fed's 69th annual Economic Conference to hear what the ec...

When the Odd Lots team was down in Washington DC earlier this year, we had a phenomenal meal at a restaurant called Butterworth's. As it turns out, the restaurant is one of the hottest hangouts for the MAGA crowd, with Steve Bannon and others frequently seen in its dining room. Of course, restaurants are difficult businesses in normal conditions, but in DC, you have the added factor that political c...

It's that time of the year. On this episode, Tracy and Joe answer questions from listeners that were submitted via voice note. We talk about everything from Chinese history to whales to whether or not we ever hold an episode without publishing it.

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2025 was an extraordinary year, with the real economy defying recession worries and equity markets putting up monster returns. So can this be repeated again in 2026? On this episode, we speak with two of the top minds at Goldman Sachs. Jan Hatzius is the bank's chief economist and head of research and Ben Snider is its chief US equity strategist. We review what really happened in 2025, talking about...

Hello Odd Lots listeners! As we take a break for the holidays we'd like to take a moment and bring you an episode by one of our sister shows here at Bloomberg Podcasts, Merryn Talks Money. 

In this special two-part series, John Stepek and Merryn Somerset Webb tell the extraordinary story of John Law: a fugitive Scots gambler who became the most powerful financier in France and helped invent the modern monetary system. From mur...

If you're a high-skilled tech worker, then potentially huge fortunes await you working for a startup or one of our booming AI giants. But the government needs these types of workers too. And the government is not set up to pay commensurate salaries with the private sector -- particularly for these types of roles. This challenge has long been understood, and there have been numerous efforts over the years to infuse the government wi...

By and large, American households are in a healthy economic position. Yes, unemployment has been rising, but it's still at fairly low levels. Consumer spending has held up well despite terrible sentiment. And many households are sitting on huge stock market gains and have a big home equity cushion. And yet, there are signs of trouble. Most notably, auto loan delinquencies have been surging to their ...