Odd Lots

In recent weeks, before the stock market plunged, a page on reddit called r/WallStreetBets suddenly started exhibiting enormous influence on a handful of stocks. The emergence of online chat rooms mak...

5 Maalis 202058min

There are lots of famous debt crises in history, but the story of Iraq's government debt build-up in the 1980s and subsequent restructuring in the early 2000s is probably one of the most unusual. Iraq...

2 Maalis 202053min

Apple's recent revenue warning reminded the world of how exposed the company is to China, and in particular its factories. As the coronavirus continues to shutter huge swaths of the Chinese economy, t...

26 Helmi 202037min

One of the best recent movies was Uncut Gems, in which Adam Sandler plays a Diamond District jeweler with an addiction to gambling and risk. It turns out, one of the workers in Sandler's shop was play...

24 Helmi 202043min

Back in 2017, the World Bank issued the world's first pandemic bonds. The bonds are meant to shift some of the financial risk of a global pandemic on to investors, but they've been criticized for havi...

17 Helmi 202028min

Over the last decade or so, we've seen an incredible rise in so-called passive investing. While definitions differ over what this means, we've seen more and more money poured into index funds (which o...

10 Helmi 202045min

There's a growing consensus that governments need to act more aggressively in using fiscal policy to stave off the next recession, and that monetary policy simply isn't powerful enough. But how do you...

3 Helmi 202059min

Even to this day, there are economists who don't understand money or don't think that money is an important aspect of the economy. They see the world as still operating essentially under a barter syst...

27 Tammi 202049min