Odd Lots

The U.S. is on the verge of an economic crisis due to the coronavirus, as people and businesses aggressively pull back on spending. On this week's Odd Lots podcast, we speak with Claudia Sahm, the dir...

12 Mar 202038min

Questions continue to arise over the effect of passive investing, and whether or not it's somehow distorting the market. On this week's episode, we speak to Vincent Deluard, the Director of Global Mac...

9 Mar 202041min

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 Mar 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 Mar 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 Feb 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 Feb 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 Feb 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 Feb 202045min