Cowen's Co-President on Why SPACs Are Having Such a Moment
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 had in the several years prior combined. But why? Why...
11 Jan 202149min
Chess Grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura on Twitch Streaming and “The Queen's Gambit”
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 Queen's Gambit." The other is the rise of Twitch stream...
7 Jan 202147min
What Happened to Europe's Economy After the Black Death
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 was the structure of the economy that allowed this ...
4 Jan 202145min
This Is How Prejudice Can Hinder the Economy
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 actually hinder growth. In this episode, UBS Global ...
31 Dec 202035min
Goldman's Jan Hatzius on the Lessons Learned in 2020
2020 has been an absolutely extraordinary year for the economy. In March, we saw the fastest economic contraction in history with an extraordinary surge in unemployment. Now, as the year closes out, w...
28 Dec 202057min
Michael Saylor, the CEO Who Turned a Software Company Into a Bitcoin Company
This past summer, the business intelligence software company MicroStrategy made waves when it put some of its extra cash into Bitcoin. Then, as Bitcoin ran up, it bought more, and the stock has now so...
24 Dec 20201h 15min
Camille Fournier on Building Tech at Two Sigma
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 building the systems needed for trading and data analysis...
21 Dec 20201h 5min
Apple Is at the Cutting Edge of a Revolution in Chips
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 happening in the chip industry beyond the manufactu...
17 Dec 202043min
