Episodes
Published 06/28/19
Angela Nagle, author of Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right, talks to FT Alphaville's Jemima Kelly about the online culture wars and the rise of the alt-right.  For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy
Published 06/28/19
A number of geopolitical and financial risks are stalking the global economy, pointing to a possible recession in 2020. According to Nouriel Roubini, what is key among these risks is the US-China trade war and general protectionism in the global market. Izabella Kaminska talks to the economist and New York University Stern School of Business professor. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy
Published 06/21/19
The economist and Brookings Institution senior fellow talks to FT contributor Megan Greene about the fiscal policies that lawmakers could arrange now that would automatically kick in when some of the early signs of a slowdown start to appear.
Published 06/14/19
Man must work. But how man works matters. Brendan Greeley sat down with Joel Mokyr, an economist and economic historian at Northwestern University, at an event on the future of work at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. Policymakers tend to focus on the binary question of a job — do people have one, or not. But the quality of that work, the questions of meaning and satisfaction, are important to people, in a way that has political consequences. They wandered all the way back to Adam Smith,...
Published 06/07/19
The political economist sits down with Alphaville's Jamie Powell and Thomas Hale to discuss how we should think about expertise in a post-truth world.
Published 05/31/19
The president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas sits down with Brendan Greeley to discuss what a tight labour market could mean for retraining workers, what fracking has done to the price of oil and why he prefers to keep an eye on credit spreads instead of equity markets.
Published 05/24/19
What if the vast majority of the high-growth tech unicorns emerging from Silicon Valley are not really technology or innovation companies? What if they are highly politicised, zero-sum enterprises? That's what Ajay Royan, the Indian-born Canadian who co-founded Mithral Capital, along with Peter Thiel, thinks might be the problem at the heart of the Silicon Valley investment proposition. Izabella Kaminska asks him how his fund is trying to differentiate itself from that model by focusing on...
Published 05/17/19
How has banking culture changed since the global financial crisis and what areas still need work? Brendan Greeley talks with three economics experts who posed that question in a recent report put out by the Group of Thirty consultants. He is joined by Elizabeth St-Onge of Oliver Wyman, Nicholas Le Pan, former superintendent of financial institutions for Canada, and Stuart Mackintosh, executive director of the Group of Thirty.
Published 05/10/19
Economist Kimberly Clausing tells Brendan Greeley and Mark Blyth why greater trade, capital flows and immigration are the solution to more equitably dividing the economic pie. It's the subject of her book, "Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital".
Published 05/03/19
Until recently, economists have ignored the idea that communities matter for economic outcomes, leaving those questions to sociologists. But there is too much evidence to ignore: where you live has a profound influence on how you turn out. In a live conversation recorded at Penn Social, a bar in Washington DC, Raghuram Rajan, former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund and Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, talks about his new book, "The Third Pillar: How Markets and the...
Published 04/26/19
Tobias Adrian, formerly of the New York Fed, runs the Monetary and Capital Markets Department at the International Monetary Fund. Brendan and Colby sat down with him after publication of the IMF's Global Financial Stability Report. They talked about collateralised loan obligations, of course, but also about China and how the US faces risks just like any other country when hot capital flows in. 
Published 04/19/19
On the occasion of the release of the International Monetary Fund's Fiscal Monitor, Brendan talked to Vitor Gaspar, who runs the fund's Fiscal Affairs Department. Mr Gaspar, formerly of the Banco de Portugal, the European Commission and the European Central Bank, drew a distinction between "good" and "bad" spending. He also argued that a "competitive" economy isn't just an economy that pays low wages, and threaded a fine needle on whether Europe needs more infrastructure investment. And he...
Published 04/18/19
Law professor Odette Lienau joins Colby and Brendan on the sidelines of the IMF spring meetings in Washington, DC to discuss the sovereign debt crises in Venezuela, Argentina and Mozambique. They also discuss why vulture funds could do some good.
Published 04/12/19
Alphaville's Jemima Kelly and Izabella Kaminska sat down with Yanis Varoufakis, former finance minister of Greece and current organiser of a trans-European group of what he calls "radical Europeanists" — in favor of union, without deflation or austerity. Mr Varoufakis answers criticism from the left, pointing out that even if the euro or the EU were poorly conceived, leaving them now would have catastrophic consequences for the poor. He gives a brief history of economic thought, connecting...
Published 04/05/19
No matter what the British Parliament decides, for almost three years the UK, Ireland and the EU have been dealing with the reality of the Leave vote. Positions have hardened, investments have been foregone, and all the countries involved have become different places, in ways that cannot be undone. Brendan Greeley of FT Alphaville and Mark Blyth of the Rhodes Center at Brown discuss consequences with Stephen Kinsella, economist at the University of Limerick and Megan Greene, chief economist...
Published 03/29/19
Leah Boustan of Princeton and Maggie Peters of UCLA look at the wave of migrants to the US from Central America and compare it to the last great wave, from Europe in the late 19th century. Some things are the same: immigrant families are adopting "American" names at the same rates as before, for example. Some things are different: the speed of communication and container shipping mean that American companies prefer to get cheap labour through outsourcing, and won't lobby for increased...
Published 03/22/19
Andrew Keen, author of Cult of the Amateur and more recently How to Fix the Future, sits down with FT Alphaville's Izabella Kaminska. They both tell the history of their own disenchantment with the internet, and discuss why the Elon Musk story has turned into a Shakespearean tragedy, while Jeff Bezos is more of a Bond villain. "When you do away with gatekeepers you get anarchy," says Mr Keen, but dystopian misery isn't the answer, either. 
Published 03/15/19
Forget Brexit. Growth in the eurozone is slowing down, but not equally for all countries. Which leaves the continent with the same question it's had for a decade: is it capable of making policy flexible enough for all of its economies? Waltraud Schelkle of the London School of Economics argues that Europe's currencies always swung with the deutschmark, so the European Central Bank offers some level of control. Ashoka Mody of Princeton says the euro will never be flexible enough to let...
Published 03/08/19
Even if the trade talks are settled, long-term friction will remain between China and the United States. China has an industrial policy which will see it strive to make more advanced products, such as aircraft and medical devices. The US wants to keep selling these kinds of high-value manufactured goods to China. It remains a fundamental issue for the two world economic powers. FT Alphaville's Brendan Greeley speaks first with Brad Stetser, the former US Treasury economist and China watcher,...
Published 03/01/19
Answering the question of whether Germany's export-driven model will ever change, and whether Germany's obsession with saving and budget surpluses will ever change. And how to say "Groundhog Day" in German. Wade Jacoby of Brigham Young University and Megan Greene of Manulife Investments join FTAlphaville's Brendan Greeley and Mark Blyth from the Rhodes Center. 
Published 02/22/19
The United States may not have an infrastructure crisis. It may in fact have too much infrastructure. And what does that word "infrastructure" even mean, anyway? We talk about the history internal improvements, public works, and the power of a group that called itself The League of American Wheelmen.
Published 02/15/19
Armon Rezai of the Vienna University of Economics and Business and Lint Barrage of Brown University talk to Colby and Mark about how climate change will affect home values and retirement portfolios — you know, middle-class wealth. 
Published 02/08/19
Adam Tooze, economic historian and author of Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, joins the FT’s Brendan Greeley and Brown University’s Mark Blyth to discuss how our politics got us to where we are today, why our ideas about how the economy works may not be fit for purpose, and the key role that China played during the Great Recession and continues to play today. They also discuss the central importance of global capital flows for understanding our world and why global...
Published 02/01/19
The 2017 tax cut in the US included a provision that would forgive capital gains taxes, if invested for ten years in an "opportunity zone" — a low-income area designated by a state governor. But the idea of encouraging investments in poor and mostly black areas has a long history. We talk to Mehrsa Baradaran, a law professor at the University of Georgia and Andrew Schrank, a sociologist at Brown University. 
Published 01/25/19