Odd Lots

Making a long career as a bear at a sell-side institution is tough. Generally financial markets have done quite well which means forecasting doom and gloom is, usually, only tenable for so long. Which is why we wanted to talk to one of the most successful bears out there. Société Générale has let Albert Edwards out of the bear cage for today's episode. Edwards knows his reputation as a bear is well deserved: He believes, among other things, double-digit inflation is in the offing. We also talk about the attention span of readers on the buy-side, what success looks like for a bear, and how a bear avoids getting fired.
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Last year, when we talked to Martin Wolf, the global order seemed like it was being upended after President Trump unveiled his sweeping tariffs against nearly every US trading partner. A lot has happened since then. In fact, April 2025 seems almost quaint when compared to 2026 so far, from the Supreme Court's tariff ruling to the US-Israel war with Iran. The war's effect on the world's economy is at once stunning and utterly strange: even as the prices of major commodities — oil chief among them — rise, the markets seem unaffected, closing at record levels in recent weeks. Today we speak with Wolf, the chief economics commentator for the Financial Times, about all this chaos and why, so far, it seems disconnected from the logic of the market. There is, he says, a great deal of ruin in the world economy, but growth remains a constant fact of life. Why is that? There's no straightforward answer, but to begin understanding how we got here, Wolf takes us to the early 20th century and paints us a picture of the world after the two World Wars. We also talk about the "terrifying" power that the US wields over the globe, how a fragmented Europe is navigating anxious relationships with both the US and China, the Faustian bargain AI represents, and much more.
Read more:Oil Inventories Falling at Record Pace on Iran War, IEA SaysUndersea Internet Cable Projects Are Getting Tangled in the Iran War
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In 2006, then-Senator Ted Stevens coined an infamous term for how to understand the internet: It's a "series of tubes." The funny thing is, that's a fairly accurate description. Underneath the world's oceans, miles and miles of fiber optic-cables send packets of information from one location to the next, serving as the backbone of the internet as know it. This infrastructure is delicate, too: Memorably, a 2022 volcanic eruption cut off the island of Tonga from web access for an extended period of time. Journalist Samanth Subramanian is the author of The Web Beneath the Waves: The Fragile Cables That Connect Our World, a book that explains, in detail, that the internet is not, and has never been, truly weightless or wireless. In fact, the system in place right now is pretty old school and resembles the telegraph cable network of yore. We talk to Subramanian about the strange contradictions of the undersea cable system, how much basic marine geography — like the Strait of Hormuz or the Suez Canal — informs where cables are laid, and how hard it is protect this vulnerable and vital infrastructure.
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Ever since Covid, central banks around the world have had the same problem. They have tools that are designed to modulate demand, but so many challenges have involved the supply side of the economy. Whether we're talking about supply chain disruptions, the war in Ukraine, and now the war in Iran, these are all issues for which monetary policy is of limited value. Of course, the temptation is to "look through" these events, recognizing the fact that these disruptions don't say much about the actual underlying state of the economy. But when we get one shock after another, it gets harder and harder to keep using words like "transitory." On this episode we speak with Megan Greene, an external member of the Monetary Policy Committee at the Bank of England. We talk about the compounding effects of all these shocks (including the trade war and Brexit), how she's thinking about the first- and second-order effects of each, and why for now, despite the underlying weakness of the UK economy, she remains squarely focused on the risks of higher inflation.
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Today's guest Mariana Mazzucato is one of our most requested. Mazzucato, a professor of economics at University College London and the founding director of its Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, specializes in the political economy of technological development and public sector investment. In our conversation, recorded in Madrid while at the Bloomberg CityLab conference, she explains her concept of the "mission economy," her definition of state capacity, how to prevent top talent from fleeing to the private sector, and whether consultants or governments should be blamed for inefficiencies and civic failures. It's a wide-ranging interview, one that covers everything from the initial public financing of Silicon Valley algorithms to the history of moonshots.

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