Odd Lots

When it comes to millennials, the media has certain tropes that it likes to go back to. Millennials love avocados. Millennials aren't into homebuying. Millennials are always killing off this or that product or service. But what if the consumption lens is the totally wrong way to talk about this generation? On this week's Odd Lots podcast, we speak to Malcolm Harris, the author of "Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials," about what he says is a more useful frame for...

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By now, everyone's heard of ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings) where companies issue their own currency-like tokens. They boomed massively in 2017, alongside the whole cryptocurrency craze. But very few people really get what they are, and how they fit into the regulatory landscape. On this week's Odd Lots podcast, we speak with Peter van Valkenburgh, the director of research at Coin Center, who explains why you have to go back to a 1946 case involving a Florida orange grower to understand how...

Recent threats to impose tariffs on Chinese goods, coupled with China's own retaliatory announcements have raised the prospects of a trade war between the world's two biggest economies. But what is a trade war, and what would be the economic ramifications if there were one? Brad Setser, the Steven A. Tananbaum senior fellow for international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations, joins us on this week’s Odd Lots to help answer those questions. Brad has been writing about trade issues ...

A lot of people would probably agree that there's something wrong with much of the traditional advice in how to lose weight -- or at least how it's implemented. The economist Miles Kimball has lost weight using a different approach. He's increased his fat intake and gone for long stretches of time without eating anything at all. On this week's Odd Lots podcast, Kimball, a prolific blogger and professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, explains what got him interested in fasting,...

Remember LIBOR? The London Interbank Offered Rate measures the cost of money when banks borrow from each other. It famously blew out during the financial crisis, but for a long time since then it's been dormant. Only lately it's started to creep higher again. On this week's Odd Lots podcast, we talk to Scott Peng, the founder, CEO and CIO of Advocate Capital Management, who warned in early 2008 that there was something fishy about the way the measure was being priced. In the post-crisis...

These days, when you think of trading, you think of people sitting at a desk with a bunch of monitors, watching charts, and maybe making decisions based on algorithmic signals. Of course if you imagine a trader a few decades ago, you think of someone in a big open pit shouting loudly and writing things down on actual physical pieces of paper. So what was that scene really like? On this week's Odd Lots podcast, we speak with Cameron Crise, a Bloomberg macro strategist, who used to trade...

For years, nobody seemed particularly concerned about inflation. Outside of a few blips, in the wake of the financial crisis, people have become accustomed to low inflation, and central banks providing ample stimulus to the economy. But suddenly that's changing. There seem to be hints that the macro backdrop is shifting, and that has investors on edge. So why the shift and what's going on? On this week's Odd Lots, we speak with Michael Ashton of Enduring Investments, a specialist in...

In theory, people should want to know accurate facts about the state of the world. In practice, it's not so simple. Because of the way we evolved, and how our brains work, there are often things that we prioritize above the truth (such as fitting in with some tribal identity). On this week's Odd Lots podcast, we speak with NYU professor Jay Van Bavel, about a new paper he co-authored titled "The Partisan Brain: An Identity-Based Model of Political Belief." It explains how political ideology...

Decrypted returns on March 6th with a brand new season. Here's a sneak peek of what's in store. We'll be releasing new episodes every Tuesday starting next week.