Odd Lots

At the end of March, Congress passed the CARES Act in an attempt to mitigate some of the massive economic devastation being caused by the coronavirus crisis. A key piece of the legislation includes grants for small businesses that keep employees on their payroll during the emergency. On this episode, we speak with Florida Senator Marco Rubio about the program, what's working, what isn't, and what it will take to move the economy back towards full employment. 

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With the U.S. economy going into a deep slump, the Federal government has attempted to counteract the pain by increasing spending. But for cities and states, it’s virtually impossible for them to run counter-cyclical fiscal policy. Furthermore, the crisis is draining local coffers due to public health expenditure and the collapse of tax revenue. This has already led to the start of a state and local austerity wave (spending cuts, layoffs, etc.) that could take years to reverse...

Earlier this year on Odd Lots, we did an episode about Korean structured investment products that were sold to retail investors, whose performance was tied to various market indices around the world. Crucially, those payouts were premised on there not being a major crash in those world markets. Obviously, we’ve seen quite the crash. So, for this week’s episode, we’ve gone back to Benn Eifert, the CIO of QVR Advisors, to check out the state of them now...

The commercial real estate market has been clobbered in this crisis, as restaurants and stores virtually shut down entirely throughout the month of March. On this week’s Odd Lots episode, we speak to Tom Barrack, the CEO of Colony Capital, on the crisis facing the industry, and what he feels needs to be done further to prevent the industry from going into a tailspin.

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The plumbing of the financial system is coming under strain like never before. On this week’s podcast, we speak with two legendary experts on how the money system works: Zoltan Pozsar of Credit Suisse and Perry Mehrling of the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies. They explain the extreme level of stress we’re seeing, what the Fed has done to alleviate, what more needs to be done, and what the post-crisis future may look like.

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In normal times, U.S. Treasuries are the ultimate safe haven. They are highly liquid and guaranteed to pay out. So when people want to hide out during periods of economic and financial market volatility, you can typically count on there being a strong bid for them. But in the last couple of weeks, the volatility has been so extreme, and the flight-to-cash so severe, that the market stopped behaving as normal...

For a long time, people have been warning that corporate debt could be the major source of vulnerability in today's economy. And the market meltdown that we've been seeing since the beginning of March could make those fears a reality...

Markets around the world are so extremely volatile that nobody can think of any perfect precedent. There are shades of the Great Recession, 1987, the period in the wake of 9/11, and other moments of extreme turbulence. This week's special episode was recorded on Monday March 16 with Naufal Sanaullah, a macro strategist at EIA All Weather Alpha Partners. He walked us through his thinking on the market, and even discussed how he was trading things, right then, during the market open...

Saudi Arabia recently announced that it was engaging in a full-on price war by pumping oil like crazy. At one point, after the move, the price of Brent Crude plunged 31%. This was a body blow to U.S. shale companies, who are already reeling from falling prices and tightening credit markets...

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 director of Macroeconomic Policy at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, about what the government can be doing right now to stop a recession. Claudia has done extensive research on exactly this topic, and now is the moment to put her theoretical work into practice.

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