Odd Lots

Stephanie Flanders, head of Bloomberg Economics, returns to bring you another season of on-the-ground insight into the forces driving global growth and jobs today. From the cosmetics maker in California grappling with Donald Trump's tariff war, to the coffee vendor in Argentina burdened by the nation's never-ending crises, Bloomberg's 130-plus economic reporters and economists around the world head into the field to tell these stories...

For years, China has experienced blistering growth. Driven by an investment-heavy economic model, this growth has limited household income while subsidizing business. This system worked extraordinarily well for years, but the system has recently been hitting its limits. On this week's Odd Lots, we speak with Michael Pettis, a longtime China expert who serves as a finance professor at Peking University as well as a Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment...

History is littered with collapsed civilizations ranging from the Maya to Angkor Wat. But what can they tell us about the world today, or doing business in it?. But what can they tell us about the world today, or doing business in it? On this episode, we speak with previous Odd Lots guest, archaeologist Arthur Demarest, often described as the "real Indiana Jones" and who is also Ingram Professor of Anthropology at Vanderbilt University...

For years, people have been predicting the demise of the U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency. Although the U.S. economy has been shrinking as a share of the world's GDP, the dollar continues to grow ever more dominant. Yet its strength is increasingly cited as a factor behind economic problems around the world. On this week's Odd Lots, the economist David Beckworth, a research fellow at the Mercatus Center, explains the dollar's persistent and growing strength.

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Last month, central bankers gathered at the annual Economic Symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. A lot of the talk was about the limits of monetary policy when it comes to boosting economic growth and what negative interests could do to the financial system. Bank of England Governor Mark Carney also gave a speech in which he talked about replacing the U.S. dollar's role in the financial system with something else­­—maybe even a central bank-run digital currency similar to Facebook's Libra...

One of the oldest, most basic strategies in investing is value investing, which, for lack of a better way to put it, means "buy stocks that are cheap." Value investing, a style associated with Warren Buffett, systematically attempts to uncover low-priced stocks. But by many measures, value investing hasn't been working recently, as high-priced growth stocks (think: technology) have trounced cheap stocks...

On this new season of Prognosis, we look at the spread of infections that are resistant to antimicrobial medicines. You're probably more likely to have heard of these as superbugs. Their rise has been described as a silent tsunami of catastrophic proportions. We travel to countries on the frontline of the crisis, and explore how hospitals and doctors around the world are fighting back. Prognosis’ new season launches Sept. 5. 

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Every day, people are bombarded with predictions of what will happen in the future. In recent months, talk of 'inflection points' in the markets has heated up, and the possibility of the U.S. economic expansion, now the longest in history, coming to an end is being actively discussed...

We live in a world of generally expensive stock markets and bank equities trading at 30-year lows. So says John Hempton, co-founder of hedge fund Bronte Capital and a former bank analyst, who also calls it "one of the great puzzles of the world." On this episode, we take a special trip to Australia to speak with Hempton about banks and how they fit into the way he evaluates good businesses and promising stocks...

The amount of negative-yielding debt keeps climbing and now includes bonds issued by emerging market countries and some junk-rated companies. On this week's episode, we talk to Viktor Shvets, Macquarie's Head of Asia Strategy, about why interest rates keep getting lower and why that's a problem for the global economy and financial system...