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Bloomberg's Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway explore the most interesting topics in finance, markets and economics. Join the conversation every Monday, Thursday, and Friday

Odd Lots

In 2014, the economists Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick were asked by the Treasury to conduct a study on the tax burden of private business owners. It was tricky to figure out how much these sorts of business owners — auto dealers, contractors, the like — actually owed in taxes: After Reagan's 1986 tax reforms, pass-through businesses and other accounting tricks became widespread enough to obscure this class of wealthy Americans hiding in plain sight. The research they conducted led to their new book The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There, and one of their central findings is that there are about three million private business owners who have an average wealth of around $25 million. They call this group “Main Street Millionaires” and their influence on the economy and politics in the US is considerable. We speak with Zidar and Zwick today about how they measured the actual number of rich people in America by sifting through reams of tax forms, why income inequality started to rise in tandem with the growing number of pass-through businesses, and how it's possible that the collective revenue of the nation's dentists far exceeds that of the NFL.
 
Read more:
Tech’s New Rich Are Suffering From ‘Sudden Wealth Syndrome’
Jobless Tech Workers Are Being Left Out of San Francisco’s AI Boom
 
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There's a Mind-Boggling Number of Rich People in America

Francis Fukuyama's essay “The End of History?” was published in the summer of 1989, a few months before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The essay's argument — that liberal democracy would not only defeat communism, but that its partisans might, in victory, miss the “courage, imagination, and idealism” that defined the ideological battle — lives on as one of the most cited pieces of political theory in the last three decades. In his new memoir, In the Realm of the Last Man, he revisits “The End of History?” and for today's episode he talks to us about how his essay's argument has evolved in a world now defined by the intense technological change brought on by AI and by the many electoral defeats liberal democracy has suffered as of late. We also talk about how the Internet and social media are helping fuel the listlessness that “The End of History” brought about, how he uses AI, and what, if anything, will come after liberalism.
 
Read more:
Trump’s Midterm Plan Centers on Tax Cuts, MAHA and Himself
Iran Ready to Escalate War Trump Says Will End After US Election
 
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What Francis Fukuyama Is Seeing at 'The End of History'

According to OpenAI President Greg Brockman, the models that escaped their sandbox and hacked into Hugging Face's servers had yet to go through alignment training. That they were able to break free of the testing environment was not a surprise to OpenAI, but what has happened since has forced them to rethink some things. Today, we talk to Brockman about what OpenAI has learned since the hacking incident and we discuss why he thinks the conversation around model development has to change. We also talk about how OpenAI collaborates and communicates with competitors like Anthropic, how he thinks models should be evaluating what counts as “good writing,” and, of course, we get his thoughts on how seriously we should be worried about the AI doomsday scenarios.
 
Read more:
OpenAI Is Open to Slowing Cutting-Edge AI, CEO Sam Altman Tells Staff
Tech’s New Rich Are Suffering From ‘Sudden Wealth Syndrome’
 
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OpenAI President Greg Brockman on Doing Business in the Wake of Hugging Face

Copper demand is booming, with the metal surging another 15% this year. Copper demand has always been tightly linked to economic activity, but now it's in overdrive, thanks to data centers, electric cars, and the global push to reindustrialize everywhere. Copper prices are also rising because it's caught in the crossfire of trade wars and resource nationalism; the US is expected to place tariffs on the refined metal. According to today's guest, Robert Friedland, the founder and executive co-chairman of Ivanhoe Mines, we're not even close to having enough copper for what's coming. We talk to Friedland about opening and running copper mines around the world, and what he's learned in his 40-year long career in mining (which includes a cameo from Steve Jobs).
 
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Read more: Copper Steadies With Dip-Buying From Funds, Chinese Industry
 
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Robert Friedland on the World's Monumental Shortage of Copper

Greg Jensen was one of the earliest backers of both OpenAI and Anthropic, and at Bridgewater Associates, where he is the managing chief investment officer, he leads the hedge fund’s AI strategy. As an early adopter of the technology, he has a lot of thoughts on where things stand right now in terms of model capability and safety, as well as the broader economic impacts of AI. Just recently, he published an op-ed in the New York Times that proposes a “token tax,” to help mitigate the job losses that AI might cause. (Bridgewater predicts as much as 18% of US jobs might be displaced in five years.) We last spoke with Jensen in 2023, and so much of what we discussed then (like AI hallucinations) seems quaint now that models have come so far — capable of lying, cheating, and much worse. On this episode, Jensen tells us how Bridgewater is currently using AI, why there needs to be a stronger AI regulatory state, and why it feels like the AI discourse is starting to resemble the months before Covid-19 took over the world in 2020.

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Why Bridgewater's CIO Says AI's Human Extinction Risk Is Real

If you walk into a local pharmacy in New York City, more likely than not, lots of the merchandise is locked behind closed doors as a measure to mitigate shoplifting. So how big is the “retail shrink” problem really? And why are stores willing to sacrifice customer experience to protect their inventory? According to today’s guest, the Home Depot’s VP of Asset Protection Scott Glenn, shoplifting is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to retail theft. What is really bedeviling companies like the Home Depot is something called organized retail crime — heists by criminal outfits that seek to nab large quantities of merchandise that eventually ends up in the black market. Today, we speak with Glenn about the in-and-outs of organized retail crime, the retail shrink problem, and what stores are doing to bring down theft right now.

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The Rise of Organized Retail Crime at Big Box Stores

Hardly anyone nowadays seems to carry much cash, never mind carrying around a bunch of $100 bills. So why does the amount of physical cash in circulation — especially big denominations like the $100 bill — keep increasing? There's a pretty obvious answer. All those dollars are being laundered and used by criminal enterprises. In this episode, we speak with journalist Oliver Bullough, author of Everybody Loves Our Dollars: How Money Laundering Won, about this cash paradox. We discuss how cartels balance their books by trading drugs for farm equipment, the gigantic parallel financial system that undergirds global money laundering networks, and why money laundering resembles Renaissance-era banking.

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Why Money Launderers Love $100 Bills

Our guest today is Colonel Sanders. More precisely, we speak with Wayne Sanders, a retired US army colonel who is currently senior defense research analyst for Bloomberg Intelligence. During his military career, Sanders specialized in cybersecurity and weapon systems research and his work for BI has recently focused on directed energy weapon systems — better known as lasers. Just a few decades ago, programs like Star Wars, the Reagan-era missile defense system, seemed like a pipedream; today lasers can shoot down missiles and much more. Sanders tells us about the physics problems researchers had to solve to make laser weapons a reality, why we still don't have laser guns, what makes a weapons system "exquisite," the economic costs that factor into battlefield decisions, and the unique supply chain constraints that affect laser development.
 
Read more:
Weary US Sailors Lay Bare War’s Strain During Thailand Shore Leave
German Navy Tests Ballistic Missile for the First Time at Sea
 
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Why Laser Beams Are the Hottest New Tech in Defense

Global bond yields are at their highest level since 2008, with the 30-year US Treasury touching 5% just before Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced a surprise increase of his department's bond buyback program and Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh made his hawkish speech at Jackson Hole. So what's driving yields higher? And what options do policymakers have to bring them down? In this episode we speak with Stanford Professor Darrell Duffie, who's been researching bonds for years, including presenting a paper at Jackson Hole in 2023 about how to fix the US Treasury market. A lot has changed since then, and at this year's Jackson Hole symposium, we caught up with Duffie to talk about everything going on in the bond market, as well as the challenge of shrinking the Fed's balance sheet. 
 
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What's Behind the Big Surge in US Government Bond Yields

Kevin Warsh gave a hawkish speech at this year's annual Kansas City Fed Symposium in Jackson Hole, but that doesn't mean the challenges are over. Will the Fed actually pull the trigger on rate hikes? What happens if the central bank doesn't act quickly enough to curb inflation? And how exactly will the new chair want to leave his mark on the Fed? In this episode, we speak with Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, who gives us his take on the direction of monetary policy and he grades Warsh's speech. We also discuss why high inflation in the US is different than the inflation seen in other countries, how the Treasury's wading into the bond market affects Fed independence, which of the Fed task forces might be the most impactful, the "messy jobs" theory of AI, and what Warsh really means when he says he wants the FOMC to have a “good family fight.”

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Adam Posen Thinks Things Could Get Very 'Messy' for the Fed

(Bloomberg) -- Gather ‘round the Odd Lots fire. Co-hosts Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway have assembled a collection of Bloomberg News reporters and editors to spread holiday cheer by sharing their favorite market stories and happenings of 2015. We discuss the stock market sell-off of Aug. 24, the fall of Silk Road, drama in the pharmaceuticals industry, how we all survived the first U.S. interest rate increase in almost a decade, China’s movie-goers, and the many, many people worried about bond market liquidity. Featuring: Max Abelson, Matt Boesler, Ed Hammond, Matt Levine, Dan Moss, and Chris Nagi.

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Episode 8: These Were Our Favorite Stories of 2015

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