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Bloomberg


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


Odd Lots

The internet is made for shopping. For years, the main inputs for e-commerce transactions involved targeted ads, algorithmic recommendations, SEO, and lots of mindless scrolling. But agentic commerce might represent a sea change for e-commerce: With the rise of AI agents doing shopping on behalf of consumers, how are retailers going to adapt? John Collison, co-founder of the financial services and payment processing company Stripe, has first-hand experience with all the ways e-commerce has changed in the last decade, and he thinks agentic commerce is going to completely transform the online shopping experience. On this episode, we speak to Collison about how AI has already changed the way consumers make purchasing decisions, why keyword search is a "ridiculous" way to find things to buy, what it means when brands will have to appeal to AI agents as opposed to human buyers, and if AI agents can truly mimic human taste.
 
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Stripe's John Collison on How Agentic Commerce Will Reshape the Internet

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.
 
Read more:
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BOE’s Pill Says Strong Iran Price Pressures Warrant Rate Rise
 
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Why SocGen's Albert Edwards Sees Double-Digit Inflation Coming Back

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 Says
Undersea Internet Cable Projects Are Getting Tangled in the Iran War
 
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Martin Wolf on the 'Terrifying' Superpower That the US Wields

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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Samanth Subramanian on the Undersea Cables That Keep the Internet Alive

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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The Bank of England's Megan Greene on Monetary Policy in a World of Supply Shocks

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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Mariana Mazzucato Thinks We Need More Moonshots

The residents of Allentown are still sore about that Billy Joel song. While it's true the Pennsylvania city became synonymous with deindustrialization after the US steel industry began its decline in the 1970s, Allentown should be known for more: In the 1950s, for instance, some of the first mass-produced transistors were made in the city, which were the precursor of today's semiconductors. The city is also a unique logistics and e-commerce hub — it's a day's drive from nearly 40 percent of the US population. Mayor Matthew Tuerk, who has held office since 2022, has made reindustrialization a focus of his mayorship. In today's episode, recorded in Madrid at the Bloomberg CityLab conference, we speak to Mayor Tuerk about the city's grand strategy for building back and sustaining its manufacturing base, implementing industrial policy on a local level, how rezoning has changed in the last decade, the political puzzle of data centers, recruiting companies to come to Allentown, de-risking the American supply chain, and our favorite new category of industry — weight-gaining industries — which Allentown specializes in.
 
Read more:
New Brookfield Venture May Restart Abandoned US Nuclear Project
Texas Ranch Lures Futuristic Startups to Revive US Manufacturing

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How an American City Can Become a Manufacturing Hub

Since Mayor Brandon Scott took office in 2020, he's fixated on a very visible problem in Baltimore: the tens of thousands of vacant homes that dot the city. It's hard to build new houses when there are so many that sit empty and unused. And the process of tracking down owners, convincing them to sell their vacant properties, and then converting those homes into usable housing supply is a tall task. In the last few years, the number of vacant homes in Baltimore has dropped from 16,000 to just over 11,800. On this episode — recorded in Madrid while we attended the Bloomberg CityLab conference — we speak to Mayor Scott about deindustrialization, redlining, and gun violence's historical effects on the current housing crisis, how his government identifies, block-by-block, redevelopment opportunities and matches projects with publicly-minded developers, and why Baltimore natives aren't huge fans of The Wire.
 

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How Baltimore's Mayor Is Fighting the City's Vacant Housing Crisis

Two years ago, Citadel's Ken Griffin paid almost $45 million for a stegosaurus skeleton, making it the most expensive fossil ever sold at auction. So why are dinosaur bones joining the collections of millionaires instead of museums? How does the private market for fossils actually work? And how similar is it to the market for art and other antiquities? In this episode, we speak with Salomon Aaron, a director at London-based gallery David Aaron, where he is the gallery's in-house broker for dinosaur fossils. We talk about how fossils are found and priced, what it's like to work alongside dinosaur hunters, how his gallery identifies potential buyers, and why Joe thinks something about the birds-to-dinosaurs evolutionary pipeline is off.
 
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Inside the Booming Market for Dinosaur Fossils

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has highlighted the potential for long-running theoretical chokepoints to turn into reality, with dramatic results for both geopolitics and the global economy. But the hypothetical scenario that policymakers have arguably been losing the most sleep over for decades is the prospect of a major conflict between China and Taiwan. So how likely is it, and what would such a conflict actually look like? On this episode, we speak with Eyck Freymann, author of the new book, Defending Taiwan: A Strategy to Prevent War With China, and a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. We discuss Xi Jinping's strategy, whether Taiwan's "silicon shield" of semiconductor manufacturing can last forever, the state of Taiwan's domestic politics, and what the US can do to deter such a conflict.
 
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Stripe's John Collison on How Agentic Commerce Will Reshape the Internet

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