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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

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

The implications of Fed Chair Kevin Warsh's Jackson Hole speech are pretty clear: Traders expect a rate hike given the hawkish hints littered in his address, largely focused on inflation. There are still a number of open questions and Warsh's lack of forward guidance does not exactly lend clarity to how the Fed will act in the coming months. Today, we recap the speech — in a conversation recorded from the Lodge at Jackson Hole — with Richmond Federal Reserve Bank President Tom Barkin and he explains why his thinking around the Fed's communication policy is changing, and he gets into what is still useful about things like the dot plot. He also tells us what he's hearing at Chamber of Commerce meetings about the impact of AI on local communities, how businesses are using their tariff refund checks, and whether the Fed will have to start paying attention to the economic effects of data center politicization.
 
Read more:
Bond Investors Wary After Warsh Fuels Wagers That Fed Is Poised to Hike
Where to Invest Now as Data Centers Turn Copper Into a Hot Commodity
 
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Richmond Fed’s Tom Barkin on the Surprisingly Resilient Real Economy

Inflation remains high and the 2% target is farther away than it was this time last year. There are signs all over that the economy is overheating — the strange labor market where hiring and firing remains low, while GDP is growing, but mostly due to AI and the data center buildout — and Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee is worried about how uncertain central bankers are about what to do to cool the economy. The next shock, he tells us, could be around the corner. In this conversation, recorded at the Jackson Hole Economic Symposium, Goolsbee explains why he is skeptical of metrics like r*, why he is embracing Kevin Warsh's philosophy around reducing forward guidance, the purpose of the new Fed task forces, and the economic indicators that influence his thinking around reaction function.

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Austan Goolsbee Is Worried the Economy Is Overheating

We are back in Jackson Hole! And this year's Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City symposium on monetary policy might be one of the most interesting editions in years. It marks the first under new Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh, and Fed observers all over the world will be closely watching his Friday speech for signs of how he might further distinguish himself, and the institution he is in charge of, from the Jerome Powell era. This meeting at Jackson Hole also comes at a fascinating, and pretty tense, time for monetary policy in the US and abroad: high bond yields, above-target inflation, and AI's still unrealized effect on broader parts of the economy like the job market. As we have in the past, we speak with Jeffrey Schmid, the president and CEO of the Kansas City Fed, about what to expect and he also shares his thoughts on the wave of baby boomer retirements and how it's affecting the labor force, his recent FOMC votes, and he explains why this symposium is so focused on payments.

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Kansas City Fed President Jeffrey Schmid on the First Jackson Hole of the Warsh Era

Earlier in August, it was reported that Nigeria's Dangote Refinery secured a $1 billion underwriting for its upcoming stock market listing, which is set to become Africa's largest IPO. Indeed, the whole the continent has seen lots of economic growth in the last few years: According to the United Nations, growth across Africa was expected to reach 4.0% in 2026. The history of economic development on the continent is a vexed one; access to critical resources, whether its minerals or petrochemicals, has not always equated to improved economic conditions. To understand what is going on in Africa, we talk to Joe Studwell, the author of How Africa Works: Success and Failure on the World's Last Developmental Frontier. The product of a decade of reporting, Studwell's book argues that African countries, in many instances, have failed to adopt development strategies (an industrial policy that favors export manufacturing for instance) that mirror Asian counterparts. And while development has been uneven, Studwell is optimistic that the seeds of sustained development are increasingly taking root, at least in some countries. We speak to Studwell about the Dangote IPO, why development has historically been so difficult, Rwanda's dreams of becoming Africa's Singapore, and why Lagos is one of the most impressive cities in the world.
 
Read more:
Dangote Offers East Africa Nations 30% Stake in New Refinery
T. Rowe Price Says Nigeria Attractive Even After 64% Stock Rally
 
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The Nigerian Industrial Behemoth That Could Reshape the African Economy

Within the AI industry, even the builders of it have been very anxious about the technology. They've talked for years about its potential to create destabilizing job losses. They even spend a lot of time thinking about rogue AI that could lead to human extinction. But for all their anxiety, they missed the thing that's become the most publicly salient: how upset people would be about building data centers. Part of this was understandable. Data center construction has been happening for a long time in America, and it used to be relatively uncontroversial. In fact, cities and states would often design their tax code to incentivize data center construction. Now there's this complete 180. On this episode, we speak with independent writer and Substacker Jasmine Sun, who recently traveled to Wisconsin and Michigan for some on-the-ground reporting about the communities and activists trying to stop data center development. She explains what the pushback is really all about, what it represents, and what future developers will have to do in order to be welcomed in.

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Read more:
Anthropic-Tied Data Center Inks $1.3 Billion Private Credit Loan
Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro to Limit New Data Centers
 
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Jasmine Sun on What the AI Industry Got Wrong About the Public Backlash

The philosopher Nick Bostrom was one of the first thinkers who mapped out the existential risk of AI. In his 2014 book, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, he delved into various scenarios — like the now-famous “paperclip maximizer” — to show the dangers that unfettered and highly intelligent AI posed to humans. A decade later, in Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World, he looked at the other side of the AI coin, and theorizes what human experience might look like if AI is capable of solving all of our problems. What happens if AI and robots can literally do every single thing better than humans can? How would we find any meaning or satisfaction from life? On this episode, he speaks to us about the two divergent ways of understanding AI's future, what we might do, and what we can do right now to improve the chances that AI actually improves our lives.
 
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Read more:
Tech Deploys Charm Offensive to Combat AI Data Center Backlash
Young Americans Become More Hostile to AI, Fearing Job Losses
 
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Nick Bostrom on What Happens if AI Solves All of Our Problems

You can do a lot of things with the click of a button nowadays. You can get insurance, open a bank account, or trade 347 different stocks all at once via an ETF. But one thing you definitely can't do via a single click, is refinance your mortgage. In fact, securing a mortgage still requires reams of paperwork -- a lot of which has to be physically mailed to all the different parties involved. So why is mortgage finance stuck in the stone age? In this episode we speak with Mike Yu, co-founder and CEO of Vesta, about why we don't have one-click mortgages refis. He describes how a mix of clunky legacy IT systems and regulation have combined to make mortgage finance a technological laggard.
 
Read More:
US Home-Purchase Applications Rise to Highest Since February
 
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Why You Can't Get a One-Click Mortgage Refi

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