There are several markets that have really settled down since the tumult of early April. But strange, unusual things are still popping up, particularly in the currency space. Over the last few days, we've seen a huge surge in the Taiwan dollar. This is important, in part, because Taiwanese life insurance companies are major buyers of US dollar assets, such as corporate bonds. Suddenly, they're looking at a major hit to the value of these holdings, with losses that are only partially hedged. So why the sudden move, and what does it mean? On this episode, we speak with Brad Setser, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. We first talked to Brad about exactly this topic back in 2019, when the story was more of an intellectual curiosity rather than a market-moving development. We discuss the implications, and what it means in the context of the Trump administration's trade strategy.

More:
Why Taiwanese Life Insurers Are The Great ‘Whodunit' Of The Financial World
Taiwan’s Markets Jolted as Currency Surges Most Since 1980s

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What does history say about how big the AI boom can get, and who will ultimately win out? When does a boom turn into a bubble that turns into a bust? On this episode of the podcast, we speak to Henry Blodget, the founder of Business Insider (and Joe's old boss there). In the late '90s, Henry was one of the most well-known Wall Street analysts covering internet stocks, before the crash and recriminations, which ended up in his lifetime ban from the industry. His new project is a publication called Regenerator, which will again focus on business and tech. We discuss the state of the AI boom, and what lessons we can draw from the dot-com era. We also talk politics, what's changed on Wall Street over the last 25 years or so, and a bit on the state of the media business.

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Over the last several years, both parties in the US have been drifting away from laissez-faire thinking about the economy, and more towards the view that the state has an active role in shaping markets. You have Republicans talking about stricter anti-trust and sovereign wealth funds, and of course Democrats embracing things like industrial policy efforts in key strategic sectors. But how do you design markets well? When does it fail? And what is the history of this type of thing in the US. In this episode, we speak with Facebook co-founder-turned-economist Chris Hughes, who has published the new book Marketcrafters: The 100-Year Struggle to Shape the American Economy. In this conversation, recorded at the New York Public Library in April, we talk about his research on the history of marketcraft in the US, and how that study of history informs his understanding of today's economic policymaking.

Read more: Markets Plummet as Tariff-War Woes Fuel Exodus From US Assets

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We don't know what the end state for the tariffs are going to be, but inevitably there will be some shifts in the way that goods and dollars flow around the world economy. Of course, some parts of the economy are always subject to changing rules around subsidies and tariffs, and that's particularly true in agriculture. On this episode of the podcast we speak with Murad Al-Katib, the President and CEO of AGT Foods and Ingredients, who is sometimes known as The Lentil King of Saskatchewan. He is credited as being a driving force in turning the Canadian Province into a powerhouse of chickpea and lentil exports all around the world. He explains to us why he saw an opportunity in this space, why it's boomed, how the global trade and supply chain of these plants work, and how his company navigates perpetual shifts in agriculture policy around the world.

Read more: Trump’s Canada Tariffs Draw Lawsuit by Blackfeet Nation Members

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Everyone knows by now that college endowment funds have gone big on alternative investing, pouring billions of dollars into private equity and hedge funds. But that investing model now seems to be under pressure and there are reports that Ivy League institutions like Yale and Harvard are looking to unload some of their more illiquid investments. So why did colleges get into alts in the first place? And how do they select which funds to invest in? In this episode, we speak with Joe Dowling, the former head of Brown University's endowment. Joe is now global head of multi-asset investing at Blackstone, one of the biggest institutional investors around. He talks about the rise of alts, how college funds got so invested, the pressures they're facing right now, and the boom in multi-strats.

Read more: Harvard in Talks to Sell $1 Billion of Private Equity Stakes
Blackstone’s King of Hedge Funds Shakes Up Its Lagging Business

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Gathering official economic data is a huge process in the best of times. But a bunch of different things have now combined to make that process even harder. People aren't responding to surveys like they used to. Survey responses have also become a lot more divided along political lines. And at the same time, the Trump administration wants to cut back on government spending, and the worry is that fewer official resources will make tracking the US economy even harder for statistical departments that were already stretched. Bill Beach was commissioner of labor statistics and head of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics during Trump's first presidency and also during President Biden's. On this episode, we talk to him about the importance of official data and why the rails for economic data are deteriorating so quickly.

Read more:
Houston, We Have a Data Problem
The US Economy Is Fracturing Too

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When stocks are plunging in a typical market environment, people reach for safe haven assets like US Treasuries. But we've seen that phenomenon break down more and more. It broke down in a sustained way during the intense inflation of 2022. And it's been breaking down again, in an acute way, since President Trump's so-called "Liberation Day." On the night of April 8 and early morning of April 9, we saw a major spike in yields. As Trump put it, the bond market was getting the "yips." But what was actually going on? Who was selling? And why? And what have we learned more broadly about technical and economic demand for US government debt? On this episode, we talked to Ira Jersey, the chief US interest rate strategist at Bloomberg Intelligence, for a crash course in what drives the bond market in both the short and long terms.

Read more:
The Bond Investors Who Got Trump to Pause His Tariffs
US Bonds Rally as Fed’s Hammack Revives Odds of a June Rate Cut

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Over the last few years, retail traders have gotten into options in a major way. Selling puts, buying calls, trading volatility — what used to be the domain of niche experts engaged in practical hedging has exploded into the public sphere. And there was a lot of easy money during a time when every dip was bought, and stocks mostly just went up. But what have we seen in recent weeks, with the extraordinary trading since April 2? On this episode we bring back one of our favorite guests, Benn Eifert of QVR Advisors. He describes what's been going on in the markets, and why a lot of social media "volfluencers" have suddenly gotten very quiet.

Mentioned on this episode:
Matt Levine on MicroStrategy’s Infinite Money Machine

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