Odd Lots

We're about two months on from Liberation Day, and there's still a lot of confusion about what's going on with global trade. Some countries, like China, have been granted delays from tariffs. But other trade restrictions, like the 50% tariff on foreign steel, have come into effect. So what exactly is going on and what impact is this having on the physical flow of goods into America? In this episode, we catch up with Gene Seroka, executive director of the Port of LA, to get a sense of what he's actually seeing and what it means for US consumers and the prospect of empty store shelves.Read more: Port Leaders Warn Tariffs Bring ‘Radical Uncertainty’ to EconomyEmpty Store Shelves Might Be Coming Sooner Than You ThinkOnly Bloomberg.com subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox — now delivered every weekday — plus unlimited access to the site and app. Subscribe at bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

To some extent, at least in big cities, it feels as though the cost of housing is enveloping almost everything else in terms of politics right now. Booming areas that drive GDP have gotten incredibly expensive in large part thanks to rent, and even the well paid residents are forced to turn over a significant share of their income over to their landlord. So can anything be done about it? Can rent come down by liberalizing supply and making it easier to build? And can that scale? And what about developers that only want to build luxury-rate housing? On this episode of the podcast, we speak to Steven Fulop, the mayor of Jersey City, which sits directly across the river from NYC. Fulop is a candidate for the Democratic Party's nomination for governor and he says his time in office in Jersey City proves cities can turn the dial on housing supply. We talk about why Jersey City has added so much to its housing stock, what can be attributed to his policies, and what he thinks can be accomplished at the state level both in terms of housing and improving public infrastructure.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

President Trump wants Apple to make iPhones in America. The company itself has talked about — and to some extent already has been — moving more of its production to other countries, like India. But in reality, Apple remains deeply, deeply enmeshed in the Chinese supply chain. In fact, the rise of Apple, and the iPhone specifically, is the ultimate example of the link between the American and Chinese economies. And while this has been fruitful for shareholders all around the world, and contributed greatly to Chinese economic development, this relationship is also now perceived to be a huge source of geopolitical vulnerability for the United States. On this episode, we speak with Patrick McGee, a reporter at the Financial Times and the author of the new book Apple In China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company. He talks to us about how Apple discovered the opportunity of doing more manufacturing in China, and how close the company has become with Chinese political leadership. We walk through both the politics and the economics that makes it almost impossible to imagine the company building its products anywhere else at significant scale.Odd Lots Live is returning to New York City on June 26. Get your tickets here!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What is a currency? This turns out to be one of those questions we just kind of skip over because we don't have clear answers to it (and because economists often like to skip over these foundational things). This special episode of the Odd Lots podcast was recorded as part of Princeton University's “How to Write the Biography of a Currency” event, hosted by the Princeton Economic History Workshop and the Julis-Rabinowitz Center for Public Policy & Finance. In this discussion, we talk about how we should define a currency and how that definition has changed (or not) over time. Our panelists were Iñaki Aldasoro, an economist at the Bank for International Settlements, Indiana University Bloomington Professor Rebecca Spang, and Stefan Ingves, the former head of the Sveriges Riksbank, the central bank of Sweden, from 2006 to 2022.Read more:Dollar Drops on Renewed Trade Uncertainty, Soft Economic DataAsia’s $7.5 Trillion Bet on US Assets Is Suddenly UnravelingOnly Bloomberg - Business News, Stock Markets, Finance, Breaking & World News subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox each week, plus unlimited access to the site and app. Subscribe at bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We're told over and over again that the one "free lunch" in investing is diversification, and that you can improve your returns over time simply by investing in a wider range of assets. This is textbook modern finance. And yet over the past several years this hasn't been the case. An investor would have done great (with the occasional hiccups) just by investing in US stocks. What's more, even within US stocks, investors should have concentrated on big tech stocks. Going long US tech has been identified as the most crowded trade by investors for years, and yet most of the time it has outperformed almost everything else. So what are the lessons from this story? And is now the moment where international diversification is going to work? On this episode, we speak with veteran portfolio manager Krishna Memani, who is now the chief investment officer at Lafayette College. Previously, he was the CIO at OppenheimerFunds, which got bought by Invesco. We talk about portfolio theory, the tragedy of the prudent international investor over recent decades, and whether that realized return we've seen across a range of asset classes should prompt a fundamental rethink of finance theory.Odd Lots Live is returning to New York City on June 26. Get your tickets here!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.