Bubble Trouble: Laying Out Inconvenient Truths About How Business and Financial Markets Really Work

Today, we turn our attention to a massive credit bubble that burst and dumped toxic sewage in the form of shell companies and endless debt on public utilities. A scandal is unfolding at Thames Water - London’s waterworks that’s frankly been drowned in debt by the private equity owners. To twist this up a notch, we’re joined by the Northern Irish former punk singer Feargal Sharkey has turned his legendary energy to a cause that's deeply dear to his fly fishing heart - that of England’s beleaguered and abused rivers and streams. It's a great reminder of how these financial bubbles impact all our lives, and Feargals dogged pursuit of justice on behalf of all of us who like to swim, fish or just enjoy the sight of the UKs precious rivers. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The podcast delves into the future of real estate post-pandemic with Dror Poleg. Topics include societal changes in China, future workspaces, rethinking inflation measurement, ethical implications of digital marketing, and content value in the creator economy.

Our guest this week is Hugh Hendry, a man who found fortunes walking the tightropes as booms turned to busts. Founder and CIO of Eclectica Asset Management, London, a Global Macro Hedge Fund, from 2002 to 2017, where its “high water mark” events were the early and successful identification of the gold bull market in 2003 and the housing debacle in the US in 2008. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week we want give a hat tip to the Financial Times, reporting on how the "Bank of England to review use of economic forecasts." As so often happens with the FT, the comments were even better than the article, which like us have been despairing for years about central bank economic models constantly getting wrongfooted by the real world. Asleep at the wheel or making the best of an impossible job? A second helping of Bailey’s many shortcomings as head of the regulator (the FCA) or victim of circumstance? We put the head of the BoE, Andrey Bailey and the economists and forecasters on the dock about the record of causing, not popping bubbles. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Economics wont get you a lot of spicy dates… but we delve into a fantastically accessible book that compliments this podcast like gin and tonic. This week we’re going to be in conversation with the authors of "Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles," an engaging tour of the last 300 years of bubbles. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week we catch up with the subject that is near and dear to our hearts: the business of podcasting. Will is fresh from two days at the industry's leading event in London where thousands of people got together to figure out can they actually make money from podcasting, an emerging new medium that is yet to find its footing as a commercial enterprise. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In recent episodes we’ve been boasting ”if there’s a bubble that burst, we pricked it first” but events at SBV caught us off guard. This bubble burst before our eyes and now the one word on the market's lips is contagion. But we’ve been here before, AND we’ll be here again - banks are being bailed out for their incompetence and central banks are scrambling to respond . (Repeat from March, 2023) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We’ve been training our respective brains on the dinner table topic de jour, artificial intelligence, for three episodes now and we’ve generated views about banking analyst notes, academia, mixtape culture. This week, we land one of the most important voices there is - a founder who built the first generative AI company on the block - jukedeck - to ByteDance and now finds himself in the front line of AI trench warfare: Ed Newton Rex - one of the few who can say ‘been there done that’ as we grapple with what AI means for the rest of us further down the line. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week, we want to lay out the current theatrics of the market - blink and you’ll have missed banks avoiding collapse and earnings beats and misses. So with eyes wide open, take your seats in the stalls so we get up and personal. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You may have heard about the recent collaboration between Drake and The Weeknd that wasn't a real collaboration, but an AI-generated fake. This incident is a canary in the coalmine not just for the music industry, but any creator or rights holders across numberous industries. Joining us to discuss is Jessica Powell of AudioShake, an A.I. startup that builds sound separation software to help musicians make additional revenue for their work. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.