In Episode 258 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Lev Menand, author of “The Fed Unbound: Central Banking in a Time of Crisis.” Menand is an associate professor of law at Columbia Law School who has worked as an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and as a senior advisor to both the Deputy Secretary of the Treasury and the Assistant Secretary for Financial Institutions. He joins Demetri for an important and timely conversation about the US Dollar and the evolution of the international financial system into a kind of Frankenstein’s monster whose appendages and doppelgängers reach into the deepest recesses of the global economy. Dollar balances and dollar-based lending by institutions not regulated by the Federal Reserve—what we broadly refer to as the shadow banking system—have grown so large over the years that no one, not even the Fed, can actually quantify them. For most of us, awareness of just how dangerously complex the modern banking system has become was made clear fourteen years ago with the onset of what we now call “The Global Financial Crisis,” a supposedly once-in-a-lifetime event that almost repeated itself during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic when the Fed came to the rescue of markets to stop yet another financial panic that threatened to bring down the global financial system. Panics like these ultimately stem from a fear or inability on the part of financial counterparties to settle claims and honor liabilities. With the Fed now raising interest rates more aggressively than it has in almost thirty years the question that many investors, economists, and policymakers around the world should be asking themselves is “what is the likelihood that the events we experienced in 2008 and most recently in 2020 repeat themselves today?” Our objective in bringing you this conversation is to provide you with a foundational framework for understanding the forces responsible for driving crises of liquidity in the international dollar system during a time when those forces are growing stronger and stronger. In the process you are going to learn about the plumbing of the shadow banking system, the evolution of the eurodollar market, repos, money market funds, and so much more. The majority of that conversation takes place in the second hour of today’s episode which is available to premium subscribers only. You can access the full episode, transcript, and intelligence report to this week’s conversation by going directly to the episode page at HiddenForces.io and clicking on "premium extras." All subscribers gain access to our premium feed, which can be easily added to your favorite podcast application. If you enjoyed listening to today’s episode of Hidden Forces you can help support the show by doing the following: Subscribe on Apple Podcasts | YouTube | Spotify | Stitcher | SoundCloud | CastBox | RSS Feed Write us a review on Apple Podcasts & Spotify Subscribe to our mailing list at https://hiddenforces.io/newsletter/ Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe & Support the Podcast at https://hiddenforces.io Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas Episode Recorded on 07/07/2022

In Episode 257 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Helen Thompson, author and Professor of Political Economy at the University of Cambridge. Thompson’s current research concentrates on the political economy of energy and the long history of the democratic, economic, and geopolitical disruptions of the twenty-first century, which she explores magisterially in her new book “Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century.”  For those of us who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, the nature of the world as we knew it to be only seemed to be getting better and better. The price of energy and the cost of capital kept getting cheaper, the world kept getting safer and more interconnected, and liberal democracy and free-market capitalism were seen as inevitable outcomes of the end of history. Today, all of that feels like it was almost a dream. The last two decades have brought a powerful tide of geopolitical, economic, and democratic shocks onto the world. Their fallout has led central banks to create over twenty-five trillion dollars of new money, brought about a new age of geopolitical competition, destabilized the Middle East, ruptured the European Union, and exposed old political fault lines in the United States--fault lines that seem to challenge even those of the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s when the specter of nuclear war and the trauma of violent riots and political assassinations cast a long shadow over the future of the Republic. This conversation between Helen Thompson and Demetri Kofinas endeavors to draw a line of continuity between those turbulent years and the present political moment as we try to imagine how a future situated in the long arch of human history with all its political challenges, economic imperatives, and destructive wars might unfold. It recounts three histories. One about geopolitics, one about the world economy, and one about western democracies, and explains how in the years of political disorder prior to the pandemic, the disruption in each became part of one big story, much of which originates in problems generated by fossil-fuel energies and our efforts to control them. And it explains why, as the green transition takes place, the longstanding predicaments that energy invariably shapes will remain firmly in place. You can access the full episode, transcript, and intelligence report to this week’s conversation by going directly to the episode page at HiddenForces.io and clicking on "premium extras." All subscribers gain access to our premium feed, which can be easily added to your favorite podcast application. If you enjoyed listening to today’s episode of Hidden Forces you can help support the show by doing the following: Subscribe on Apple Podcasts | YouTube | Spotify | Stitcher | SoundCloud | CastBox | RSS Feed Write us a review on Apple Podcasts & Spotify Subscribe to our mailing list at https://hiddenforces.io/newsletter/ Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe & Support the Podcast at https://hiddenforces.io Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas Episode Recorded on 07/06/2022

In Episode 256 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with the CEO of Investment Management Associates, Vitaliy Katsenelson. Vitaliy is a well-known value investor and author of several books on investing and life. His latest, “Soul in the Game,” is a philosophical exploration of the sources of life’s meaning told through a collection of day-to-day observations and insights about Vitaliy’s early childhood in Russia, his experiences as a parent, and his love of classical music, and most importantly of art, which features prominently in their discussion. This conversation combines two of the objectives that Demetri laid out in the introduction to a recent episode he published on the subject of courage and self-actualization, namely his desire to take a more holistic approach to exploring and analyzing the macro challenges that we are all facing as a community, but which affect each and every one of us as individuals. Vitaliy has made that very easy to do, because he writes so prolifically about both of these things, whether it is the principals of value investing, his thoughts on the macro economy, markets, stagflation, or the path of interest rates, as well as how to cultivate objectivity, the benefits of introducing randomness into your life, and learning how to separate the things that you can’t control from the things you can. You can access the full episode, transcript, and intelligence report to this week’s conversation by going directly to the episode page at HiddenForces.io and clicking on "premium extras." All subscribers gain access to our premium feed, which can be easily added to your favorite podcast application. If you enjoyed listening to today’s episode of Hidden Forces you can help support the show by doing the following: Subscribe on Apple Podcasts | YouTube | Spotify | Stitcher | SoundCloud | CastBox | RSS Feed Write us a review on Apple Podcasts & Spotify Subscribe to our mailing list at https://hiddenforces.io/newsletter/ Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe & Support the Podcast at https://hiddenforces.io Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas Episode Recorded on 06/28/2022

In Episode 255 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Ian Bremmer. Ian Bremmer is the president and founder of Eurasia Group, the world’s leading global research and consulting firm, and GZERO Media, a company dedicated to providing intelligent and engaging coverage of international affairs. Bremmer is also the author of ten books, including his latest, “The Power of Crisis,” in which he argues that we are unprepared for a trio of looming crises in the areas of pandemic response, climate change, and the next technological revolution. All of these looming crises that Ian focuses on are subjects that we’ve explored in great depth over the years with folks like fmr. FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, NASA’s Chief Climate Scientist Gavin Schmidt, Google’s Eric Schmidt, and so many more. You can find all of those previous and relevant conversations in the related section on the episode page of our website. Because of the ongoing war in Ukraine and its effect on global commodity markets—and in particular oil & gas—our conversation with Ian leads with a discussion about climate policy. The discussion focuses specifically on the war in Ukraine, what it reveals about our vulnerabilities as we try transition towards more sustainable, carbon-free forms of energy production, and how to balance our national security concerns while still ensuring that we can meet the long-term climate goals set out in the 2016 Paris Agreement. In the second part of their conversation Kofinas and Bremmer continue their discussion about energy markets, eventually pivoting to a much broader conversation about the upcoming elections in 2022 and 2024, and specifically why there seems to be a persistent leadership deficit in American politics today and what we can do to change that. They also discuss media reform and what we can do as individuals and in some cases as influencers with large followings to have more constructive and good-faith conversations around the issues that matter to all of us as we navigate what may well be the most dangerous time for the international system since at least the early stages of the Cold War. The goal of today’s conversation, among other things, is to bring you the perspective of someone who operates within some of the most powerful networks of people in the world—and is an advisor to many of them. Ian Bremmer has years of experience speaking with global leaders, CEO’s of Fortune 100 companies, and experts across all industries & territories, making him an invaluable resource for anyone trying to think about the future path of policy, risks to global governance, and so much more.  You can access the full episode, transcript, and intelligence report to this week’s conversation by going directly to the episode page at HiddenForces.io and clicking on "premium extras." All subscribers gain access to our premium feed, which can be easily added to your favorite podcast application. If you enjoyed listening to today’s episode of Hidden Forces you can help support the show by doing the following: Subscribe on Apple Podcasts | YouTube | Spotify | Stitcher | SoundCloud | CastBox | RSS Feed Write us a review on Apple Podcasts & Spotify Subscribe to our mailing list at https://hiddenforces.io/newsletter/ Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe & Support the Podcast at https://hiddenforces.io Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas Episode Recorded on 06/21/2022

In Episode 254 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Jared Dillian, editor of The Daily Dirtnap, a financial newsletter for professional investors focused on gauging market sentiment and how to capitalize on it. Dillian is also the author of two very successful books on Wall Street and investing and is the host of the Be Smart podcast, where he talks to his listeners about everything from how to sort out their personal finances to how to approach trading and investing in the stock market and everything in between. This conversation is yet another in a series of episodes that we’ve been doing focused on how to navigate the transition in market regimes and all of the challenges that this transition presents for our assumptions about markets and the world at large. Jared is the perfect person to speak to about this not just because of his focus on sentiment, but because he really is someone who stands apart. He’s a contrarian in the purest sense of that word and during a time when many of the people we’ve had on this podcast increasingly seem to share similar perspectives on the future path of interest rates, inflation, and energy prices, bringing on someone like Jared is a way of holding ourselves and our ideas accountable–something that is especially important whenever money or investing are involved.  That said, Jared Dillian also has another unique quality which is that he publishes an investment newsletter, which means that he spends an enormous amount of time thinking through his investment ideas in public and that can be very tricky to do while also managing to invest successfully in those ideas, precisely because of how easy it is to become emotionally invested in being right. This is something that you will see time and time again in the financial news business. Financial commentators and pundits will twist themselves into pretzels trying to align their public statements, personas, and track records with an ever-changing set of market conditions.  Therefore, one of the topics that Jared and Demetri discuss is how not to do that and how to know when someone else is doing it. In other words, how to filter through information so that you know who to listen to, what to take from them, and then how to exercise a level of humility in your own investment mindset so that you don’t get caught off-sides during a period of time where we think that market conditions and assumptions about risk and allocation will be changing faster than at any point since the great financial crisis. You can access the full episode, transcript, and intelligence report to this week’s conversation by going directly to the episode page at HiddenForces.io and clicking on "premium extras." All subscribers gain access to our premium feed, which can be easily added to your favorite podcast application. If you enjoyed listening to today’s episode of Hidden Forces you can help support the show by doing the following: Subscribe on Apple Podcasts | YouTube | Spotify | Stitcher | SoundCloud | CastBox | RSS Feed Write us a review on Apple Podcasts & Spotify Subscribe to our mailing list at https://hiddenforces.io/newsletter/ Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe & Support the Podcast at https://hiddenforces.io Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas Episode Recorded on 06/14/2022

In Episode 253 of Hidden Forces, I (Demetri Kofinas) share an interview I recently gave on the In-Bloom podcast hosted by Micaela Richmond. This was a pretty emotional conversation, and I don’t want to spoil the episode by giving it away, but I do want to say that while the subjects I mostly cover on Hidden Forces are intellectual the things that matter most to me are most definitely not. Every now and then I publish episodes that speak to those things like my episode with Jerry Colona on the hero’s journey and the art of growing up or my episode with Eugenia Zuckerman who courageously shared stories from her own experience living with Alzheimer’s. These types of conversations speak to what I believe is common in all of us. Our common humanity and our capacity to experience joy and suffering as we try and make our lives matter. And that can be really hard especially when you’re younger and you’re just starting out, full of insecurities, self-doubt, impatience, fear…I dealt with a lot of fear when I was growing up—fear of failure, fear of disappointing others, fear of not amounting to anything. That was my greatest fear that I’d die and have made nothing of my life. It wasn’t until I overcame those fears of failure and of not amounting to anything by learning to run into danger, by learning to run into the burning building that I found my path to bliss. And I say this because I know that millions of you out there feel exactly the same way even if you haven’t found the words to articulate it. My hope is that today’s conversation with Micaela can go some way in helping you identify, face, and overcome those fears regardless of where you are in your life, because those are the things that stand in the way of joy, love, and self-actualization. Those are the things that matter in life. Not money or fame or material success. The sooner you recognize that, the sooner you can come into relationship with the mystery of life from which I believe everything arises and ultimately returns. You can access the transcript to this week’s conversation by going directly to the episode page at HiddenForces.io and clicking on "premium extras." All subscribers gain access to our premium feed, which can be easily added to your favorite podcast application. If you enjoyed listening to today’s episode of Hidden Forces you can help support the show by doing the following: Subscribe on Apple Podcasts | YouTube | Spotify | Stitcher | SoundCloud | CastBox | RSS Feed Write us a review on Apple Podcasts & Spotify Subscribe to our mailing list at https://hiddenforces.io/newsletter/ Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe & Support the Podcast at https://hiddenforces.io Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas Episode Recorded on 05/05/2022

In Episode 252 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Daniel Peris, Senior Vice President and Senior Portfolio Manager at Federated Hermes in Pittsburgh. Daniel is also the author of three books that together explore the intellectual underpinnings of modern portfolio allocation, with a particular focus on dividend investing, why it’s fallen out of favor with investors over the last 30 years, and why dividend-paying securities are positioned to outperform some of their more growth-oriented, cashless competitors in the next 30. While our recent episodes with Tony Greer and Jeff Currie also focus on the rotation from growth stocks to value stocks, those conversations are industry-specific, namely, they focus on commodities and industrial resources. Conversely, the objective of today’s conversation with Daniel is to narrow that focus to companies that pay some portion of their profits to shareholders, irrespective of industry. The goal of today’s episode is to help you reimagine what is possible for your portfolios and how to manage them in a stagflationary global economy characterized by rising risk rates and persistently higher levels of financial volatility. You can access the full episode, transcript, and intelligence report to this week’s conversation by going directly to the episode page at HiddenForces.io and clicking on "premium extras." All subscribers gain access to our premium feed, which can be easily added to your favorite podcast application. If you enjoyed listening to today’s episode of Hidden Forces you can help support the show by doing the following: Subscribe on Apple Podcasts | YouTube | Spotify | Stitcher | SoundCloud | CastBox | RSS Feed Write us a review on Apple Podcasts & Spotify Subscribe to our mailing list at https://hiddenforces.io/newsletter/ Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe & Support the Podcast at https://hiddenforces.io Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas Episode Recorded on 05/23/2022

In Episode 251 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Tony Greer, the founder of TG Macro, an independent research firm that provides fundamental, technical, and behavioral analysis of global markets to institutional and non-institutional clients alike. This conversation follows-up on a series of episodes we’ve published recently focused on the macro, political, and geopolitical economy, with an especially strong focus on commodities, currencies, and government policy. The goal with all of these episdoes has been to help listeners develop a framework for thinking about some of the big-picture trends driving markets and the economy, with the ultimate goal of helping them gain the type of conviction needed in order to invest successfully in them. Those who heard Demetri’s recent episode with Grant Williams know that he was able to use this framework to profitably exit long-held positions in risk-assets ahead of the recent market downturn and even rotated some of those profits into commodities, though as he has said countless times he did not allocate nearly enough because he lacked conviction. He didn’t know enough to feel confident in the Supercycle thesis that we laid out in our recent episode with Jeff Currie. He didn’t fuly appreciate the supply-side picture that the team at Doomberg has been writing about so presciently for the past year and that we spoke with them about during Doomberg’s recent appearance on Hidden Forces. So what does one do now? What does one do if he or she is persuaded by the thesis that long-term, structural forces restricting the supply of key commodities will support persistently high prices even in the face of relatively weak demand, but doesn’t have conviction around what those prices could reasonably be, especially in the short-term ahead of a Fed tightening cycle? This is why we’ve brought Tony Greer on the podcast. Tony’s specialty is trading commodities. He’s been doing it for 30 years and we’re going to rely on his experience to work through exactly the type of dilemma that has been laid out here and which many of you may also be struggling with. You can access the full episode, transcript, and intelligence report to this week’s conversation by going directly to the episode page at HiddenForces.io and clicking on "premium extras." All subscribers gain access to our premium feed, which can be easily added to your favorite podcast application. If you enjoyed listening to today’s episode of Hidden Forces you can help support the show by doing the following: Subscribe on Apple Podcasts | YouTube | Spotify | Stitcher | SoundCloud | CastBox | RSS Feed Write us a review on Apple Podcasts & Spotify Subscribe to our mailing list at https://hiddenforces.io/newsletter/ Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe & Support the Podcast at https://hiddenforces.io Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas Episode Recorded on 05/17/2022

In Episode 250 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with CEO of Santiago Capital and originator of the “Dollar Milkshake” theory, Brent Johnson. Brent and Demetri discuss his thesis on the Dollar as part of a much larger conversation about the sell-off that we’re currently experiencing in risk assets, the dislocations we’re seeing in currencies and currency pairs like Dollar-Yen, and how to position yourself as conditions change in real-time.  Because so much is happening in markets right now it is challenging to know where to focus your attention, which is why Brent’s framework around the role of the US Dollar and its impact on financial flows is crucial for understanding what we’re seeing in markets today. We have published countless episodes over the last several years in anticipation of the events that are transpiring today. We think we are in the end-game phase of what in our view has been a forty-year paradigm of falling interest rates, rising debt levels, low inflation, growing inequality, and peak globalization, all of which we believe are in the process of reversing. How that process unfolds and what assets and investments you want to be invested in during this time do not have straightforward answers, but conversations like this one with Brent are crucial in helping you think through the steps required to get you there. You can access the full episode, transcript, and intelligence report to this week’s conversation by going directly to the episode page at HiddenForces.io and clicking on "premium extras." All subscribers gain access to our premium feed, which can be easily added to your favorite podcast application. If you enjoyed listening to today’s episode of Hidden Forces you can help support the show by doing the following: Subscribe on Apple Podcasts | YouTube | Spotify | Stitcher | SoundCloud | CastBox | RSS Feed Write us a review on Apple Podcasts & Spotify Subscribe to our mailing list at https://hiddenforces.io/newsletter/ Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe & Support the Podcast at https://hiddenforces.io Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas Episode Recorded on 05/12/2022

In Episode 249 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Nathaniel Whittemore, host of “The Breakdown” a podcast distributed by CoinDesk, which focuses on the big picture power shifts in the economy and society, seen through the lens of crypto. It’s also the largest daily analysis podcast in the bitcoin and crypto space and one that Demetri has relied on to sort through the daily noise and to get a sense of its community’s cultural attitudes and narratives for years. Demetri asked Nathaniel to come onto the podcast today to help him make sense of the events that have transpired in crypto over the last week, including the collapse of Terra Luna and its algorithmically maintained stablecoin UST. But they also discuss the overall state of the market and the implications and consequences of collapses like LUNA’s for other stablecoins, as well as for regulation and participation in the space. Lastly, the two share their perspectives on what Demetri considers to be crypto’s biggest vulnerability, which is its use as a life raft for a generation of younger investors who see it as their ticket out of the hamster wheel of policy-induced financial inequality and modern-day serfdom. What eventually becomes of these people—their disaffection and its manifestation in American political life is a question that they also consider.  You can access the full conversation and transcript to this premium-only episode by going directly to the episode page at HiddenForces.io and clicking on "premium extras." All subscribers gain access to our premium feed, which can be easily added to your favorite podcast application. If you enjoyed listening to today’s episode of Hidden Forces you can help support the show by doing the following: Subscribe on Apple Podcasts | YouTube | Spotify | Stitcher | SoundCloud | CastBox | RSS Feed Write us a review on Apple Podcasts & Spotify Subscribe to our mailing list at https://hiddenforces.io/newsletter/ Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe & Support the Podcast at https://hiddenforces.io Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas Episode Recorded on 05/13/2022