Odd Lots

Ever since Covid, central banks around the world have had the same problem. They have tools that are designed to modulate demand, but so many challenges have involved the supply side of the economy. Whether we're talking about supply chain disruptions, the war in Ukraine, and now the war in Iran, these are all issues for which monetary policy is of limited value. Of course, the temptation is to "look through" these events, recognizing the fact that these disruptions don't say much about the actual underlying state of the economy. But when we get one shock after another, it gets harder and harder to keep using words like "transitory." On this episode we speak with Megan Greene, an external member of the Monetary Policy Committee at the Bank of England. We talk about the compounding effects of all these shocks (including the trade war and Brexit), how she's thinking about the first- and second-order effects of each, and why for now, despite the underlying weakness of the UK economy, she remains squarely focused on the risks of higher inflation.
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Today's guest Mariana Mazzucato is one of our most requested. Mazzucato, who is the director of the University College London Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, specializes in the political economy of technological development and public sector investment. In our conversation, recorded in Madrid while at the Bloomberg CityLab conference, she explains her concept of the "mission economy," her definition of state capacity, how to prevent top talent from fleeing to the private sector, and whether consultants or governments should be blamed for inefficiencies and civic failures. It's a wide-ranging interview, one that covers everything from the initial public financing of Silicon Valley algorithms to the history of moonshots.

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The residents of Allentown are still sore about that Billy Joel song. While it's true the Pennsylvania city became synonymous with deindustrialization after the US steel industry began its decline in the 1970s, Allentown should be known for more: In the 1950s, for instance, some of the first mass-produced transistors were made in the city, which were the precursor of today's semiconductors. The city is also a unique logistics and e-commerce hub — it's a day's drive from nearly 40 percent of the US population. Mayor Matthew Tuerk, who has held office since 2022, has made reindustrialization a focus of his mayorship. In today's episode, recorded in Madrid at the Bloomberg CityLab conference, we speak to Mayor Tuerk about the city's grand strategy for building back and sustaining its manufacturing base, implementing industrial policy on a local level, how rezoning has changed in the last decade, the political puzzle of data centers, recruiting companies to come to Allentown, de-risking the American supply chain, and our favorite new category of industry — weight-gaining industries — which Allentown specializes in.
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Since Mayor Brandon Scott took office in 2020, he's fixated on a very visible problem in Baltimore: the tens of thousands of vacant homes that dot the city. It's hard to build new houses when there are so many that sit empty and unused. And the process of tracking down owners, convincing them to sell their vacant properties, and then converting those homes into usable housing supply is a tall task. In the last few years, the number of vacant homes in Baltimore has dropped from 16,000 to just over 11,800. On this episode — recorded in Madrid while we attended the Bloomberg CityLab conference — we speak to Mayor Scott about deindustrialization, redlining, and gun violence's historical effects on the current housing crisis, how his government identifies, block-by-block, redevelopment opportunities and matches projects with publicly-minded developers, and why Baltimore natives aren't huge fans of The Wire.

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Two years ago, Citadel's Ken Griffin paid almost $45 million for a stegosaurus skeleton, making it the most expensive fossil ever sold at auction. So why are dinosaur bones joining the collections of millionaires instead of museums? How does the private market for fossils actually work? And how similar is it to the market for art and other antiquities? In this episode, we speak with Salomon Aaron, a director at London-based gallery David Aaron, where he is the gallery's in-house broker for dinosaur fossils. We talk about how fossils are found and priced, what it's like to work alongside dinosaur hunters, how his gallery identifies potential buyers, and why Joe thinks something about the birds-to-dinosaurs evolutionary pipeline is off.
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