Episodes

  • The Library of Mistakes: A Conversation with Russell Napier
    Mar 10 2025
    The Library of Mistakes is a library located in Edinburgh, Scotland dedicated to financial and economic history. Russell Napier, the founder and keeper of the library is a professor at The Edinburgh Business School and investment manager. In this wide-ranging discussion, Russell discusses his work as a practitioner and a scholar of financial crises. He also discusses how and why he started a library, in addition to his writing on financial history. Professor Russell Napier is the author of The Solid Ground investment report for institutional investors and co-founder of the investment research portal ERIC- a business he now co-owns with D.C. Thomson. Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance
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    55 mins
  • Kimberly Clausing, "Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital" (Harvard UP, 2019)
    Mar 8 2025
    Critics on the Left have long attacked open markets and free trade agreements for exploiting the poor and undermining labor, while those on the Right complain that they unjustly penalize workers back home. In Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital (Harvard University Press, 2019), Kimberly Clausing takes on old and new skeptics in her compelling case that open economies are actually a force for good. Turning to the data to separate substance from spin, she shows how international trade makes countries richer, raises living standards, benefits consumers, and brings nations together. At a time when borders are closing and the safety of global supply chains is being thrown into question, she outlines a clear agenda to manage globalization more effectively, presenting strategies to equip workers for a modern economy and establish a better partnership between labor and the business community. Kimberly Clausing holds the Eric M. Zolt Chair in Tax Law and Policy at the UCLA School of Law. During the first part of the Biden Administration, Clausing was the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Tax Analysis in the US Department of the Treasury, serving as the lead economist in the Office of Tax Policy. Prior to coming to UCLA, Clausing was the Thormund A. Miller and Walter Mintz Professor of Economics at Reed College. Professor Clausing is also a nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. She has worked on economic policy research with the International Monetary Fund, the Hamilton Project, the Brookings Institution, the Tax Policy Center, and the Center for American Progress. She has testified before the House Ways and Means Committee, the Senate Committee on Finance, the Senate Committee on the Budget, and the Joint Economic Committee. Professor Clausing received her B.A. from Carleton College in 1991 and her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1996, both in economics. Other New Books Networks interviews on related themes include Yale economist Penny Goldberg, former Chief Economist of the World Bank, on The Unequal Effects of Globalization, Princeton economist Leah Boustan on how immigrants have contributed to and rapidly assimilated into US society, and University of Massachusetts economist Isabella Weber on China's process of integration into the world economy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance
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    1 hr and 3 mins
  • Social Death by Debt: China's Lending Boom Reshapes Lives
    Mar 7 2025
    China's household debt has exploded from 11% of GDP in 2006 to over 62% today—a profound transformation in a traditionally savings-focused society. How is this reshaping social relationships and daily life? In this episode, Dr. Jiaqi Guo from the University of Turku reveals findings from her corpus analysis of China's largest debt support forum. Her research uncovers the practice of "contact bombing" (爆通讯录), where collectors harass debtors' entire social networks, causing what Chinese debtors call "social death" (社死). With minimal institutional protection, desperate debtors are forming underground support networks and developing their own legal expertise. This cultural shift exposes a human dimension of China's economic growth that statistics alone cannot capture. Dr. Jiaqi Guo is a University Lecturer in Chinese at the University of Turku, Finland. This episode is hosted by Hanna Holttinen, University Teacher in Chinese language at the University of Turku, Finland. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the following academic partners: Asia Centre, University of Tartu (Estonia), Asian studies, University of Helsinki (Finland), Centre for Asian Studies, Vytautas Magnus University (Lithuania), Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku (Finland) and Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University (Sweden) and Norwegian Network for Asian Studies. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance
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    17 mins
  • Maria Kaika and Luca Ruggiero, "Class Meets Land: The Embodied History of Land Financialization" (U California Press, 2024)
    Mar 6 2025
    Class Meets Land: The Embodied History of Land Financialization (University of California Press, 2024) by Dr. Maria Kaika & Dr. Luca Ruggiero reveals something seemingly counterintuitive: that nineteenth-century class struggles over land are deeply implicated in the transition to twenty-first-century financial capitalism. Challenging our understanding of land financialization as a recent phenomenon propelled by high finance, Dr. Kaika and Dr. Ruggiero foreground 150 years of class struggle over land as a catalyst for assembling the global financial constellation. Narrating the close-knit histories of industrial land, industrial elites, and the working class, the authors offer a novel understanding of land financialization as a “lived” process: the outcome of a relentless, socially embodied historical unfolding, in which shifts in land’s material, economic, and symbolic roles impact both local everyday lives and global capital flows. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance
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    1 hr and 3 mins
  • Melinda Cooper, "Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance" (Zone Books, 2024)
    Feb 18 2025
    At the close of the 1970s, government treasuries and central banks took a vow of perpetual self-restraint. To this day, fiscal authorities fret over soaring public debt burdens, while central bankers wring their hands at the slightest sign of rising wages. As the brief reprieve of coronavirus spending made clear, no departure from government austerity will be tolerated without a corresponding act of penance. Yet we misunderstand the scope of neoliberal public finance if we assume austerity to be its sole setting. Beyond the zero-sum game of direct claims on state budgets lies a realm of indirect government spending that escapes the naked eye. Capital gains are multiply subsidized by a tax system that reserves its greatest rewards for financial asset holders. And for all its airs of haughty asceticism, the Federal Reserve has become adept at facilitating the inflation of asset values while ruthlessly suppressing wages. Neoliberalism is as extravagant as it is austere, and this paradox needs to be grasped if we are to challenge its core modus operandi. In Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance (Zone Books, 2024) Dr. Melinda Cooper examines the major schools of thought that have shaped neoliberal common sense around public finance. Focusing, in particular, on Virginia school public choice theory and supply-side economics, she shows how these currents produced distinct but ultimately complementary responses to the capitalist crisis of the 1970s. With its intellectual roots in the conservative Southern Democratic tradition, Virginia school public choice theory espoused an austere doctrine of budget balance. The supply-side movement, by contrast, advocated tax cuts without spending restraint and debt issuance without guilt, in an apparent repudiation of austerity. Yet, for all their differences, the two schools converged around the need to rein in the redistributive uses of public spending. Together, they drove a counterrevolution in public finance that deepened the divide between rich and poor and revived the fortunes of dynastic wealth. Far-reaching as the neoliberal counterrevolution has been, Dr. Cooper still identifies a counterfactual history of unrealized possibilities in the capitalist crisis of the 1970s. She concludes by inviting us to rethink the concept of revolution and raises the question: Is another politics of extravagance possible? This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance
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    1 hr and 22 mins
  • Paul Podolsky, "The Uncomfortable Truth About Money: How to Live with Uncertainty and Learn to Think for Yourself" (Harriman House, 2024)
    Feb 14 2025
    We are all stuck in a money cage. Money isn’t the most important thing, but it is a thing and you can’t get away from it. Birth costs money and death costs money. So even if you hate talking about money, you need to know the basics, the same way you need to know how to cook yourself a simple meal. The problem with most money books is that they are not written by practitioners and avoid hard truths. Paul Podolsky’s The Uncomfortable Truth About Money: How to Live with Uncertainty and Learn to Think for Yourself (Harriman House, 2024) breaks down walls around financial knowledge. What a weathered investor knows is that stocks are not always good for the long run. They know that being stingy helps accrue wealth. They know the big thing when you buy property has nothing to do with the property. They know the big thing is less what happens to the markets in a day than if the entire system holds together. And they know what to look for if it’s time to pull out. That’s what this book will teach you: a lifetime of money learnings distilled to a thin volume, like a basic cooking recipe you can follow. Paul Podolsky writes about macro–politics and money. For many years, he was the strategist and equity partner at the largest hedge fund in the world. Previous to that, he worked as a reporter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance
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    48 mins
  • Lionel Barber, "Gambling Man: The Wild Ride of Japan’s Masayoshi Son" (Atria, 2024)
    Feb 1 2025
    As Wall Street swooned and boomed through the last decade, our livelihoods have—now more than ever—come to rely upon the good sense and risk appetites of a few standout investors. And amidst the BlackRocks, Vanguards, and Berkshire Hathaways stands arguably the most iconoclastic of them all: SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son. In Gambling Man: The Wild Ride of Japan’s Masayoshi Son (Atria, 2024), the first Western biography of Son, the self-professed unicorn hunter, we go behind the scenes of the world’s most monied halls of power in New York, Tokyo, Silicon Valley, Saudi Arabia, and beyond to see how Son’s firm SoftBank has defied conventional wisdom and imposing odds to push global tech and commerce into the future. From the dizzying highs of Uber, DoorDash, and Slack to the epic lows of WeWork and tech-infused dogwalking app Wag Son and SoftBank have been at the center of cutting-edge capitalism’s absolute peaks and valleys. In the process, Son, son of a pachinko kingpin who grew up in a slum in Japan, has been a hero, a villain, and even a meme-ified hero to the internet tech- and finance-bro set all at once. Based on in-depth research and eye-opening interviews, Gambling Man is an unforgettable character study and alarming true story of twenty-first-century commerce that will stick with you long after you turn the final page. Lionel Barber is the former editor of the Financial Times. As editor, he interviewed many of the world’s leaders in business and politics, including US Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Barber has co-written several books and has lectured widely on foreign policy, transatlantic relations, and economics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance
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    34 mins
  • Joel Z. Garrod, "Royal Histories: The Transformation of the Royal Bank of Canada, 1864-2022" (U Toronto Press, 2025)
    Feb 1 2025
    In this engaging interview, young scholar Dr, Joel Z. Garrod explains his book's main argument, with a personal touch. In Royal Histories: The Transformation of the Royal Bank of Canada, 1864-2022 (U Toronto Press, 2025), Garrod presents a historical analysis of the Royal Bank of Canada, illustrating how Canadian capitalism and the Canadian banking industry have transformed as they have consolidated nationally and expanded abroad. Emphasizing how national institutions and rules are increasingly becoming capabilities for transnational forms of capital accumulation, the book draws on extensive primary and secondary sources to document the transformation of the assemblage of territory, authority, and rights that have supported the bank’s activities over time. Linking the bank’s history to the policy regimes of the welfare state and neoliberalism, Garrod contends that our present period of globalization severely limits the extent to which nation-states can absorb capitalist crises or be a site of successful social reform. Connecting the Canadian experience to the wider transformation of global capitalism, Royal Histories illuminates the effects of globalization and the changing landscape of banking and finance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance
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    58 mins