Odd Lots

When we last spoke to Brannin McBee, the co-founder and chief development officer of cloud company CoreWeave, his business was not yet public and sourcing GPUs was a key constraint on growth. But three years later, things look pretty different. CoreWeave IPOed and has been raising money in the bond market too, as well as signing more deals with chipmaker Nvidia. In fact, investors have basically been throwing money at all-things-AI. But there are persistent bottlenecks to further growth. Chip supply is still scarce, but so are transformers and electricity. In this episode, we catch up with Brannin on everything he's seeing in the market for compute right now, including leases, Nvidia's new Vera Rubin systems, demand for training versus inference, and the possibility of standardizing the market for compute. Read more:Trump Officials Worry US Loophole Let Chinese Firms Buy Nvidia Blackwell ChipsBroadcom Slides Most Since January 2025 on AI Outlook Miss Only http://Bloomberg.com 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/oddlots Subscribe to the Odd Lots NewsletterJoin the conversation: discord.gg/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Prediction markets that enable you to bet on pretty much everything are everywhere nowadays. But there's still a big question over whether they can expand to include larger institutional investors like hedge funds. Part of the problem is that a lot of prediction market contracts are illiquid and trading volumes can sometimes be shallow. That's where trading firm Susquehanna International Group comes in. In this episode, recorded live at New York's City Winery, we talk to Jeremy Maletz, Susquehanna's head of macro trading and prediction markets, about the firm's market-making business with Kalshi. We talk about how big investors could use prediction markets, what Susquehanna is seeing in terms of flows, how a market-maker hedges risk on these contracts, and how it makes money from them.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today’s episode, which was recorded at our recent live show at New York’s City Winery, follows up on a conversation we had with Iain Dunning, head of AI at Hudson River Trading. Last year, we talked about how his firm uses AI. Now, some seven months later, we follow up on how one of the biggest market makers around is deploying this technology. We talk about the price of memory, bottlenecks in compute, how much HRT employees are actually spending on tokens, why the firm might develop its own chips, as well as AI-induced delirium. Read more:Jane Street Plans New Data Center as Compute Power Runs ScarceNvidia-Backed Robotics Startup Generalist AI Valued at $2 Billion Only 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/oddlots Subscribe to the Odd Lots NewsletterJoin the conversation: discord.gg/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

There's a lot of debate about the future of AI — not just whether it will produce the returns investors are expecting, but also if AI will lead to mass worker displacement. Big banks are the perfect prism through which to explore some of these questions. Not only are they deploying AI very quickly, but they have a wide range of workers who are using the technology, from back-office employees to junior analysts to the most senior investment bankers. In this episode, we speak with David Solomon, chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs, about the impact of AI on the banking business, and why he does not predict a major white collar wipeout. We talk about the outlook for headcount, current conditions in capital markets, and the bank's role in the upcoming SpaceX IPO and Alphabet's historic equity capital raise. He also tells us about his early career in junk bonds and (because of his love of electronic dance music) how AI is transforming music production. Read: Anthropic Picks Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs to Lead IPO Subscribe to the Odd Lots NewsletterJoin the conversation: discord.gg/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We talk about the commodity supply chain all the time. We talk about the ports and the trucks and the ships and all of that. But there's another dimension to moving commodities all around the world, which is actually paying for it. Who funds the oil tanker and what happens when that tanker is, say, stuck in the Strait of Hormuz? Commodity finance underpins production, transportation and storage of a wide variety of the things that make the modern world, but you tend to only hear about it when things go wrong. Today we speak with Lewis Hart, head of corporate advisory and banking at Brown Brothers Harriman. We discuss how the business of commodity finance actually works, how risk is priced, what makes for a good or bad warehouse, and the difference between financing a commodity you can hedge (like oil) versus one where's there's no futures market (like cashews). Subscribe to the Odd Lots NewsletterJoin the conversation: discord.gg/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Rope is easy to take for granted. It seems obvious and straightforward. But of course, it had to be invented. Early humans discovered that by twisting fibers around each other, the resulting structure would be something durable and strong. Without rope, all kinds of things aren't possible, from lifting objects into the air to whaling or modern bridges. So how was it developed and what were the big breakthroughs in its history? On this episode, we speak with Tim Queeney, the author of the recent book Rope: How a Bundle of Twisted Fibers Became the Backbone of Civilization. He walks us through the history of the technology, and its ongoing evolution, including how it might one day allow to build an elevator into outer space. Read more:Japan Cablemaker Rout Exposes Cracks in AI Infrastructure RallyWhy Huawei’s New Chipmaking Plan Has Investors Buzzing Only Bloomberg.com 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/oddlots Subscribe to the Odd Lots NewsletterJoin the conversation: discord.gg/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

There's been a massive selloff in the bond market and rates are rising all around the world. Japan, Korea, the UK... You name it. Gita Gopinath, Harvard economics professor and the former first deputy managing director of the IMF, has long warned that bond markets are "in a fragile place." She sees a confluence of demographics, high levels of public debt, and the intense capital needs of the AI boom creating inflationary pressure all around the world. Today we speak with Gopinath about the seeming disconnect between stocks and bonds and why investors may be wrong to assume that governments will have their back the next time there's a major shock. Read more:US Bonds’ Return to Pre-War Calm Fuels Bets It’ll Be Short-LivedChina Sells $885 Million of Green Bonds in Hong Kong Debut Only http://Bloomberg.com 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/oddlots Subscribe to the Odd Lots NewsletterJoin the conversation: discord.gg/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We love talking about money. And of course, we love talking about the dollar, in all its varieties — from bank deposits to eurodollars to stablecoins. But what fundamentally is a dollar and who actually controls it? To understand these questions, you need to understand how the dollar was born. Journalist (and current Ph.D. candidate in financial history) Brendan Greeley argues not only that the dollar is older than you might suspect, but that the dollar long precedes the United States itself. In fact, the word is derived from German, referring to a Spanish currency made from silver found in Mexico. In this episode, we discuss Brendan's new book, The Almighty Dollar: 500 Years of the World's Most Powerful Money. He explains not only the dollar's surprising history, but also what actually backs the US dollar and gives it purchasing power.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

As our listeners know, restaurants are great microcosms for macro-economic trends. They sit at the intersection of everything from consumer confidence to commodity costs to the labor market. So on our recent visit to London, we wanted to learn about the business of pubs. According to the British Beer and Pub Association, approximately two pubs a day have closed in England during the first quarter of 2026. Could pubs tell us something about larger trends in the British economy? And when it comes to the day-to-day operations of the business: How is a pub different from a regular bar? And how are publicans — pub managers — dealing with the era of the £10 pint? Today's episode is a special two-parter, devoted to the business of pubs. We talk to Oisin Rogers and Ashley Palmer-Watts, co-founders of the Devonshire, a famed London pub. The first part is with Rogers, who is the publican, and we discuss the difference between a good and bad pub, why he hates the word 'gastropub,' and how the indoor smoking ban changed the meaning of pubs for the average Londoner. Second up is a segment from our London live show with the Devonshire chef Palmer-Watts, who tells us about the complicated confluence of factors — from temperature to the right mix of gases — that lead to a perfect pint of Guinness, why higher ingredient costs (whether it's beef or scallops) don't always correlate to higher menu prices, and making a Victorian-era meat fruit for Apple's Jony Ive. Read more:Reeves Floats Price Freezes on Food in Bid to Cut UK Bills Inflation Resurgence Squeezes US Voters as Gas, Food Prices Rise ?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=podcast&utm_campaign=odd_lots&utm_content=article Only http://Bloomberg.com 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/oddlots Subscribe to the Odd Lots NewsletterJoin the conversation: discord.gg/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Not many people think of designing buildings as an exercise in economics, but the entire process is defined by constraints around resources (both physical and financial), and an iconic building can also have a huge impact on the wealth and development of the area around it. So how do you encourage private developers to consider the public good when designing new projects? And how are some countries able to encourage more landmark building projects than others? In this episode, we speak with Norman Foster, renowned architect and founder of Foster + Partners. We talk to him about how constraints impact his own design process, how building budgets actually work, what makes a building successful in the long run, why China keeps completing mega-project after mega-project, and why places like the UK and the US are now struggling to keep up. Subscribe to the Odd Lots NewsletterJoin the conversation: discord.gg/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.