Macro perspective on capital markets, economy, geopolitics, and technology from Barry Ritholtz.
My mid-week morning reads: • The Diesel Weapon: Why a rather unglamorous fuel is suddenly at the centre of a transatlantic power struggle, and why this matters for all of us (Material World) • 250K per year is plenty of income: If you don’t feel rich here, you…
The biggest question confronting investors today isn’t about AI, market concentration, or technology. Instead, it’s about the bond market. Like nearly everything in investing, it’s rarely about any one thing; instead, a mix of factors drives interest rates. So…
My Two-for-Tuesday morning reads: • The Mighty American Consumer Is Crashing Through Inflation and Driving Growth: Spending is rising because prices are climbing and Americans are buying more stuff, despite long-running frustrations over inflation. (Wall Stree…
The transcript from this week’s MiB: Omar Aguilar, CEO and CIO of Schwab Asset Management, is below. You can stream and download our full conversation, including any podcast extras, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube (video), YouTube (audio), and Bloomberg. A…
My back-to-work morning reads: • Private Equity Has a Problem. Uncle Sam Says Your Wallet Can Fix It.: A government proposal would help fund managers sell alternative investments to a much wider audience. Wall Street’s problem becomes Main Street’s opportunity…
Shane Parrish’s Knowledge Project: Bill Ackman is the founder and CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management, one of the most closely watched investment firms in the world. In this conversation, he breaks down how he tells the difference between real innovation…
Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures: • I Deliberately Bet Like a Problem Gambler.DraftKings Made Me a VIP. Jake Pearson blew $1,800 in one night chasing losses with bigger bets, a textbook warning sign. The n…
This week, I speak with Omar Aguilar, Chief Executive Officer and Chief Investment Officer of Schwab Asset Management. We discuss his time at Financial Engines, where he worked under Nobel laureate William Sharpe before joining Schwab Asset Management in 2011.…
The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of Danish Blend coffee, grab a seat outside, and get ready for our longer-form weekend reads: • I Went Shopping. When Did I Become an Unpaid Employee? This North American tipping culture really annoys me. How businesses…
My end-of-week morning reads: • Has AI impacted the labor market yet? Evaluating the state of the evidence: Alex Imas and Jacob Schaal review the impact of AI on the labor market with a focus on early-career workers. The more important lagging indicators, unem…
Welcome to October! Kick off the month right with my morning reads: • A double-edged code – How AI is reshaping the global wealth landscape: Global financial assets expanded to a record $260 trillion in 2025, expanding +8.6% from the previous year, despite a c…
At the Money: The Data Behind America’s Wealthy with Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick (September 30, 2026) In this episode of ‘At the Money,’ I speak with Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick about the data behind America’s wealthiest people. About this week’s guests: Owen Zida…
My mid-week morning reads: • Anthropic’s IPO prospectus shows sweeping AI vision, surging costs. Anthropic is making a massive bet that AI will transform the global economy more profoundly than industrialization, electricity and the internet, according to its…
It’s the end of September, and that means I am busy working on the Q4 quarterly call (out early October). I decided to surface to share two tables I find absolutely fascinating. The first table (above) compares the 10-year bonds and the 30-year fixed-rate mort…
My Two-for-Tuesday morning reads: • Innovation Is Driving a New Bull Market in Biotech. Biotechnology stocks are soaring this year as medical advances and merger activity rekindle investor interest. More gains lie ahead, our healthcare panel says. (Barron’s) •…
The transcript from this week’s MiB: Adam Frank, JPMorgan Wealth Management’s Head of Wealth Planning and Advice, is below. You can stream and download our full conversation, including any podcast extras, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube (video), YouTube (a…
My Monday back-to-work morning reads: • Booms, Bombs and Bonds: Interest Rates, Part I: Paul Krugman on why serious analysts talk about bonds while cable touts talk about stocks. Equity prices are a notoriously unreliable read on the economy; the bond market…
I am not usually in the city on Fridays. But Robin Wigglesworth, in from Oslo for 0only as few days, led to me coming in on a Friday to record an MiB about his new book, “A Fabulous Debt: The Epic Story of How Bonds Built the Modern World.” More on this in a……
The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of Danish Blend coffee, grab a seat outside, and get ready for our longer-form weekend reads: • How DraftKings Uses A.I. to Target the Gamblers Likeliest to Lose: Jenny Vrentas on the machine-learning model DraftKings…
This week, I speak with Adam Frank, Managing Director and Head of Wealth Planning and Advice at J.P. Morgan Wealth Management. We discuss his time at Bear Stearns as the company was acquired by J.P. Morgan Chase, as well as his start in law before pivoting to…
The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of Danish Blend coffee, grab a seat outside, and get ready for our longer-form weekend reads: • The Hierarchy of Money: Some money is better than others. This is foundational to how money and banking works. I explore t…
My end-of-week morning reads: • Tokens Too Cheap to Meter. The price of using machine learning intelligence is decreasing by several orders of magnitude a year and shows no signs of slowing. We are likely to see LLMs integrated into every part of computing as…
Map by Claude Last month, I posted this data dive into the question of “How Wealth Is Created in America.” It’s always fun to look at the sources of wealth, and I used a few broad data sources.1 But these create a very blunt, 10,000-foot view of wealth in Amer…
My morning reads: • “If You Want to Bet on the End of the World…”: Puck sits down with Mark Spitznagel on the art of cool bullishness — and what tail-risk hedging looks like from here. Hedge fund prophet Mark Spitznagel, the ultimate black swan investor, is f…
At The Money: Who Is Wealthy in America, and How Did They Get Rich? September 23, 2026 We know America is a rich nation, but do you know exactly how rich? And who holds all of that wealth? Full transcript below. ~~~ About this week’s guest: Owen Zidar is profe…
My Autumn Equinox morning reads: • ‘Crisis even bigger than Covid’: American business owners are barely getting by. Around the country, American business owners across myriad industries say they’re in a similar boat. A closely watched monthly survey from the I…
The transcript from this week’s MiB: Glen Kacher, CIO of Light Street Capital, is below. You can stream and download our full conversation, including any podcast extras, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube (video), YouTube (audio), and Bloomberg. All of our ea…
My first day of Autumn reads (Fall Equinox is 8:04 P.M!): • How Much Is Being Close to Your Favorite Artist Worth? Superfans Are Reshaping the Concert Industry: Rosalind Adams on fans spending thousands for barricade spots and VIP perks — and how that’s becom…
A bonus LIVE episode of Masters in Business: I spend most of the evening listening to — and laughing — with bestselling author and financial journalist Michael Lewis, live from the Landmark Theater in Port Washington, NY. Our wide-ranging, 90-minute conversati…
My Yom Kippur morning reads: • Weeks Before the Midterms, Almost Everything Is Getting More Expensive: David Uberti and Justin Lahart on mortgage rates near 7%, gas at its highest since 2022, and the Fed’s first hike in three years. The price of eating out an…