Odd Lots

Lloyd Blankfein was CEO of Goldman Sachs for more than a decade, riding the trading boom to the top of the storied investment bank and steering it through the 2008 financial crisis. In his new memoir, Streetwise: Getting To and Through Goldman Sachs, he writes about his journey from public housing in Brooklyn to the pinnacle of Wall Street. So what's he up to now? And how does he see markets and finance today? In this episode, we talk about deglobalization and Wall Street, the threats AI and tech pose to investment banking, risk management in private credit, and rich people's attitudes towards taxes. Plus, Lloyd shares some of what he left out of the book and he explains why he doesn't tweet more.
Read more:Goldman’s Solomon Is Watching for ‘Frothiness’ in Private CreditPrivate Market Titans Warn of Pain as Credit Cracks Widen
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The average person can enter a stock trade on their computer, hit refresh, and the trade is done. As fast as that seems, there are professional traders moving even faster, executing thousands of trades per second. Over the years, the need for speed got so intense that competing firms would aim to get their own systems closer and closer to the exchange's computers, so as to minimize the length of the wires and get their trades in even faster. How did this happen? And how does this change the nature of trading itself? On this episode, we speak with Donald Mackenzie, a professor of sociology at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. Professor Mackenzie has been studying the intersection of finance and tech for a long time, and in 2021 wrote the book, Trading at the Speed of Light. We discuss the history of finance technology and look at where the technological arms race is going next.
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'Bloomberg This Weekend' features unique conversations on business, news, lifestyle and culture. Join David Gura, Christina Ruffini and Lisa Mateo Saturdays and Sundays for discussions with business leaders, lawmakers and cultural icons.

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Something very unusual happened in the market in the last week of February. It sold off, in part, thanks to an article on Substack. James van Geelen is the founder of Citrini Research, which published a piece a week ago titled, “The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis.” It was not written as a forecast of an imminent disaster, but rather as a scenario analysis in which AI capabilities lead to widespread white collar job losses, triggering a deep downturn, and a financial crisis. Nonetheless, the piece went extraordinary viral, gathering all kinds of responses from economists and research shops and even Citadel Securities. On this episode, we speak with James, the piece's co-author, about what Citrini Research actually is, why he wrote the piece, and why this is a scenario worth paying attention to, even if it's not the most likely outcome.
Read more:
Bank Shares Walloped by More AI and ‘Cockroach’ Credit Woes
Pentagon Casts Cloud of Doubt Over Anthropic’s AI Business
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Earlier this month, the Supreme Court ruled that Trump's "Liberation Day" tariffs were illegal. And now basically every importer who paid those tariffs will be rushing to get their refunds. But will businesses actually get paid? And how do they file a claim? And should consumers get refunded if a business passed the cost of the tariffs on to them? On this episode, we're rejoined by regular Odd Lots guest Ryan Petersen, the CEO of Flexport, a major freight forwarding company. We discuss how the entire refund process works, and the estimated timeline for payoff. We also talk about the booming secondary market in refund claims, where traders are buying up other people's claims for, in some cases, 50 cents on the dollar. Ryan also walks us through how world trade has changed since the tariffs began and the various way companies tried to game the system.

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