Macro Hive Conversations With Bilal Hafeez

Bob Elliott is the Co-Founder of Unlimited, which uses machine learning to create index replication ETFs of alternative investments, like hedge funds. Prior to founding Unlimited, Bob was a Senior Investment Executive at Bridgewater Associates, where he served on the Investment Committee (G7) and led Ray Dalio’s personal investment research team for nearly a decade. Bob holds a degree in History and Science from Harvard. In this podcast we discuss income business cycle rather than credit cycle, parallels to 1950s and 1960s, whether Fed policy is restrictive, and much more. 

Follow us here for more...

J. Doyne Farmer is Director of the Complexity Economics Programme and Professor of Complex Systems Science at the University of Oxford. He is also External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute and Chief Scientist at Macrocosm. He was a founder of Prediction Company, a quantitative automated trading firm that was sold to UBS in 2006. His book, Making Sense of Chaos: A Better Economics for a Better World, was published in 2024. During the 1980s he was an Oppenheimer Fellow and the founder of the Complex Systems Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory. While a graduate student in the 1970s, he...

Shawn Edwards is Bloomberg’s Chief Technology Officer. Based in New York, he oversees the development of Bloomberg’s global technology strategy. In 2017, Shawn was named in the top ten of the Institutional Investor Tech 40 – an annual ranking of financial industry technology leaders. Prior to joining Bloomberg in 2003, Shawn worked for Bear Stearns & Co. where he was a managing director in the company’s fixed income trading group. He has also held positions at Mentor Graphics and IBM. This podcast covers philosophy around tech innovation, product and infrastructure strategy, adapting to cloud, mobile and API-first, and much more. 

Brad Setser is the Whitney Shepardson senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. His expertise includes global trade and capital flows, financial vulnerability analysis, and sovereign debt restructuring. He regularly blogs at Follow the Money. Brad served as a senior advisor to the United States Trade Representative from 2021 to 2022, where he worked on the resolution of a number of trade disputes. He had previously served as the deputy assistant secretary for international economic analysis in the US Treasury from 2011 to 2015 and as a director for international economics on the staff of the National Economic Council and the National...

My colleague Mirza Baig hosted this podcast on my behalf. Liang is a markets professional, with 20 years’ experience as a portfolio manager, quantitative analyst, currency strategist, and China economist. He has spent most of his career based in Germany, where he earned his PhD and worked at several asset managers including DWS. Liang recently returned to his hometown of Shanghai, from where he speaks to global asset managers through the Macro Hive platform, advising them about the macro and policy outlook for China. This episode covers whether Fed rate cuts can prevent a deeper sell-off in global equity markets, cur...

Álvaro Cartea is Professor of  Mathematical Finance in the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford, and director of the Oxford-Man Institute of Quantitative Finance. He is a founding member and deputy chairman of the Commodities & Energy Markets Association (CEMA). Before coming to Oxford, Álvaro was Reader in Mathematical Finance at University College London. He was also previously JP Morgan Lecturer in Financial Mathematics, Exeter College, University of Oxford. Álvaro obtained his doctorate from the University of Oxford in 2003. This podcast covers the evolution of AI trading strategies, the unintented consequences of AI market makers, and the regulatory aspects of AI in f...

Gary Gerstle is the Paul Mellon Professor of American History Emeritus and Paul Mellon Director of Research at the University of Cambridge. He is the author and editor of more than ten books, including two prize-winners, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (2017) and Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present (2015). His most recent book, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era (2022), was chosen as a Best Book of 2022 by the Financial Times and Prospect Magazine. He has also testified...

Dr. Pippa Malmgren is an economist who makes sense of the world economy by writing books, founding tech businesses, advising policymakers around the world and through public speaking and teaching. She lectures at Sandhurst and is a Founder member of the Lunar University, a NASA-originated project to ensure the first human institution on the moon represents the arts and humanities.  

She served President George W. Bush in the White House as Special Assistant to the President and on the National Economic Council. After 9/11 she was also responsible for assessing terrorism risks to the economy and technology as a...

Philipp Carlsson-Szlezak is Boston Consulting Group (BCG)’s Global Chief Economist and a managing director and partner in the firm’s New York office. Paul Swartz is Senior Economist and executive director at BCG. He co-leads the Center for Macroeconomics at the BCG Henderson Institute in New York. They have recently published a new book, ‘Shocks, Crises, and False Alarms: How to Assess True Macroeconomic Risk’. In this podcast, we discuss why there are so many false alarms on recessions, models vs eclectic approaches, how will AI impact economic growth, and much more. 

Follow us here for m...

My colleague Henry Occelston hosted this podcast on my behalf. Shahin Vallée is a senior fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations (a German think tank) and also a Board Member overseeing Europe coverage at the Observatory group, a geopolitical macro-advisory firm. He was previously an economic advisor to the President of the European Council, Herman von Rompuy, and also an economic advisor to Emmanuel Macron while Macron was Economy Minister of France. This podcast covers why Macron called a snap election, how to interpret the first round of the election, why a far-right majority is still po...