In the latest episode of the New Money Review podcast I’m joined by someone who says we’re in the middle of a historic battle between the public and private sector over money. And it’s one the state can’t afford to lose, he argues. Our future global money will be digital, cheap and mobile, says Richard Holden, professor of economics at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, but it may be issued by a tech giant or an emerging economy rather than the Federal Reserve, European Central Bank or Bank of England. And that right to issue money will confer massive power on the winner of ..read more

In the latest episode of the New Money Review podcast I’m delighted to welcome Satyajit Das, a former investment banker, derivatives expert and author. His book “Traders, Guns and Money”, published in 2006, remains one of the best books ever written about the world of high finance. It’s been called “a wickedly comic exposé of the culture, games and pure deceptions played out every day in trading rooms around the world. And played out with other people’s money.” Das went on to publish “Extreme Money” and “The Age of Stagnation”, in which a common theme is the high global levels of debt. In ..read more

Excitement over the prospects for artificial intelligence (AI) has driven US stock market valuations to a historic high. Can AI technologies deliver on their promise? Or is this yet another case of irrational exuberance? In the latest New Money Review podcast I am joined by Eric Siegel, a former Columbia University professor who has taught computer science courses in machine learning and AI. Siegel, now a consultant, has just published a new book called “The AI Playbook—Mastering the Rare Art of Machine Learning Deployment”. In the podcast, we explore some of the paradoxes surrounding AI: wh ..read more

Against an uncertain economic backdrop, one industry is booming. Internet fraudsters are scamming more and more victims worldwide. Using increasingly sophisticated methods, they are now stealing even from the most prepared among us. But while the number of online frauds and the volumes of money involved are increasing, so are the efforts to stop scammers. In the latest New Money Review podcast, I’m joined by Simon Miller, director of policy and communications at Stop Scams UK. In the podcast, we discuss: Why the volumes of scams and the money lost are significantly underreported How scam ..read more

If you thought tax was boring, the latest New Money Review podcast will change your mind. Dan Neidle was a top corporate lawyer for 23 years—ending up as head of tax at London law firm Clifford Chance. But in 2022 he retired to set up a new think tank called Tax Policy Associates. Its aim is to improve UK tax policy and to improve the public understanding of the subject. This nerdish-sounding mission statement gave no indication of the political fireworks Neidle’s new venture was shortly to ignite. In July 2022, he accused then-Chancellor Nadim Zahawi of having avoided £4m in capital gains ..read more

Financial markets go up and down. And they usually fall faster than they rise. But when does normal financial market turbulence tip over into a systemic collapse? How should policymakers prepare and how should they react? In the latest New Money Review podcast, I interview Steven Kelly, associate director of research at the Yale Programme on Financial Stability. The programme’s mission is to create, disseminate and preserve knowledge about financial crises. In the podcast, we cover: What defines a systemic financial crisis? The common threads of financial crises Deposits, short-term debt ..read more

In the latest episode of the New Money Review podcast I’m delighted to welcome Tim Congdon, an economist and leading advocate of monetarism. After a successful career in the City, Tim became founder and chair of the Institute of International Monetary Research at the University of Buckingham. I’ve followed his work for over three decades. In the early 1990s, when I was working as a bond fund manager, the UK’s central bank was keeping interest rates at over 10% in an attempt to make sterling shadow the deutsche mark. Tim forecast that UK interest rates would soon fall from double figures, b ..read more

We often look at colonial empires as territories gained and occupied by nation states. But across four centuries, colonialism has above all been the business of companies, says my interviewee in the latest New Money Review podcast. Philip Stern is the author of a new book called ‘Empire, Incorporated’, in which he explores the role of the company in British colonial history. In it, he argues that corporations conceived, promoted, financed, and governed overseas expansion, making claims over territory and peoples while ensuring that British and colonial society were also invested, quite liter ..read more

Tim Yunusov is hacker with a special interest in banking and payment systems. He’s also written a series of articles on hacking for New Money Review. He’s been hired by financial institutions to see if he could breach their online banking systems and mobile apps, their card payment systems or their automated teller machines (ATMs). In many cases he could. In 2019, for example, he showed how to get around the limit on contactless card payments (£30 at the time in the UK) by altering the information exchanged by the contactless device and the card reader. In a more recent case, Tim went arou ..read more

In this episode I’m joined by Kyle Gibson, a senior staff researcher and writer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Open Learning initiative. I’ve been following Kyle on Twitter for years, where he has been a consistently funny and well-informed critic of the crazy world of cryptocurrency. Today he joins the podcast to talk about another tech utopia that’s in the headlines: artificial intelligence or ‘AI’. Are the claims made for AI overblown? How are AI models developed? What human inputs are required? Who funds AI? What’s the link between AI and cryptocurrency? Can cryptocurren ..read more