PFI
Talks

"The bad guys only have to get hit once or twice, and believe me, they try very hard," says Joseph Wassel, director of the US government's FirstNet Authority, which oversees the world's most secure and largest telecommunications network for emergency responders, including firefighters and paramedics.

Silicon Valley technology firms have a strong voice in Washington, says Krisztián Orbán, founder of the Oriens investment fund. That's also why in February the Fed guaranteed all of these companies' deposits in Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), which collapsed due to poor business decisions. "We got our money out of SVB on time," says Orbán, whose fund is used to crisis situations.

The story of the German financial company Wirecard sounds like the subject of a film. A company with the aura of a European tech giant challenging its American rivals collapsed in 2020, with its path to ruin punctuated by falsified accounts, empty mailboxes in the Philippines and the founder’s escape. The story of the fraud, which many have long refused to believe, has been gradually unravelled since 2014 by Dan McCrum, a journalist at the Financial Times. Last year he published a book, Money Men, and made a documentary based on his reporting. He described the ins and outs of the case during an interview on another PFI Talks podcast.

Patching holes in the state budget with debt is something that responsible politicians should avoid. Debt is supposed to be used to bridge wars, pandemics or crises, but most importantly the borrowed money is supposed to go into productive investments, says Barry Eichengreen in an interview.

Marc Faber, a Swiss investor living in Thailand, doesn't mince his words. In 2017, he dedicated an issue of his monthly investment newsletter, The Gloom, Boom & Doom Report, to the raging racial conflicts in the US. At the time, he said, "Thank God America is populated by whites and not blacks. Otherwise, the United States would look like Zimbabwe, which may happen one day, but America has enjoyed at least 200 years of economic and political prominence." He later defended himself, telling the US television network CNBC in his defence that he was not a racist, but that "the facts should be described as they are, regardless of their degree of political incorrectness". This is also why Marc Faber said goodbye after an hour-long interview, saying: "I believe it is still politically appropriate to say - Merry Christmas!"

When a speculative bubble bursts, many people usually lose. But history is littered with investment manias in which the suffering of individuals ultimately outweighed the benefits for all. In the 19th century, thousands of speculators burned their hands investing in the shares of American railway companies. But their losses enabled all Americans to switch from horse-drawn carriages to trains. The bursting of the internet bubble at the beginning of the 21st century left many empty family bank accounts, but also a network of data cables that allowed the digital economy to really take off within two decades. What may emerge from the ashes of the cryptocurrency mania is one of the topics Sumit Agarwal discusses.

Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February, Professor Jeffrey Sachs has repeatedly called on world politicians to seek a path to peace through negotiations. The war has thus almost overshadowed economic issues in his articles and media appearances, but Jeffrey Sachs has been seeking answers to these questions as an academic and advisor to governments for decades.

As reports and polls from Russia show, a large part of the public there refuses to admit that Russia, not Ukraine, is the origin of the biggest armed conflict in Europe since World War II. According to Daniel Kahneman, such a reaction is understandable not only in terms of the effectiveness of current Russian propaganda. "The reluctance to see one's country as the culprit of aggression, of crime, is very strong in most of us," says Professor Kahneman