In no particular order, here are the most-listened-to Capitalisn’t episodes from 2023.
1. SVB: The End of Banking as We Know It?
Luigi and Bethany talk to two experts with unique insights into the 2023 banking crisis: Chicago Booth Professor Douglas Diamond, who won the 2022 Nobel Prize for his decades-long work on bank runs, and Eric Rosengren, former Boston Fed President, for his view as a regulator. They discuss the factors that led to the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, including risky lending practices, lack of oversight, and the challenges of regulating the rapidly evolving world of banking.
2. Is Technological Progress Good For Everyone? With Daron Acemoglu
In this episode, Daron Acemoglu joins Bethany and Luigi to discuss the key challenges of ensuring that this progress benefits everyone, not just the wealthy and powerful. They discuss the rules, norms, and expectations around technology governance, the unintended consequences of AI development, and how the mismanagement of property rights, especially over data, can reinforce inequality and exploitation.
3. Raghuram Rajan: Why The Banking Crisis Isn’t Over
Several questions continue to swirl around the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and its larger implications. In this special episode, Chicago Booth’s Raghuram Rajan – former Governor of the Reserve Bank of India and IMF Chief Economist – joins Bethany and Luigi to explore the risks in the financial system and possible solutions.
“Poverty will be abolished in America only when a mass movement demands it,” writes Princeton sociologist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Matthew Desmond in his new book, “Poverty, by America.” Building on his own lived experiences of growing up poor and continued contact with impoverished communities that “forces [him] to be intellectually honest,” he claims that poverty persists in America not because we are incapable of preventing it but because society – and especially the wealthy – benefits from it at the expense of the poor.
In recent years, the New York Times has published several exposés on McKinsey. On this episode, Bethany and Luigi speak with the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist behind those exposés, Walt Bogdanich, about his new book “When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Untold Story of McKinsey & Co., the World’s Most Controversial Management Consulting Firm” (co-authored with Michael Forsyth). Bogdanich traces the history and culture of McKinsey and some of the shocking stories he uncovered in the book. Our hosts then discuss the ethical implications of the consulting industry and the questions raised about the accountability of powerful societal institutions, including the role of business education.
