PFI Talks

Prague Finance Institute

The Prague Finance Institute in cooperation with the daily E15 brings you a series of podcast interviews with distinguished domestic and foreign personalities from the world of economics and finance. The interviews with the guests of PFI Talks are hosted by Leoš Rousek, former business journalist of the Wall Street Journal and Hospodářské noviny.

  1. 2 DAYS AGO

    #47 Michael Sonenscher - Historian & Fellow /University of Cambridge/

    Michael Sonenscher is one of Britain's most distinguished intellectual historians, Fellow and Director of Studies in History at King's College, University of Cambridge, where he has taught for several decades. His work has reshaped how scholars understand the political, economic and moral thought of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, and the deep intellectual origins of the categories such as public debt, commercial society, the division of labour and capitalism itself through which we still try to make sense of the modern economy. Sonenscher's early work focused on the social and economic history of the French ancien régime, including The Hatters of Eighteenth-Century France (1987) and Work and Wages: Natural Law, Politics and the Eighteenth-Century French Trades (Cambridge University Press, 1989). He went on to publish two major studies of the intellectual origins of the French Revolution with Princeton University Press: Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution (2007), which traced how eighteenth-century debates about sovereign borrowing and inequality fed directly into the upheavals of 1789, and Sans-Culottes: An Eighteenth-Century Emblem in the French Revolution (2008). He has also edited and translated the political writings of Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès for Hackett, and published Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Division of Labour, the Politics of the Imagination and the Concept of Federal Government (Brill, 2020). His most recent books speak directly to current debates in political economy and political theory. In Capitalism: The Story behind the Word (Princeton University Press, 2022), Sonenscher recovers the surprising origins of the term "capitalism", first coined in early-nineteenth-century France as a fusion of two distinct sets of ideas, one about public debt and war finance, the other about the division of labour, and shows how this prehistory continues to shape contemporary arguments about markets, welfare states and inequality. In After Kant: The Romans, the Germans, and the Moderns in the History of Political Thought (Princeton University Press, 2023), a sweeping 567-page study, he traces the genealogy of modern political ideologies, from liberalism to nationalism to communism, through the long European argument that followed Immanuel Kant's question about how the lives of individuals relate to the whole of human history. Sonenscher is also a regular contributor to the London Review of Books, where he writes on European politics, constitutional thought and the intellectual roots of contemporary political conflicts. Jiří Zatloukal, financial journalist at Seznam Zprávy and contributor of PFI Talks, talked with Michael Sonenscher.

    43 min

  2. 3 DAYS AGO

    #46 Jon Spencer - Partner /TriWest Capital Partners/

    Jon Spencer is a Partner at TriWest Capital Partners, one of Canada's leading private equity firms. Based in Calgary, Alberta, TriWest was founded in 1998 and has raised more than ~$1.75 billion of committed capital across seven funds, completing fifty platform investments and over sixty add-on acquisitions, with a focus on partnering with management teams of Western Canadian mid-market and lower mid-market businesses across the industrial, manufacturing, services and distribution sectors. Spencer joined TriWest in 2007 and has spent nearly two decades helping to lead the firm's investment activity. He currently serves as Chair of the Board of Monarch Industries, a long-established Canadian manufacturer of industrial castings, hydraulic components and concrete-mixing equipment, and sits on the boards of A Parent Media Company (APMC), Supreme International, Lithion Power Group and Prostar Energy Services. Earlier in his career he worked at RBC Capital Markets in the Global Energy Group, where he was involved in public equity offerings and mergers and acquisitions assignments across the North American energy sector, and began his career at Credit Suisse as an investment banking analyst. Spencer graduated with distinction from the Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario, where he earned an Honours degree in Business Administration. Alongside his investment work, he has been actively engaged in the Canadian corporate finance community, having served as President of the Calgary Chapter of the Association for Corporate Growth. Leoš Rousek, the Head Of Corporate Communications at PPF Group (https://www.ppf.eu/en) and contributor of PFI Talks, talked with Jon Spencer.

    51 min

  3. 4 DAYS AGO

    #45 John Kay - Economist /University of Oxford/

    Sir John Kay, CBE, FBA, FRSE, is one of Britain's leading economists, whose career has spanned the academic world, business and finance, and public affairs. Born in Edinburgh in 1948, he has held chairs at the London Business School, the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics, and has been a Fellow of St John's College, Oxford since 1970, when he was elected to a permanent teaching post at the University of Oxford at the age of 21. Kay studied at the University of Edinburgh and then at Nuffield College, Oxford, where he worked under James Mirrlees, the future Nobel laureate. He served as the first Research Director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, founded the consultancy London Economics in 1986, and in 1996 became the founding Dean of Oxford's Saïd Business School. He was also the first Professor of Management to be elected a Fellow of the British Academy. He has served as a member of the Council of Economic Advisers to the First Minister of Scotland (2007–2011) and chaired the Kay Review of UK Equity Markets and Long-Term Decision Making, which reported to the British government in 2012. Following the United Kingdom's vote to leave the European Union, he was appointed to the Standing Council on Scotland and Europe. Kay is the author of many influential books, including Foundations of Corporate Success (1993), The Truth About Markets (2003) — named Politics Book of the Year in 2005 — Obliquity (2010), The Long and the Short of It (2009, revised 2016), and Other People's Money (2015), which won the Saltire Prize and was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing. His more recent works include Radical Uncertainty (2020, with former Bank of England Governor Mervyn King), Greed is Dead (2020, with Paul Collier), and his latest book, The Corporation in the 21st Century (2024), which examines how the modern corporation has been transformed by globalisation, financialisation and the rise of intangible assets. A regular Financial Times columnist for nearly three decades, Kay received the Senior Wincott Award for Financial Journalism in 2011. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (1997), the Royal Society of Edinburgh (2008) and the Academy of Social Sciences (2016). He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2014 for services to economics and was knighted in the 2021 Birthday Honours for services to economics, finance and business. Jiří Zatloukal, financial journalist at Seznam Zprávy and contributor of PFI Talks, talked with John Kay.

    40 min

  4. 5 DAYS AGO

    #44 Paul Collier - Economist & Professor /University of Oxford/

    Sir Paul Collier, CBE, FBA, is Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford and Professorial Fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford. He is also Professeur invité at Sciences Po and a co-director of the International Growth Centre, a joint initiative of LSE and Oxford. From 1998 to 2003 he served as Director of the Development Research Group at the World Bank, and he was the founding Director of the Centre for the Study of African Economies at Oxford, which he led from 1989 until 2014. Collier studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at the University of Oxford, where he also earned his D.Phil. He has previously held a professorship at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and served as a senior advisor to the Blair Commission for Africa. In 2014 he was awarded a knighthood for services to promoting research and policy change in Africa, and in 2017 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. His research covers the causes and consequences of civil war, the political economy of fragile states, the management of natural resources, urbanisation in low-income countries, and most recently the economics of "left behind" regions in advanced economies. He is the author of several internationally acclaimed books, including The Bottom Billion (2007), which won the Lionel Gelber, Arthur Ross and Corine prizes; Wars, Guns and Votes (2009); The Plundered Planet (2010); Exodus: How Migration is Changing Our World (2013); Refuge: Rethinking Refugee Policy in a Changing World (with Alexander Betts, 2017); The Future of Capitalism (2018); Greed is Dead (with John Kay, 2020); and Left Behind: A New Economics for Neglected Places (2024), a Silver winner in the 2025 Axiom Business Book Awards. Collier has also been recognised with the Adam Smith Prize from Glasgow's Philosophical Society (2023), the A.SK Social Science Prize (2013), the Estoril Global Issues Distinguished Book Prize (2009), and was named by Foreign Policy magazine among its top global thinkers. He writes regularly for the Financial Times, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. Jiří Zatloukal, financial journalist at Seznam Zprávy and contributor of PFI Talks, talked with Paul Collier.

    49 min

  5. 4 MAR

    #43 George Selgin - Economist

    George Selgin is an American economist. Until his retirement in July 2025, he served as a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, where he was the founding Director of the Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives and editor-in-chief of its online publication, Alt-M. He is Professor Emeritus of Economics at the Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia, Honorary Professor at Francisco Marroquin University, and an associate editor of Econ Journal Watch. George Selgin is considered a Bitcoin OG, having participated in the original cypherpunk mailing list alongside Wei Dai and Nick Szabo—a forum that contributed to the ideas behind Bitcoin’s creation. Hal Finney and Nick Szabo have both said that his work helped inspire the development of Bitcoin. He was among the first economists to study the economics of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Selgin is also an expert on the history and economics of traditional metallic coinage. His book, Good Money, recounts the story of private coin minting during Great Britain’s Industrial Revolution. He is widely regarded as a leading authority on Gresham’s Law, the longstanding economic principle concerning the circulation of money.

    49 min

  6. 17/12/2025

    #42 Carmen M. Reinhart - Economist & Professor /Harvard University/

    Carmen M. Reinhart is the Minos A. Zombanakis Professor of the International Financial System at Harvard Kennedy School. She was Senior Policy Advisor and Deputy Director at the International Monetary Fund and held positions as Chief Economist and Vice President at the investment bank Bear Stearns in the 1980s. She serves in the Advisory Panel of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and was a member of the Congressional Budget Office Panel of Economic Advisors. She has written on a variety of topics in macroeconomics and international finance. Her work has helped to inform the understanding of financial crises in both advanced economies and emerging markets. Her best-selling book (with Kenneth S. Rogoff) entitled This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly documents the striking similarities of the recurring booms and busts that have characterized financial history. It has been translated to over 20 languages and won the Paul A. Samuelson Award. Based on publications and scholarly citations, Reinhart is ranked among the top economists worldwide, according to Research Papers in Economics (RePEc). She has testified before Congress and has been listed among Bloomberg Markets Most Influential 50 in Finance, Foreign Policy's Top 100 Global Thinkers, and Thompson Reuters' The World's Most Influential Scientific Minds. In 2018 she was awarded the King Juan Carlos Prize in Economics and NABE's Adam Smith Award, among others.

    53 min

  7. 20/11/2025

    #41 Morgan Housel - Investor & Author /Psychology of Money/

    Morgan Housel is a prominent financial writer, award-winning author, and investor known for his insightful perspectives on money, investing, and behavioral economics. He is a partner at ⁠The Collaborative Fund, ⁠a venture capital firm at the intersection of finance, innovation, and social progress. With a keen interest in storytelling, Housel has built a reputation for his ability to convey complex financial concepts in a clear and engaging manner. He is a highly sought-after speaker and shares insights on investing, financial planning, and the ever-evolving landscape of the global economy. His ability to blend storytelling with data-driven analysis has earned him acclaim as a thought leader in the financial industry. As a financial writer, Housel’s writings reflect a deep understanding of the psychological aspects that influence decision-making in the world of money. In 2020, he published “⁠The Psychology of Money⁠“. Through a series of short stories, the book explores the relationship between money and human behaviour. It offers readers practical wisdom on building wealth and is said to be “one of the best and most original finance books in years.” It has sold over four million copies, and has been translated into 53 languages. Morgan Housel’s latest book “⁠Same As Ever⁠” is a New York Times bestseller and offers timeless wisdom aimed at helping people navigate the uncertainty of the future. Housel shapes conversations about money and its profound impact on individuals and society at large. He is a two-time winner of the Best in Business Award from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, and winner of the New York Times Sidney Award. In 2022, MarketWatch named him one of the 50 most influential people in markets. He serves on the board of directors at ⁠Markel ⁠and was formerly a columnist for The Motley Fool and The Wall Street Journal. Housel lives in Seattle with his wife and two kids.

    36 min

  8. 21/10/2025

    #40 Michael Bordo - Historian & Professor /Rutgers University/

    One of the world's top monetary historians Michael D. Bordo, Professor at Rutgers University, sees alarming parallels between today and the catastrophic 1930s.KEY POINTSThe "Wily Coyote Moment"· Markets running on air over a fiscal cliff - haven't looked down yet· Sudden crisis could hit when confidence breaksFed Under Attack· Trump pressuring Fed just like Nixon did in the 1970s (led to runaway inflation)· Attempt to fire Lisa Cook threatens central bank independencePerfect Storm Brewing· Unsustainable debt + protectionism + potential tech bubble· Globalization reversing like it did 100 years ago· "All the bad policies from the 1930s are coming back"What Must Be Done· Keep central banks independent and credible· Focus only on price stability· Remember: nationalism and protectionism led to disaster before"I find the current era extremely worrisome. In some ways it reminds me of the 1930s."Michael D. Bordo is a Board of Governors Professor of Economics and director of the Center for Monetary and Financial History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey.Interview conducted by Jiri Zatloukal, Prague Finance Institute

    36 min
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About

The Prague Finance Institute in cooperation with the daily E15 brings you a series of podcast interviews with distinguished domestic and foreign personalities from the world of economics and finance. The interviews with the guests of PFI Talks are hosted by Leoš Rousek, former business journalist of the Wall Street Journal and Hospodářské noviny.

Information

  • Creator
    Prague Finance Institute
  • Years Active
    2020 - 2026
  • Episodes
    47
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Prague Finance Institute
  • Show Website
    PFI Talks

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