Working Capital Conversations

Chris Riback
Working Capital Conversations

Engaging conversations on business, technology and innovation.

  1. 02/01/2022

    Christopher Leonard: The Lords of Easy Money

    We know the headlines: Inflation is the highest in 40 years, climbing 7 percent last year. Stock prices and corporate debt have been running incredibly high. Unemployment, meanwhile, is incredibly low, while the U.S. economy grew 5.7 percent in 2021, its fastest full-year clip since 1984. The wealth gap, meanwhile, continues to spread. To fight these realities – especially inflation – the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank will soon start unwinding their two most significant policies that drove extreme amounts of available money at rates that made that money virtually free to borrow since 2008 and the Great Recession and through the Covid pandemic: They will stop the extraordinary experiment of mass buying of U.S. Treasuries known as Quantitative Easing, and they will raise interest rates at least three – perhaps 4 or more times – this year.   The American easy money party is over, and it’s time to clean up any mess. So how did this party get started? Why did it go on so long – long after the first signs of rising inflation arose last year? Who made the decisions and, perhaps more centrally, why is the U.S. central bank, comprised of unelected governors and bank presidents, so opaque? What happened behind closed doors? Christopher Leonard has the inside story – and he tells it masterfully. His book The Lords of Easy Money: How the Federal Reserve Broke the American Economy, is a clear telling of Fed policy and the key personalities behind it: people like Jerome Powell, Ben Bernanke, Janet Yellen, and one you may never have heard of, Thomas Hoenig. About Leonard: He is a business reporter whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, and Bloomberg Businessweek. He is the New York Times bestselling author of The Meat Racket and Kochland.

    30 min
  2. 12/29/2021

    Walter Isaacson: The Science and Business of CRISPR

    Throughout nearly the entirety of human history, we have accepted a simple truth: A person’s genetic makeup is beyond one’s choice. Until now. In 2020, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna for the development of CRISPR, a method for genome editing. CRISPR may change everything -- and land us in a world previously imaginable only in science fiction. CRISPR can be wonderful and incredible. It may eliminate a child’s susceptibility to a genetic condition, such as cleft lip or cystic fibrosis or devastating disease. Imagine that. However, it also makes it possible to choose a child’s height or hair color. With these and other possibilities, the moral and ethical implications are important and immense. The race to discover CRISPR was one of the great science tales of the 21st century, a cross-continent battle of discovery and speed. So how did CRISPR arrive? And more importantly, where might it take us? Walter Isaacson is one to tell that story -- a professor of history at Tulane, he has been CEO of the Aspen Institute, chair of CNN, and editor of Time. He has written numerous No. 1 best-selling books, including on Leonardo DaVinci, Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, and Ben Franklin, each one of the great creators of their time, who transformed not only their fields, but also the way humans connect -- offering new ways to think about and engage in meaningful human interaction. Isaacson’s latest book is The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race. It’s part mystery, part science, part personal, and completely compelling. Isaacson details the discovery of the CRISPR method and tells the story of the groundbreaking, female scientists who revolutionized the world.

    26 min
4.5
out of 5
14 Ratings

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