Latest Interviews

Can vaccine passports kickstart the economy?

Helen Joyce

Governments worldwide are deploying vaccine passports to accelerate economic recovery and restore civil freedoms, with Israel's "Green Pass" serving as a primary model driving a projected 7.5% growth rate. While these digital credentials facilitate access to venues and travel, their implementation faces significant hurdles including the risk of viral transmission from new variants, deepening socioeconomic inequalities along generational and racial lines, and serious civil liberties concerns regarding data privacy. Experts warn that without robust transparency and sustained vaccine efficacy, these temporary measures could evolve into permanent mechanisms that further entrench disparities between wealthy and developing nations.

How Supply-Chain Disruptions Are Impacting Inflation

Joseph Briggs, Jake Seward

Recorded on March 24, 2021, this analysis by Goldman Sachs attributes current global supply chain bottlenecks to a surge in goods demand and international logistics failures rather than production capacity. While shipping rates have risen approximately 300% since 2020, the firm forecasts a modest inflationary impact of nine basis points on core consumer prices as firms absorb costs through expensive workarounds. The outlook projects that these constraints will ease by late 2021 alongside global vaccination rollouts and a shift in consumer spending from goods to services, leading to price normalization in 2022.

The Resiliency of the Muni Market

Sylvia Yeh, Liz

Despite early pandemic uncertainty, the municipal bond market demonstrated exceptional resilience in 2020 driven by stable revenue streams, historically low default rates, and strong balance sheets. Issuers capitalized on the rally to refund old debt while tax revenues exceeded forecasts, further bolstered by fiscal stimulus funds designated for infrastructure and pandemic relief rather than tax cuts. GSAM maintained a fundamental, bottom-up selection strategy that helped both investment grade and high yield segments perform well, resulting in significantly tightened credit spreads and record issue volumes by year-end.

One Year Since Market Trough: A Cycle on Fast-Forward

Kamakshya Trivedi, Liz

Goldman Sachs analysis identifies that the March 2020 market bottom was triggered when specific downside risks were quantified and policy mitigations stabilized funding, leading to a historical "fast forward" recovery where the S&P 500 reclaimed pre-pandemic levels within months. Driven by rapid vaccine deployment and unprecedented global fiscal support, the bank forecasts nearly 7% global growth for 2021, a pace significantly outstripping consensus expectations and previous post-crisis rebounds. This accelerated cycle is expected to force earlier central bank tightening compared to traditional recoveries, prompting investors to position portfolios in cyclical assets while hedging against rapidly rising interest rates.

The New Tech Investing Landscape

Brook Dane, Brooke, Liz

Investors are increasingly targeting underexposed US mid-cap and international technology sectors, leveraging recent market pullbacks to build positions in transformational companies at attractive valuations. Key growth themes include the structural shift to digital payments, the rapid expansion of e-commerce models in emerging markets, and the democratization of innovation through cloud infrastructure and mobile device proliferation. Despite risks from geopolitical tensions and regulatory scrutiny, the firm maintains a bullish long-term outlook, urging portfolio diversification into dynamic players within artificial intelligence, machine learning, and advanced semiconductors to capture the disruptive acceleration expected over the next decade.

Israel’s election: what next for Netanyahu?

Netanyahu, Anchelle Pfeffer, Greg Karlstrom

Facing indictments for bribery and fraud, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called his fourth election in less than two years as a strategy to secure immunity legislation and avoid a trial that could strip him of executive power. While polls suggest his Likud party is unlikely to reach his target of 40 seats, the outcome hinges on small right-wing parties like Naftali Bennett's, whose kingmaker status could either extend Netanyahu's centralized, presidential-style governance or force a fragile opposition coalition led by Yair Lapid. Regardless of the winner, structural barriers to Palestinian statehood remain intact, though a new administration might improve relations with the U.S. Democratic leadership compared to the current strained bilateral ties.

The Beginning of a Structural Bull Market for Commodities

Damien Courvalin, Liz

Goldman Sachs Research has revised its 12-month commodity index return forecast to 15.5% based on a structural bull market driven by post-vaccination demand recovery, expansive green infrastructure spending, and constrained producer supply. The firm attributes this shift to simultaneous global fiscal stimulus and capital discipline that limit oil and mine output while redirecting investment toward transition metals like copper. Consequently, analysts have upgraded price targets for copper, oil, and grains, positioning commodities as a hedge against sustained inflationary pressures and a diversification tool against equity valuation risks.

Sherry Turkle, MIT Professor and Author of "The Empathy Diaries"

Sherry Turkle

Sociologist Sherry Turkle reflects on how childhood family secrets and a transformative moment of peer empathy at Harvard shaped her lifelong dedication to truth and her distinctive view of leadership as active, open-ended listening. She details her early, isolated research in the late 1970s where she challenged MIT's engineering establishment to recognize computers as intimate "second selves," a thesis later validated by the modern emotional role of technology. Drawing on her pandemic experience and career advice to study what she loves, Turkle argues that the capacity for solitude and the pursuit of intrinsic passion provide essential resilience against professional and personal upheaval.

The future of shopping: what's in store?

Henry Trix

The 2020 pandemic accelerated a global retail revolution driven by over $4 trillion in online spending, forcing traditional chains like US big retailers to close while firms such as Alibaba, Amazon, and Nike pivoted to data-centric direct-to-consumer models. In this new landscape, Chinese super-apps and Western platforms like Shopify have enabled brands to leverage intimate consumer data for production and "retail everywhere" experiences, effectively reversing loyalty dynamics to depend on how well retailers protect personal information. As global data volume is projected to reach 175 trillion gigabytes by 2025, the industry now faces a critical tension between hyper-personalization and growing privacy concerns regarding the exploitation of shopper footprints.

The Semiconductor Shortage of 2021

Tammy Kiely, Liz

Originating from pandemic-driven demand shocks rather than geopolitical tensions, the current semiconductor supply crunch has pushed industry lead times beyond the 14-week danger zone, severely constraining production of microcontrollers and power devices on older 28nm and 40nm nodes. Manufacturers face structural hurdles in expanding capacity due to limited incentives to invest in fully depreciated equipment and a two-year timeline required to construct new facilities, a situation exemplified by Toyota's resilience through pre-established resource planning. As the shortage persists through year-end with rising prices and order overshoot fueled by inventory stockpiling, the market risks a volatile transition where a V-shaped demand recovery could eventually be complicated by future oversupply conditions.

Charles Phillips, Co-Chair of the Black Economic Alliance and Co-Founder of Recognize

Charles Phillips

Charles Phillips, co-founder of Recognize, leverages his background in computer science and corporate leadership to launch "110," a private initiative designed to create one million jobs for Black people by aggregating nonprofit training networks and securing commitments from dozens of major corporations. Beyond employment, the program emphasizes targeted economic levers such as increasing Black homeownership through "rent-to-own" models and supports parallel efforts to address wealth gaps facing Black women in entrepreneurship. Drawing on his experience driving cloud adoption at Recognize, Phillips argues that specialized third-party providers offer the scalable infrastructure necessary to sustain these high-impact social and technological advancements.

Investing in High Yield Bonds and Bank Loans

Lori Pomerantz, Liz

Goldman Sachs Asset Management analyzes the high-yield and bank loan markets by contrasting 2020's central bank-supported resilience with 2021's profit-taking outflows and anticipated rate hike sensitivity. The firm forecasts annual returns of 4% to 5% for U.S. high yield and 4.5% to 5.5% for bank loans, driven by coupon carry, sector migration from fallen angels to rising stars, and the structural stability of collateralized loan obligations. Strategic allocation shifts toward investment-grade issuers downgraded in the energy sector and active security selection aim to navigate elevated leverage ratios while capitalizing on expected second-half 2021 economic recovery.

The End is Near: Understanding the Transition from LIBOR

Jason Granet, Liz

U.S. regulators finalized a timeline confirming that non-U.S. dollar LIBOR rates will cease at year-end while dollar rates remain published until June 30, 2023, to facilitate a controlled wind-down of legacy contracts. This transition replaces the benchmark with SOFR, a secured overnight rate backed by a Federal Reserve partnership, while industry groups work to align averaging methodologies between loan and derivatives markets to mitigate basis risks. Global coordination and ongoing legislative efforts aim to standardize the adoption of risk-free rate alternatives across jurisdictions and eliminate residual legal uncertainties.

How to crunch covid-19 data

Leveraging unprecedented data volumes, The Economist's data team exposed divergent global lockdown strategies through real-time mobility tracking that rapidly convinced Google to release public datasets and prompted immediate adoption in government briefings. Concurrently, the organization's simplified "flatten the curve" visualization, refined by editor Sasha Mostow and academic Drew Harris, established a critical communication standard for illustrating social distancing impacts on healthcare capacity. These efforts collectively transformed raw data into actionable policy tools, fundamentally shaping the global response to the pandemic.

Antoine Flamarion and Mathieu Chabran, Co-Founders of Tikehau Capital

Antoine Flamarion, Mathieu Chabran, Alison

TKO Capital co-founders Antoine Fulmarian and Mathieu Chabron are leveraging private markets, SPACs, and a €1 billion Energy Transition Fund to drive industrial growth and decarbonization efforts. The firm combines a "skin in the game" balance sheet strategy with contrarian thinking to target infrastructure, European private equity, and real SMEs while maintaining offices across the US, Europe, and Asia. By prioritizing creation over competition and advising investors to act with offensive ambition, TKO aims to capitalize on global structural shifts following the post-pandemic economic reset.