In Episode 262 of Hidden Forces, I (Demetri Kofinas) share an interview I recently gave on “The Breakdown” with Nathaniel Whittemore, but not before delivering an important message, which has to do with a new Hidden Forces community tier that we will be launching.
I’m excited to announce that we will be launching a new Hidden Forces community tier where you'll be able to get immediate access to me, my thoughts, special content, etc., along with private events that will include opportunities to ask questions directly to my guests and to me in real-time. We are giving you a preview of that experience this coming Wednesday, August 3rd, from 6:30 PM — 8 PM EST when I will be hosting a live video Q&A over zoom. Anyone can join and ask me pretty much any question they want so long as it is relevant to the podcast. The zoom call is open to anyone but we are limiting the number of people who can join this time just to keep things manageable. You can secure your spot on the list by going to HiddenForces.io/events and registering right now.
The title of the event is “Investing Between the Wars,” and while listeners are free to ask any question they like, the focus of the Q&A is on how the changing political and geopolitical landscape is affecting your life and investments. Indeed, this is the subject that Nathaniel Whittemore and I discussed in my recent appearance on “The Breakdown.” I shared some of my own views and perspectives on markets and geopolitics as well as how I’ve incorporated my macro views of the political economy into my own investment decisions.
The Breakdown is a daily analysis podcast that explores themes in macroeconomics, bitcoin, geopolitics, and the big picture power shifts affecting the world. You can find it on any major podcast platform and at coindesk.com/podcasts and you can follow Nathaniel on Twitter at @NLW.
You can access the transcript to this week’s conversation by going directly to the episode page at HiddenForces.io and clicking on "premium extras." All subscribers gain access to our premium feed, which can be easily added to your favorite podcast application.
If you enjoyed listening to today’s episode of Hidden Forces you can help support the show by doing the following:
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Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas
Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou
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Episode Recorded on 07/18/2022
In Episode 261 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Elbridge Colby, co-founder and principal of The Marathon Initiative, an organization whose mission is to develop the diplomatic, military, and economic strategies that the United States will need to navigate a protracted era of great power competition. Colby has also served as US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy and Force Development and was the chief architect of the 2018 National Defense Strategy (NDS), which was by some estimates the most significant revision of U.S. defense strategy since 9/11, if not since the end of the Cold War.
This is a conversation about the national security challenges that Elbridge Colby believes we face as a country, their urgency, and what is needed in terms of practical changes to our strategic objectives, the organization of our national defense, what we prioritize, and perhaps most importantly, our sense of mission, unity, and national purpose. Kofinas and Colby spend the first hour laying out the nature and scope of these challenges as they pertain to the Chinese Communist Party in particular, and to the degree that it acts in unison with Chinese objectives, the Russian Federation as well.
The second hour is broken into two parts, the first of which covers specifics on how to meet the challenge, while the second focuses on Taiwan where Elbridge makes the case for why he believes that an attack on the island nation by China is not only likely but may come much sooner than most pundits and military planners expect. The consequences of such an attack would not only be destabilizing for the current equilibrium in Asia, but could escalate into a global kinetic conflict with hypersonic missiles, space warfare, cyber-attacks, and God forbid, the use of nuclear weapons. Preventing such scenarios from unfolding should be at the very top of our list of national priorities. Today’s conversation is mean to help inform you about just how salient this threat is and what we can and perhaps should do about it.
You can access the full episode, transcript, and intelligence report to this week’s conversation by going directly to the episode page at HiddenForces.io and clicking on "premium extras." All subscribers gain access to our premium feed, which can be easily added to your favorite podcast application.
If you enjoyed listening to today’s episode of Hidden Forces you can help support the show by doing the following:
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts | YouTube | Spotify | Stitcher | SoundCloud | CastBox | RSS Feed
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Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas
Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou
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Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas
Episode Recorded on 07/19/2022
In Episode 260 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Rory Johnston. Rory is a widely quoted researcher and expert in global commodities markets. His work includes a variety of research and investment projects including his commodity market research platform at Commodity Context Dot Com, as well as both public market portfolio and private equity strategy at Price Street.
This episode is for premium subscribers only and is part of an ongoing series of conversations that I’ve been curating with guests focused on investment themes and opportunities in the commodities complex. The goal of this conversation is to provide you with a more critical look at the supply side story in oil, refined products like gasoline and diesel, and to a lesser degree natural gas, including drivers of end-use demand for these commodities. The demand-side picture is much more difficult to project, as it requires assumptions about growth, monetary policy, and the further implementation of sanctions on Russian energy supplies. These are subjects we explored in recent episodes with Helen Thompson on Energy Geopolitics and Ian Bremmer on how to fight a geopolitical recession and are featured in the related tab on this week’s episode page on our website.
Rory and Demetri also discuss some of the financial data compiled by Rory in his most recent Global Oil Data Deck including calendar spreads and speculative positioning in major crude contracts and how we can use that information to help us anticipate the direction of and volatility in oil prices going forward. For premium subscribers to our super nerd tier, Rory has provided you with an abridged version of his data deck for the month of July which publishes in full on his commodity context substack today.
You can access the full episode and transcript, along with the abridged version of Rory’s Global Oil Data Deck by going directly to the episode page at HiddenForces.io and clicking on "premium extras." All subscribers gain access to our premium feed, which can be easily added to your favorite podcast application.
If you enjoyed listening to today’s episode of Hidden Forces you can help support the show by doing the following:
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts | YouTube | Spotify | Stitcher | SoundCloud | CastBox | RSS Feed
Write us a review on Apple Podcasts & Spotify
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Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas
Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou
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Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas
Episode Recorded on 07/14/2022
In Episode 259 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Ryan Gingeras, a professor in the Department of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School and an expert on Turkish, Balkan, and Middle East history. Gingeras has authored six books on Turkish history and culture, including his forthcoming, “The Last Days of the Ottoman Empire,” which is scheduled for release by Penguin in October 2022.
In recent years, Turkey has become an X-factor of sorts in global politics. Its president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has attracted the ire of liberal-minded politicians and his transactional political style has raised questions about Turkey’s dependability as a NATO ally and about its long-term commitment to the rules-based international order. This is obviously a concern for the United States and NATO, but there is perhaps no country for whom Turkey’s long-term orientation Westward carries more existential importance than Greece, which has been on the receiving end of escalating Turkish provocations and territorial violations of its internationally recognized maritime borders and airspace. This comes during a time when Turkish cooperation within NATO itself has become a bargaining chip of sorts that Ankara has used to further its own strategic objectives, as seen most recently in negations over Finish and Swedish membership.
This conversation has two primary objectives. The first is to give you an understanding of the historical, political, and geostrategic forces responsible for driving Turkish foreign policy today, including the intellectual foundations for its more assertive, revanchist, and perhaps even expansionist ambitions—concepts and doctrines such as “strategic depth” and Mavi Vatan or “Blue Homeland,” which inform and explain much of Turkey’s policy in the broader Middle East, Africa, and the Aegean. The second objective is to expose you to how the Middle East, Europe, and North Africa could evolve territorially in a world without NATO or where the post-WWII liberal international order continues to degrade or comes apart entirely. While this has more immediate implications for Greece, it also risks altering the larger territorial landscape of Eurasia in ways that most people would have found unimaginable at the beginning of the 21st century. What this could mean for citizens in these territories, for the politicians responsible for making policy within the various countries affected, and for investors and businesses looking to put capital to work in them cannot be understated.
You can access the full episode, transcript, and intelligence report to this week’s conversation by going directly to the episode page at HiddenForces.io and clicking on "premium extras." All subscribers gain access to our premium feed, which can be easily added to your favorite podcast application.
If you enjoyed listening to today’s episode of Hidden Forces you can help support the show by doing the following:
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts | YouTube | Spotify | Stitcher | SoundCloud | CastBox | RSS Feed
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Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas
Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou
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Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod
Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas
Episode Recorded on 07/05/2022
In Episode 258 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Lev Menand, author of “The Fed Unbound: Central Banking in a Time of Crisis.” Menand is an associate professor of law at Columbia Law School who has worked as an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and as a senior advisor to both the Deputy Secretary of the Treasury and the Assistant Secretary for Financial Institutions.
He joins Demetri for an important and timely conversation about the US Dollar and the evolution of the international financial system into a kind of Frankenstein’s monster whose appendages and doppelgängers reach into the deepest recesses of the global economy.
Dollar balances and dollar-based lending by institutions not regulated by the Federal Reserve—what we broadly refer to as the shadow banking system—have grown so large over the years that no one, not even the Fed, can actually quantify them.
For most of us, awareness of just how dangerously complex the modern banking system has become was made clear fourteen years ago with the onset of what we now call “The Global Financial Crisis,” a supposedly once-in-a-lifetime event that almost repeated itself during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic when the Fed came to the rescue of markets to stop yet another financial panic that threatened to bring down the global financial system.
Panics like these ultimately stem from a fear or inability on the part of financial counterparties to settle claims and honor liabilities. With the Fed now raising interest rates more aggressively than it has in almost thirty years the question that many investors, economists, and policymakers around the world should be asking themselves is “what is the likelihood that the events we experienced in 2008 and most recently in 2020 repeat themselves today?”
Our objective in bringing you this conversation is to provide you with a foundational framework for understanding the forces responsible for driving crises of liquidity in the international dollar system during a time when those forces are growing stronger and stronger. In the process you are going to learn about the plumbing of the shadow banking system, the evolution of the eurodollar market, repos, money market funds, and so much more. The majority of that conversation takes place in the second hour of today’s episode which is available to premium subscribers only.
You can access the full episode, transcript, and intelligence report to this week’s conversation by going directly to the episode page at HiddenForces.io and clicking on "premium extras." All subscribers gain access to our premium feed, which can be easily added to your favorite podcast application.
If you enjoyed listening to today’s episode of Hidden Forces you can help support the show by doing the following:
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts | YouTube | Spotify | Stitcher | SoundCloud | CastBox | RSS Feed
Write us a review on Apple Podcasts & Spotify
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Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas
Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou
Subscribe & Support the Podcast at https://hiddenforces.io
Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod
Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas
Episode Recorded on 07/07/2022
In Episode 257 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Helen Thompson, author and Professor of Political Economy at the University of Cambridge. Thompson’s current research concentrates on the political economy of energy and the long history of the democratic, economic, and geopolitical disruptions of the twenty-first century, which she explores magisterially in her new book “Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century.”
For those of us who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, the nature of the world as we knew it to be only seemed to be getting better and better. The price of energy and the cost of capital kept getting cheaper, the world kept getting safer and more interconnected, and liberal democracy and free-market capitalism were seen as inevitable outcomes of the end of history. Today, all of that feels like it was almost a dream.
The last two decades have brought a powerful tide of geopolitical, economic, and democratic shocks onto the world. Their fallout has led central banks to create over twenty-five trillion dollars of new money, brought about a new age of geopolitical competition, destabilized the Middle East, ruptured the European Union, and exposed old political fault lines in the United States--fault lines that seem to challenge even those of the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s when the specter of nuclear war and the trauma of violent riots and political assassinations cast a long shadow over the future of the Republic.
This conversation between Helen Thompson and Demetri Kofinas endeavors to draw a line of continuity between those turbulent years and the present political moment as we try to imagine how a future situated in the long arch of human history with all its political challenges, economic imperatives, and destructive wars might unfold. It recounts three histories. One about geopolitics, one about the world economy, and one about western democracies, and explains how in the years of political disorder prior to the pandemic, the disruption in each became part of one big story, much of which originates in problems generated by fossil-fuel energies and our efforts to control them. And it explains why, as the green transition takes place, the longstanding predicaments that energy invariably shapes will remain firmly in place.
You can access the full episode, transcript, and intelligence report to this week’s conversation by going directly to the episode page at HiddenForces.io and clicking on "premium extras." All subscribers gain access to our premium feed, which can be easily added to your favorite podcast application.
If you enjoyed listening to today’s episode of Hidden Forces you can help support the show by doing the following:
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts | YouTube | Spotify | Stitcher | SoundCloud | CastBox | RSS Feed
Write us a review on Apple Podcasts & Spotify
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Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas
Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou
Subscribe & Support the Podcast at https://hiddenforces.io
Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod
Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas
Episode Recorded on 07/06/2022
In Episode 256 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with the CEO of Investment Management Associates, Vitaliy Katsenelson. Vitaliy is a well-known value investor and author of several books on investing and life. His latest, “Soul in the Game,” is a philosophical exploration of the sources of life’s meaning told through a collection of day-to-day observations and insights about Vitaliy’s early childhood in Russia, his experiences as a parent, and his love of classical music, and most importantly of art, which features prominently in their discussion.
This conversation combines two of the objectives that Demetri laid out in the introduction to a recent episode he published on the subject of courage and self-actualization, namely his desire to take a more holistic approach to exploring and analyzing the macro challenges that we are all facing as a community, but which affect each and every one of us as individuals. Vitaliy has made that very easy to do, because he writes so prolifically about both of these things, whether it is the principals of value investing, his thoughts on the macro economy, markets, stagflation, or the path of interest rates, as well as how to cultivate objectivity, the benefits of introducing randomness into your life, and learning how to separate the things that you can’t control from the things you can.
You can access the full episode, transcript, and intelligence report to this week’s conversation by going directly to the episode page at HiddenForces.io and clicking on "premium extras." All subscribers gain access to our premium feed, which can be easily added to your favorite podcast application.
If you enjoyed listening to today’s episode of Hidden Forces you can help support the show by doing the following:
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts | YouTube | Spotify | Stitcher | SoundCloud | CastBox | RSS Feed
Write us a review on Apple Podcasts & Spotify
Subscribe to our mailing list at https://hiddenforces.io/newsletter/
Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas
Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou
Subscribe & Support the Podcast at https://hiddenforces.io
Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod
Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas
Episode Recorded on 06/28/2022