SmarterMarkets™

Billionaire financier Robert Friedland returns as Michelle Dennedy joins the Smarter Markets hosting team. Robert and Erik discuss what it will take to Green the Global Economy in Part 1 of this extensive 2-part interview.

AirCarbon Exchange co-founder and COO Bill Pazos joins us this week to discuss the history, present challenges, and future of the carbon credit trading industry.

Goldman Sachs’ global head of sustainable investing practices John Goldstein is this week’s feature interview guest. We discuss how to engage in ESG investing to make a difference by engaging directly with the industries that need reform, rather than avoiding them. John calls this Impact Investing, and we discuss this practice in detail in this episode.

SAP’s chief innovation officer and outspoken green energy proponent Tom Raftery is this week’s feature interview guest. We discuss the coming green energy revolution and what it will mean for markets and the economy as a whole.

In the first episode of a series on Environmental, Socially Responsible, and Governance-focused Investing, SmarterMarkets presents Peter Fusaro, veteran sustainability investor and organizer of the Wall Street Green Investing Conference. We discuss everything relating to ESG investing.

Epsilon Theory founder Dr. Ben Hunt joins Smarter Markets to weigh in on how social media is being used to engineer the narratives which shape both financial markets and society more broadly. We discuss the influence of social media then go on to discuss how financial markets no longer serve society in the way they were intended, and what needs to be done to fix them.

Former senior Twitter executive and current head of Media, Sport & Entertainment for the World Economic Forum Kirstine Stewart weighs in on the growing influence of social media on financial markets and society as a whole, including whether and how social media should be governed to control abuse of its power of influence.

Commodity legend Mark Fisher shares some choice stories, including how the Hudson River can be used as a risk management tool to cure over-trading, then goes on to reflect on how the design of commodities futures markets could be improved.

NEO Stock exchange founder Jos Schmitt explains why most existing stock exchanges give an unfair trading advantage to some customers over others, and explains why he launched a new exchange specifically designed to level the playing field for all investors.

Former U.S. Ambassador to Singapore Frank Lavin weighs in on Singapore’s suitability as the emergent Asian Financial Capital City and Singaporean regulators’ willingness to consider new and innovative approaches to designing smarter financial markets.

Logica Funds’ Mike Green explains why he and most of the smartest people in finance are in the business of exploiting and profiting from deficiencies of current markets, rather than fixing them. Mike explains why incentives don’t favor fixing what’s broken, and what we need to do to change the system and enable migration to a new generation of Smarter Markets.  

Charlie McGarraugh is Chief Strategy Officer for Blockchain.com, the largest self-custodied crypto wallet provider globally.  Previously he was a Goldman Sachs Partner and former head of metals trading, so his native language is finance. In this interview, Charlie explains Tokenization in terms that Finance professionals can relate to, then goes on to explain what this change will mean both to financial markets and to the people who work in them.

Abaxx co-founder Thom McMahon weighs in on the company’s activities to actually design and build the fully tokenized commodity trading system envisioned by Robert Friedland, Maryam Ayati and Jeffrey Currie in our first three episodes. Thom also explains why a physical delivery LNG contract is essential to the green energy revolution, and how Abaxx Exchange is designing that contract right now to establish Singapore as the global benchmark market for LNG price discovery.

Goldman Sachs commodities chief Jeff Currie weighs in on the next commodity cycle, the return of inflation, and why it’s essential for the marketplace to figure out how to put a price on carbon in order to enable the realization of ESG objectives. Jeff goes on to describe tokenization of commodity futures warehouse receipts as the best use case he’s heard for distributed ledger (aka “Blockchain Technology”).

Energy industry veteran and NEO co-founder and CEO Maryam Ayati reacts to Robert Friedland's vision of grading and trading commodities based on ESG aspects of how they're produced, and expands on Robert's ideas to explain how the entire commodity supply chain could be tokenized using distributed ledger technology, and how commodities could literally be traced to their source using new "watermark" technology that applies molecular-level digital fingerprints to almost any  commodity.