Markets Happy Hour Podcast - Live from St Louis - Jan 30, 2025, with special guest Brittany Lewis

In this special live podcast we come to you from St. Louis where we run through a tumultuous week in what has turned out to be a tumultuous month and feature our first guest on the Markets Happy Hour Podcast. Today we chat with Brittany Lewis, who joined the Olin Business School at Washington University as an Assistant Professor of Finance in July 2022. Her areas of expertise are Banking and Financial Institutions, Finance/Investments, Financial Economics and we hear about her research on financial regulation and some of the unintended consequences that it can have.

Before that we run through the recent market conditions including a left field surprise from Deepseek that rattled markets at the beginning of the week, and, as is now a typical pattern, affected adjacent sectors such as energy in a more extreme fashion than the tech stocks themselves. This underscores how large cap tech is still regarded as a safe haven sector by some - while value and defensive sectors tend to be more susceptible to sell-offs.

In the domain of interest rates clearly the Fed is under no hurry to do anything, while other countries have more of a sense of. urgency - namely Canada and the European Central Bank, both of which cut rates. This will, of course, be negative for those currencies v. the dollar, and the pending tariffs, which could come as soon as this weekend, seem poised to unsettle markets even further.