FT Alphachat

Angela Nagle, author of Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right, talks to FT Alphaville's Jemima Kelly about the online culture wars and the rise of the alt-right. 

A number of geopolitical and financial risks are stalking the global economy, pointing to a possible recession in 2020. According to Nouriel Roubini, what is key among these risks is the US-China trade war and general protectionism in the global market. Izabella Kaminska talks to the economist and New York University Stern School of Business professor.

The economist and Brookings Institution senior fellow talks to FT contributor Megan Greene about the fiscal policies that lawmakers could arrange now that would automatically kick in when some of the early signs of a slowdown start to appear.

Man must work. But how man works matters. Brendan Greeley sat down with Joel Mokyr, an economist and economic historian at Northwestern University, at an event on the future of work at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. Policymakers tend to focus on the binary question of a job — do people have one, or not. But the quality of that work, the questions of meaning and satisfaction, are important to people, in a way that has political consequences. They wandered all the way back to Adam Smith, and eventually the curse of Adam himself, to talk about how the meaning and definition of "work" has changed, and why that matters now.

The political economist sits down with Alphaville's Jamie Powell and Thomas Hale to discuss how we should think about expertise in a post-truth world.

The president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas sits down with Brendan Greeley to discuss what a tight labour market could mean for retraining workers, what fracking has done to the price of oil and why he prefers to keep an eye on credit spreads instead of equity markets.

What if the vast majority of the high-growth tech unicorns emerging from Silicon Valley are not really technology or innovation companies? What if they are highly politicised, zero-sum enterprises? That's what Ajay Royan, the Indian-born Canadian who co-founded Mithral Capital, along with Peter Thiel, thinks might be the problem at the heart of the Silicon Valley investment proposition. Izabella Kaminska asks him how his fund is trying to differentiate itself from that model by focusing on unleveraged growth opportunities instead.

How has banking culture changed since the global financial crisis and what areas still need work? Brendan Greeley talks with three economics experts who posed that question in a recent report put out by the Group of Thirty consultants. He is joined by Elizabeth St-Onge of Oliver Wyman, Nicholas Le Pan, former superintendent of financial institutions for Canada, and Stuart Mackintosh, executive director of the Group of Thirty.

Economist Kimberly Clausing tells Brendan Greeley and Mark Blyth why greater trade, capital flows and immigration are the solution to more equitably dividing the economic pie. It's the subject of her book, "Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital".