Economics Matters with Laurence Kotlikoff

What if the Medicare premium increases heading your way aren't just a number, they're a signal that the entire system is heading somewhere most retirees aren't prepared for?

Phil Moeller has co-written a New York Times bestseller on Social Security, authored the definitive consumer guide to Medicare, and spent decades covering personal finance for US News, PBS NewsHour, and Money Magazine. He's also a Medicare enrollee with strong o...

What if the three most dangerous regimes on earth — Russia, China, and Iran — are all weaker than they appear, and yet America is still losing ground to all three at once?

Sir Niall Ferguson has spent a career studying how empires rise, overreach, and fall. He watched the Soviet Union collapse from the inside out while everyone in Washington assumed it would last forever. He's been warning about China's hidden fragility ...

What if the passive investing revolution (the idea that just buying the index and holding is the smartest thing most people can do) has quietly turned into something that no longer resembles the efficient market it was designed to track?

Every month, $33 billion flows automatically from 401(k) contributions into U.S. equity index funds. That money doesn't stop to ask whether Nvidia is fairly valued. It doesn't check whether 50% of t...

What if one of the most famous and widely cited findings in modern economics (that money doesn't really make you happier) turned out to simply be wrong? And what does the economist who proved it wrong have to say about where America is heading next?

Justin Wolfers is not a typical economist. He's written landmark papers on happiness, divorce, racial discrimination in NBA officiating, corruption in college basketball, gender and ...

The headlines say Social Security is running out of money. But what if the real numbers are actually far worse than what the headlines are showing you, and the trustees' report is burying the truth in an appendix table that almost nobody reads?

The 2026 Social Security Trustees Report just dropped, and the media coverage has been loud, alarming, and, still understating how serious the problem actually is. In this Substack Live conve...

What does it actually take to consistently beat the market when 90% of professional fund managers can't, and what is a Wall Street veteran seeing right now that has him warning ordinary investors to get off margin immediately?

Steve Laffey has lived several lives in one. Raised in genuine poverty in Cranston, Rhode Island, he earned his way to Bowdoin College and Harvard Business School, landed on a trading desk at PaineWebber surro...

What if the most powerful tax-advantaged account in your financial life was designed by one economist with a better idea, and the full version of that idea was never actually implemented?

You've probably heard of the Health Savings Account. You may even have one. But the man who invented it says the version Congress passed is a watered-down shadow of what it could be. And that's just the beginning of what's broken.

In this episode, L...

What happens when five completely unrelated thinkers, writing across five different decades, all point to the exact same moment in history as a coming crisis point...and that moment is now?

Samuel Huntington, Neil Howe, Ray Dalio, George Friedman, and Peter Turchin never collaborated. All of them landed on the 2020s. In this episode, Larry Kotlikoff sits down with Bruce Mehlman — founder of Mehlman Consulting, former Assis...

What does it actually take to solve a scientific puzzle that stumped researchers for fifty years — and why are the same AI tools that cracked it still getting basic financial math catastrophically wrong?

In 2024, Demis Hassabis won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for something that sounds almost too ambitious to be real: teaching artificial intelligence to predict the three-dimensional shape of any protein, a problem that had res...

What if everything you've been told about the new Iran deal — and what "winning" the war even meant — is built on a comparison that doesn't hold up, and a strategic outcome that's the opposite of what most commentators are claiming?

A 14-point memorandum is about to be signed in Switzerland, and the headlines are already calling it weaker than the 2015 Obama-era nuclear deal that Trump once tore apart. But according to&n...

What if the system designed to protect your health in retirement was actually engineered (from the inside) to profit from keeping you confused, underserved, and locked out of the care you've already paid for?

You've spent decades paying into Medicare. You've done everything right. And yet, as you approach the years when healthcare matters most, the system greeting you on the other side is riddled with hidden traps, gaming, and a...

Can Israel reverse its political and social trajectory as elections approach amid ongoing wars and rising international isolation?

Economics Matters co-host, Alex Kotlikoff, reunites with Israel's most influential and consequential economist, Eytan Sheshinski, to discuss Benjamin Netanyahu’s long tenure and the impact of his right-wing coalition. The discussion ranges over Israeli domestic policy, geopolitics, the Iran war, a...

Andrew Fesiak rejoins Economics Matters with reassuring news about the war in Ukraine. As I'm traveling in Europe until early June, my son and occasional co-host, Alex, interviews Andrew.  This is Andrew's 6th appearance on Economics Matters. He is, as ever, fully up-to-date on what's happening for real in Ukraine. Indeed, our military and everyone in the Administration, particularly the President, would do well to watch this ...

This will be of interest to anyone who seeks more money, less risk, and a better life. Wade Pfau is one of our country’s truly exceptional thought leaders when it comes to personal finance. He holds a PhD in economics from Princeton as well as the CFA and RICP® designations. Wade is a professor of practice in the Retirement Income Certified Professional® (RICP®) Program at The American College of Financial Services.

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Forget what Wall Street says, risky investing is an option, not a starting point when it comes to your financial plan. No investment is perfectly safe and Economics Matters does not provide investment or any other form of financial, tax, or insurance advice. What this blog and podcast do is discuss options. Because TIPS -- Treasury Inflation Protected Securities -- are U.S. Treasury bonds, but ones that are protected against inflat...

John Campbell has made major contributions to the fields of macroeconomics and finance, solved a number of critical problems in both fields, and received all manner of fully deserved top awards in economics and finance.

Grab a copy of his outstanding new, co-authored book, Fixed. It will turn your stomach, but keep you safe from Wall Street's terrible financial predation.  

He is the Morton L. and Carole S. ...

World-Renowned, Fantastic Economist, and Former CEA Chair, Gregory Mankiw, Discusses his Career, the Iraq War, Trump Policy and Advisers, and His Top Research Hits

Greg may be the world's most influential economist as millions of students, in the US and abroad, have studied introductory economics and intermediate macroeconomics using his leading text books. He's also been a major US policy player, including serving as Chair of the P...

Glenn is an absolutely brilliant economist and a public intellectual extraordinaire. In addition, Glenn is the pioneer of podcasting by academic economists. Glenn's remarkable podcast -- The Glenn Show-- debuted in 2008.

In this episode of Economics Matters -- the Podcast, I ask Glenn to talk about the Glenn Show, including the topics and guests he's had during the show's now almost two-decade run. But...

Martin Wolf is Chief Economics Commentator at the Financial Times, London. He was awarded Commander of the British Empire in 2000 "for services to financial journalism". This is Martin's third appearance on Economics Matters -- the Podcast. Martin's 2023 book, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, warned that liberal democracy was in recession, with authoritarianism on the rise. Two years later his dark vision ha...