The “Airbnbust” has not arrived, but Airbnb is no longer at peak expectations.
Mary Long hosted Motley Fool Analyst Alicia Alfiere and BiggerPockets CEO Scott Trench at The Denver Press Club for a conversation about Airbnb as a stock and as a real estate investment. They discuss:
- Airbnb’s capital allocation strategy.
- The hosting platform’s competition.
- How real estate investors can get started with Airbnb.
- The scaling challenges of managing short-term rentals.
Company discussed: ABNB
Host: Mary Long
Guests: Alicia Alfiere, Scott Trench
Producer: Ricky Mulvey
Engineer: Tim Sparks
Special thanks to Alex Pailet from BiggerPockets and Alby Segall, Jean-Luc Currie, Jim Bofencamp, and Katlyn Howery from the Denver Press Club for making the event happen.
After close to three decades of the hegemony of free market ideas, the state has made a big comeback as an economic actor since the 2008 financial crisis. China’s state-owned companies and international financial institutions have made headlines for their growing influence in the world economy. State-backed investment vehicles based in the Gulf states have made high-profile investments in global real estate markets and professional sports, while their state-owned firms have become world leaders in the logistics and natural resource sectors. Governments around the world – including in the heartlands of advanced capitalism – have promoted the interests of ‘national champion’ companies in strategic economic sectors, bailed out financial institutions by taking toxic assets off of their balance sheets, and implemented industrial policies with the aim of moving into the most profitable segments of global value chains.
What accounts for this renewed prominence of states in global capitalism? Does the increased activism of states mark the end of neoliberal hegemony? And how do contemporary state-led economic initiatives compare to the heyday of Keynesian and developmentalist policy agendas in the decades immediately following World War II?
The book that we are discussing today, The Spectre of State Capitalism (Oxford UP, 2024) by Ilias Alami and Adam Dixon, marks the culmination of a highly productive research project that the authors have led on the compulsions and constraints that shape the ‘new’ state capitalism. The book aims to challenge narratives that pathologize state capitalism as an authoritarian deviation from the ‘normal’ course of free market capitalism while also showing how new forms of state activism depart from earlier models of state-led development.
Ilias Alami is a University assistant professor in the political economy of development at Cambrdige University. His previous book is Money Power and Financial Capital in Emerging Markets (2019). Adam Dixon holds the Adam Smith Chair in Sustainable Capitalism at Heriot Watt University’s Ediburgh Business School. He is the author of several books, most recently Sovereign Wealth Funds: Between States and Markets (2022).
On December 11, 1978, one of the most audacious heists in history took place at JFK Airport in New York City.
A small group of thieves executed an almost perfect crime and walked away with 6 million dollars in cash and jewelry.
While the actual robbery went off without a hitch, it was after the crime that things fell apart and eventually left a trail of bodies strewn across New York.
Learn more about the 1978 Lufthansa Heist, how they pulled it off, and its bloody results on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
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In Central Asia, the world's youngest desert occupies a basin that once held a vast saline lake. The Aral Sea.
Up until the 1960s, the sea spanned more than 26 thousand square miles across two countries. It supported thriving fishing communities along its shores. But then, in the name of progress and development, much of the river water that fed the sea was diverted for agriculture. Now the Aral Sea has all but disappeared, shrunk to about tenth of its original size. The UN Environment Programme has called the Aral Sea's destruction quote "one of the most staggering disasters of the 20th century."
On this episode of The Sunday Story, Above The Fray Fellow Valerie Kipnis takes us to the Aral Sea to try to understand what went wrong and whether anything can be done to save the little water that's left.
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In this installment of Best Of The Gist, we bring you a recent episode of The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie, on which Mike Pesca was the guest. It’s an hour of Nick and Mike talking quite a bit about how NPR lost its way.
“Reddit” was one of the top ten most searched words on Google over the past twelve months in the United States, searched more often than “map” or “calculator”. The social networking site is a central hub for the internet.
Dylan Lewis caught up with Reddit CEO Steve Huffman for a conversation about:
- What’s driving Reddit’s 50% year-over-year user growth.
- How the social network targets ads.
- What Reddit is doing with large language models.
Serious allegations against a Republican gubernatorial candidate in North Carolina and tensions in Georgia over the counting of ballots are just two of this week's top political headlines - we'll bring you the latest. Plus, Israel turned pagers and two-way radios used by Hezbollah and civilians in Lebanon into mini bombs - we'll look at what that move, plus another air strike, could mean in the context of wider regional tensions.
We hear about the freedom and independence a visually impaired man found by running with an AI guide. Also: South Africa's hospital train; an usual diplomatic job share; and the dog whose love of binmen has gone viral.
Presenter: Jackie Leonard. Music composed by Iona Hampson
