Prediction markets are everywhere nowadays. You can go online and bet on political outcomes, or the weather, or how long Taylor Swift will stay together with Travis Kelce. But prediction markets have a long history, and one of the earliest involved betting on who would be the next pope. In fact, Renaissance Romans gambled on everything from papal elections to whether a particular noblewoman would give birth to a boy or girl. So why was betting such a big thing in 1500s Italy? How did the papal prediction market actually work? And what can it tell us about prediction markets today? We speak to Ryan Isakow, the author of the No Dumb Ideas substack.

Read More: A Live Experiment in Prediction Markets
Prediction Markets Are a Thing Now

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Housing affordability remains one of the single greatest sources of economic stress. Even if inflation measures were to come down, the simple cost of shelter is a huge burden on a wide swathe of the population. Hardly anyone disagrees with the idea of increasing supply, but this is easier said than done. There isn't a lot of spare construction capacity and the political fights over liberalizing zoning are tedious and slow. On this episode, we speak with Kevin Erdmann, a senior affiliated scholar at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, who proposes a simple idea. He argues that after the Great Financial Crisis, regulators over-tightened lending standards, and in so doing, took out the entire "starter home" segment of the new housing market. He says that if Fannie and Freddie were to liberalize their lending standards, homebuilders would be incentivized to build more homes that cater to people with lower incomes and lower FICO scores, essentially re-creating a whole slice of the new home market that's disappeared over the last 15 years.

Read More:
US Homebuilders Face a Supply Chain Snarl From Tariff Battles
US Mortgage Rates Decline to 6.88%, Lowest Level This Year

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Markets have been selling off, with shares of tech companies like Nvidia down almost 20% so far this year. But even before the recent selloff, DeepSeek rattled the AI market and sparked questions over how US platforms will compete and actually monetize their technology. Despite all these hurdles, some investors remain tech optimists. Cathie Wood, the founder, CEO and chief investment officer of ARK Investment Management, is one of the most prominent, with ARK's Innovation Fund heavily invested in companies like Tesla, Coinbase and Roku. In this conversation, recorded live on stage at Bloomberg Invest, we discuss Cathie's view of potential opportunities in the space, and why she's expecting the Trump administration to create a Reagan Era-esque "golden age" for investors.

Read More:
Cathie Wood Sees Trump Era as ‘Golden Age’ for Wall Street
Cathie Wood May Have Lost $14 Billion. But She’s Interesting

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