Larry McDonald is an American financial strategist, bestselling author, and founder of The Bear Traps Report, an independent macro research platform focused on political and systemic risk. A former vice president at Lehman Brothers—where his team famously profited by shorting the subprime market before the 2008 collapse—McDonald later served as Head of U.S. Macro Strategy at Société Générale and became a partner at ACG Analytics in Washington D.C., advising institutional investors on policy and market risk. He’s best known for his New York Times bestselling book A Colossal Failure of Common Sense: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers, and more recently, How to Listen When Markets Speak. Through The Bear Traps Report, he and his team track what they call the 21 Lehman Systemic Risk Indicators® to anticipate economic stress and identify actionable investment opportunities. A frequent guest on CNBC, Bloomberg, and Fox Business, McDonald’s work bridges market intelligence, policy analysis, and risk management, offering a pragmatic perspective shaped by his front-row experience during one of modern finance’s most dramatic crises.
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Episode 450
Lawrence McDonald
How to Navigate the New Investment Paradigm | Lawrence McDonald
Larry McDonald is an American financial strategist, bestselling author, and founder of The Bear Traps Report, an independent macro research platform focused on political and systemic risk. A former vice president at Lehman Brothers—where his team famously profited by shorting the subprime market before the 2008 collapse—McDonald later served as Head of U.S. Macro Strategy at Société Générale and became a partner at ACG Analytics in Washington D.C., advising institutional investors on policy and market risk. He’s best known for his New York Times bestselling book A Colossal Failure of Common Sense: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers, and more recently, How to Listen When Markets Speak. Through The Bear Traps Report, he and his team track what they call the 21 Lehman Systemic Risk Indicators® to anticipate economic stress and identify actionable investment opportunities. A frequent guest on CNBC, Bloomberg, and Fox Business, McDonald’s work bridges market intelligence, policy analysis, and risk management, offering a pragmatic perspective shaped by his front-row experience during one of modern finance’s most dramatic crises.
In Episode 450 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Lawrence McDonald, the founder of The Bear Traps Report and the author of “How to Listen When Markets Speak” about the investment risks and opportunities in today’s new investment paradigm.
In today’s conversation, Demetri and Lawrence discuss how social media and the gamification of investing have amplified behavioral biases and fueled the AI boom, as well as the growth of crypto and other “tertiary” assets.
They then zoom out to examine how the macro environment has changed since the Covid 19 pandemic, and how the government’s response to both the GFC and covid crisis have sent investors scrambling for new frameworks to help them understand government’s role in the economy and how to position themselves and their client’s portfolios for a radically new world—one that you will not learn about in financial text books or most macroeconomics courses.
Kofinas and McDonald also explore the “dark side of passive investing,” the extreme concentration risk present in a handful of AI-linked mega-caps, the risk to markets of more capricious government trade policies, and why Lawrence McDonald believes that one of the most underappreciated opportunity sets in AI lies not at the intersection of semiconductors and AI companies, but in the physical energy and delivery infrastructure needed to power them.
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Larry McDonald is an American financial strategist, bestselling author, and founder of The Bear Traps Report, an independent macro research platform focused on political and systemic risk. A former vice president at Lehman Brothers—where his team famously profited by shorting the subprime market before the 2008 collapse—McDonald later served as Head of U.S. Macro Strategy at Société Générale and became a partner at ACG Analytics in Washington D.C., advising institutional investors on policy and market risk. He’s best known for his New York Times bestselling book A Colossal Failure of Common Sense: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers, and more recently, How to Listen When Markets Speak. Through The Bear Traps Report, he and his team track what they call the 21 Lehman Systemic Risk Indicators® to anticipate economic stress and identify actionable investment opportunities. A frequent guest on CNBC, Bloomberg, and Fox Business, McDonald’s work bridges market intelligence, policy analysis, and risk management, offering a pragmatic perspective shaped by his front-row experience during one of modern finance’s most dramatic crises.
Demetri Kofinas is a media entrepreneur and financial analyst whose mission is to help uncover the hidden forces and pivotal patterns shaping our lives. His contrarian perspective and critical-thinking approach has helped hundreds of thousands of people make smarter, informed decisions. This same methodology has helped guide Demetri’s decision-making as an early-stage investor and as a creator of several innovative media properties and live events.
Demetri Kofinas is a media entrepreneur and financial analyst whose mission is to help uncover the hidden forces and pivotal patterns shaping our lives. His contrarian perspective and critical-thinking approach has helped hundreds of thousands of people make smarter, informed decisions. This same methodology has helped guide Demetri’s decision-making as an early-stage investor and as a creator of several innovative media properties and live events.
Demetri Kofinas is a media entrepreneur and financial analyst whose mission is to help uncover the hidden forces and pivotal patterns shaping our lives. His contrarian perspective and critical-thinking approach has helped hundreds of thousands of people make smarter, informed decisions. This same methodology has helped guide Demetri’s decision-making as an early-stage investor and as a creator of several innovative media properties and live events.
Demetri Kofinas is a media entrepreneur and financial analyst whose mission is to help uncover the hidden forces and pivotal patterns shaping our lives. His contrarian perspective and critical-thinking approach has helped hundreds of thousands of people make smarter, informed decisions. This same methodology has helped guide Demetri’s decision-making as an early-stage investor and as a creator of several innovative media properties and live events.
Demetri Kofinas is a media entrepreneur and financial analyst whose mission is to help uncover the hidden forces and pivotal patterns shaping our lives. His contrarian perspective and critical-thinking approach has helped hundreds of thousands of people make smarter, informed decisions. This same methodology has helped guide Demetri’s decision-making as an early-stage investor and as a creator of several innovative media properties and live events.
