Bloomberg / Odd Lots / @TheStalwart
"The Man Who Makes Markets Make Sense - and Then Picks Up the Guitar"
Finance journalist. Podcast architect. Recovering paleo dieter. He turned Bloomberg's digital operations into something people actually want to read, and somehow also formed a band named after crude oil.
JOURNALIST / PODCASTER
There is a man at Bloomberg who genuinely loves talking about obscure corners of the bond market at 7 in the morning, has a guitar in the corner of his life labeled "crude oil band," and follows chess games on his phone the way others follow sports. That man is Joe Weisenthal, and he is very good at his job - which is, in essence, making you care about things you previously assumed were the exclusive province of serious, gray-suited people.
Weisenthal is Bloomberg's Executive Editor for digital news, co-anchor of "What'd You Miss?" on Bloomberg Television, and - most famously - co-host of the Odd Lots podcast with Tracy Alloway. Since 2015, Odd Lots has been releasing episodes twice a week, threading a needle that almost no financial media outlet manages: genuinely technical enough to satisfy professionals, genuinely interesting enough to attract everyone else.
The career arc is unusual. He studied Political Science at the University of Texas at Austin, not economics. He did not come up through investment banking or a PhD program. He came up through blogs - specifically through TheStalwart.com, a finance blog he co-founded in 2004, which turned out to be excellent preparation for a media world that would eventually prize exactly those qualities: fast, direct, curious, unafraid to say "I don't know, but here's what I think."
Before Bloomberg, he helped run financial coverage at Business Insider, where he was part of the team that grew the site to 50 million unique monthly visitors. That is a lot of people reading about monetary policy. His trick, then as now, is the same: treat the reader as intelligent, explain the technical parts clearly, and trust that the underlying story - why central banks work the way they do, what commodity markets are actually pricing in, why bond yields move the way they move - is genuinely interesting on its own terms. It usually is.
The goal is always to make things that are arcane and technical sing on the internet.
- Joe WeisenthalHis Twitter/X handle is @TheStalwart, a reference to his original blog, and he has accumulated more than 431,000 followers there - a remarkable number for someone whose feed is primarily about macroeconomics and yield curves. He is also active on Bluesky, where he arrived early and brought 53,000 followers with him. His Instagram, also @thestalwart, has nearly 1,900 posts. He is, in the language of modern media, extremely online. In 2026 he made headlines by declaring he "never wants to use the web again" and prefers AI interfaces for information consumption. This is either very prescient or very on-brand, and probably both.
Then there is Light Sweet Crude - the band. Weisenthal plays guitar and sings. The band's name is drawn from a grade of crude oil. Their debut EP, "Lower East Side Country," came out in October 2023. One of the songs is literally about financial markets, a song called "Old Trader." The joke writes itself, but the fact that he actually did it is the whole thing.
Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway launched Odd Lots in 2015 with a simple premise: talk to the people who actually understand what is happening in financial markets, and let the conversation run long enough to be genuinely informative.
The format is deceptively simple. Two hosts, one guest, a topic - repo markets, the commodities supercycle, central bank digital currencies, whatever is moving or should be moving but isn't. The result is something closer to a graduate seminar than a business podcast, except that graduate seminars are rarely this entertaining.
Episodes drop twice a week, every week. The consistency is itself a statement. In a media environment that rewards hot takes and short attention spans, Odd Lots keeps choosing depth. The newsletter, available through Bloomberg, extends the conversation further. In 2026, the show is doing its first-ever live episode - at Wilton's Music Hall in London in May, which is a very specific venue choice that suggests Weisenthal and Alloway know their audience.
In October 2023, Joe Weisenthal - Bloomberg executive editor, widely followed market commentator, serious person in a serious business - released a debut EP with his band Light Sweet Crude. The band is named after a grade of crude oil. The EP is called "Lower East Side Country." One of the songs is called "Old Trader," and it is about financial markets.
This is either the most on-brand thing a financial journalist has ever done, or the most surprising. Possibly both. His bandmates include Paul E. Williams and Thomas Herndon (yes, the Thomas Herndon who famously found the spreadsheet error in the Reinhart-Rogoff austerity research). The band plays actual shows. Weisenthal sings and plays guitar. The song about financial markets is real. CONFIRMED
The list of things Weisenthal knows well enough to both explain clearly and ask genuinely good questions about is unusually long for a single human. It includes, but is not limited to:
Politics brain. Never once.
- Joe Weisenthal's self-descriptionThe above is not a boast. It is a constraint that Weisenthal has imposed on himself, and the discipline shows. In an era when financial commentary almost always comes wrapped in political assumptions, he works to separate the economic analysis from the ideological conclusion. This is harder than it sounds - and rarer than it should be.
His writing style reflects the same principle: direct, data-grounded, willing to explore counterintuitive readings of events, and structured around the question of what the market is actually telling us rather than what we might want it to say. The Odd Lots guest list reflects this too - the show doesn't have a consistent ideological perspective, because Weisenthal's curiosity is genuinely agnostic about where interesting analysis comes from.