The State of Things

In Conversation with Aniket Shah.

Most people who work in finance don't question capitalism. And most people who question capitalism don't work in finance. Aniket Shah does both — which turns out to be a very useful position to occupy.

For more than a decade, he’s been making an argument most of his industry considers fringe: that markets don't drive economies, governments do; and that the state of capitalism isn't inevitable, it's a choice — and understanding how we got here reveals things could be different. On 17 March 2026 — a week after our conversation — the World Bank published a landmark reversal on industrial policy. It said, more or less, the same thing Aniket’s been saying for years.

Our conversation is about what it takes to hold a position when the consensus is against you, how to read the world's largest economic shifts before they show up in the data, and why the most interesting analyst at one of the world's biggest investment banks sounds, occasionally, like a philosopher.

Aniket leads Washington Policy and Sustainability Research at Jefferies (his team has been ranked number one in the US and Europe), and moves between finance, development, academia and sustainability in a way that makes you wonder why anyone would ever choose between them.

If this conversation meant something to you, share it — it's how the show gets found. And if you'd like to support the work, a paid subscription goes a long way.  Subscribe here

Want more between essays and episodes? Check out Below the Fold — shorter dispatches on the stories worth paying attention to, from the people in my own backyard to the forces reshaping the wider world.

Watch clips and video previews on YouTube 

Credits:

Host: Meredith Ogilvie-Thompson

Sound Editing: Dax Krishna and the team at SpeechDocs

Music: Ilya Kuznetsov