On Wednesday, October 7, the Financial Times’ economics blog Alphaville attracted 180 of its most avid readers to Manhattan bar The Ainsworth for the second annual Alphaville Pub Quiz. The 27 teams answered 70 questions on topics ranging from the Shenzhen composite stock index to the US financial sector’s corporate profits, plus quirky questions asking teams to guess whether a statement had been made by the occasionally bellicose statistician and author Nassim Nicholas Taleb or Donald Trump.
Guests, largely professionals from finance, media, and government, included Joe Weisenthal of Bloomberg; Felix Salmon, Senior Editor at Fusion; Nicholas Colas, Chief Market Strategist for Convergex; Dan Alpert, Managing Partner of Westwood Capital; James Sweeney, chief economist of the Credit Suisse investment bank; Charlie Herman, host of WNYC Money Talking; and John Carney and Miriam Gottfried of the Wall Street Journal’s “Heard on the Street”.
FT Alphaville Reporter and Pub Quiz host Cardiff Garcia said, “We had a blast producing the event and were honoured to have been joined by former Fed chair Paul Volcker, who co-hosted the economics and history section of the quiz with US Managing Editor Gillian Tett, and even submitted a few questions of his own.”
The winners (the self-dubbed Team Lower Expectations, who defended their first-place ranking from last year’s quiz) took home drones and a copy of the first page of the Volcker Rule, signed by Volcker himself.
A copy of the Volcker Rule, prize for the first place Pub Quiz winners, signed by Former Chairman Volcker with a different inscription on each. On one, he writes: “Read it carefully, all 500 pages.”
600 people tuned in to the Periscope’d livestream of the event on the night, and nearly 1000 people have already taken a short online version of the quiz.
You can hear from the attendees themselves during the vox-pop segment of this week’s Alphachat, and scroll back through the #FTPubQuiz hashtag on Twitter. See the full list of questions and answers from the quiz here.