No one blinks when Argentina, Venezuela, and India default on debts or refuse to honor arbitration awards. The shocker is that Spain — egged on by the European Union itself — has become an incorrigible deadbeat.

Spain is second only to Venezuela in the number of defaults on arbitration awards. Foreign investors now need to re-think whether Spain, and the European Union more broadly, are safe places to invest. If nothing changes, Ursula von der Leyen’s recent promise to fast-track EU funding for the energy transition may come a cropper.

For 40 years, Jay Newman was a legendary hedge fund portfolio manager, traveling across the globe to recover billions of dollars in debt defaults by countries like the Congo, Panama, and Argentina. When he retired in 2016, he considered writing a biographical, non-fiction account of his storied career. Instead, he decided that fiction would be a better vehicle to capture the essence of the people and events he encountered over the years. In today’s episode, Jay talks about his new novel, “Undermoney,” a blockbuster financial thriller about a group of Americans who secretly take over the world’s largest dark money fund. He’ll talk about what he learned about how the unseen confluence of money, power and corruption has shaped the destiny of nations.