"Paul Kedrosky: "I'm particularly fond of SmashingTelly given how it, in effect, Tivo-ifies the web"... Guy Dickinson: "David Galbraith has turned Smashing Telly into well, the new TV."... Fimoculous: "Best Blogs of 2007"... The Guardian: Video sharing on the net has uncovered a hoard of TV gems...and a number of sites have been established to lead us to them. Take smashingtelly.com."
about
"Smashing Telly is a hand edited collection of the best free, instantly available TV on the web. Not 30 second clips (now with added clips, good ones) of a dog on a skateboard, or the millionth person to mime the Numa song, but classic clips and full length programs, with a focus on documentaries and non fiction. Smashing Television, not Gimmick Television.
Each entry is like a postcard, a short piece of text which describes a moving picture."
60 minutes comes down firmly on the side of speculation vs demand as an explanation of last years oil price shock and traces the problem back to Enron and the deregulation of oil futures.
The analysis is good but non-conclusive. Unlike houses, both the equivalent boom and bust in oil happened together, in a much shorter period of time and in a more extreme fashion. This caused central banking policy moves which take 6 months to have an effect to switch from inflation concerns to deflation in a matter of weeks.
The Oil bubble was perhaps a bigger trigger of the market crash than housing and the fact that we have very little insight as to whether or not Wall Street speculation, Opec deceit about supply or BRIC economy growth determined oil prices, is terrifying.
One of the surprising things about money is that the people who directly manage it are often tedious, but the subject itself is fascinating. In book form, J.K. Galbraith’s (no relation), ‘Money’ is my favorite, and this documentary comes close to what a film version of that might have looked like.
Obviously, current events make this series particularly important. For the embed, I have picked my favorite part: episode 5, which is about property. For those in denial about what happens with a property crash and zero interest rates, a Tokyo realtor shows us around a Tokyo apt. which was worth 3 times what it is now…a decade ago. The parallel between the UK/US property bubble and Japan is something which I was banging on about on my blog, in mean spirited fashion, before the crash.
Episode 5 of 6: Running Time 48 mins.
All of Niall Ferguson’s excellent 6 part series, the Ascent of Money, can now be viewed on Google.
Charlie Rose interviews Nassim Taleb who famously compared investment bankers to turkeys. Taleb is best known for his book about the importance of seemingly impossible but inevitable events such as Black Swan sightings after the discovery of Australia, where they exist.
A turkey gets fed very well, until it gets slaughtered. Right up to turkey killing day, turkey analysts and advisors would recommend investing in relationships with farmers to feed and shelter them. So it has been with bankers from the 80s till now.
Rose asks Taleb for a balanced view of how bad the economy will really get, compared to the extreme doomsayers such as Nouriel Roubini, who correctly predicted each step of this ‘great recession’ and who worried Rose’s viewers by saying that it meant the end of American empire.
Taleb’s reply is that it will be worse than Roubini thinks. At which point there is an audible thud as Charlie Rose slams his hands on the desk, aghast.
Unfortunately nobody has uploaded the excellent UK Channel 4 documentary version of Niall Ferguson’s timely book about the history of money, but this conversation is a good taster. Have a look out for the series of the same name.
After WWII, which Britain had fought with American weapons while being supplied with American food, the UK was heavily in debt and on the brink of bankruptcy while the US economy was booming. The US demanded repayment for the wartime loans and so John Maynard Keynes went to Washington to ask for an $8billion bailout. He was refused, but given a loan of half the amount on condition that made the US dollar the new reserve currency. This loan was only paid off in 2006.
What does this have to teach us about today? In the details, not very much, but in the big picture view, it says a lot about how we might expect creditors such as China and Japan to behave towards the US, now that dollar priced hegemony may be ending. The current strength of the dollar is a panic move and prefaces an increasingly likely collapse, during which the US will be at the mercy of Asia.
If you want to get really spooked consider this:
“Victor Shih, a specialist in Chinese central banking at Northwestern University, said that when he visited the People’s Bank of China for a series of meetings this summer, he was surprised by how many officials resented the institution’s losses [on dollar assets].
He said the officials blamed the United States and believed the controversial assertions set forth in the book “Currency War,” a Chinese best seller published a year ago. The book suggests that the United States deliberately lured China into buying its securities knowing that they would later plunge in value.”
