What happens when you take the 2004, Academy award-nominated German film Der Untergang (The Downfall) and turn it into a spoof? Here, the “downfall” is all about the decline of the housing market, and how Hitler becomes just another man with a home under water. There are some classic lines here, particularly if you looked to buy a home in recent years. Thanks Bob for the tip.
We’re about to witness the beginning of the YouTube Presidency, as The Washington Post has dubbed it. When Barack Obama takes office in late January, he plans to give a new twist to a longstanding tradition. The weekly presidential radio address will now “air” on YouTube, meaning that you’ll be able to access the president’s messages in video, whenever you want, on one of America’s most trafficked web sites. The upshot? Someone may actually listen to these weekly messages.
This move is part of Obama’s effort to use technology to communicate more directly with the American public. It’s a way of bringing FDR’s fireside chats into the 21st century. In addition to harnessing the power of Web 2.0, you can expect to find a laptop on his Oval Office desk, a first for any president. And, if Obama has his way, he might get to hang on to his Blackberry as well. (See this piece in the NY Times.)
In the meantime, here’s first of the YouTube videos that Obama has launched during the transition. Watch it below:
British historian Niall Ferguson has achieved the academic holy trinity, holding positions at Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Only 44 years old, he has 9 books to his credit (including a new one: The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World), and you’ll often find him writing in the public press. In the latest edition of Vanity Fair, Ferguson takes a good look at the demise of the global financial system and locates the crisis “in the long run of financial history.” The story he tells is how the 20th century — and particularly America’s urge to become a “property-owning democracy” — brought us into “The Age of Leverage,” which carried with it a “deluge of paper money, asset-price inflation, [an] explosion of consumer and bank debt, and the hypertrophic growth of derivatives.” The Leverage Age is now over. But will its collapse have economic and social effects as disastrous as the Great Depression? Or will government action pull us back from the brink? Definitely give this piece a read, and thanks to “Hanoch” for making us aware of it. As always, it’s great to get reader suggestions.
As a related aside, I should direct your attention to a new article by Michael Lewis, who first wrote about Wall Street’s excesses in Liar’s Poker. It’s called “The End,” and it offers an inside account of how Wall Street sowed the seeds of its own destruction. It’s also apparently the basis for a new book.
Finally, you may want to check out a fascinating piece in the Wall Street Journal called “Memories of the 1930s Still Sear.” It features interviews with the older generation who endured the Depression, how they coped, and what lessons they learned.
Several years ago, I had lunch with the former head of a large investment bank who talked about how Wall Street had a built-in bullish bias, and anyone who goes against the grain, does so at their own peril. Below you’ll find a good example of that. Here we have Peter Schiff, head of Euro Pacific Capital, sounding the alarms repeatedly on Fox “News” in 2006-07, making predictions that turned out to be remarkably right, and watch the scorn that gets heaped on him. Imagine if the grown ups had bothered to mind the store during the past decade, to see some of the obvious problems mounting. We might all be breathing a bit more easily today.
via The Daily Dish
Here’s the moment when Chicago, Obama’s adopted hometown, learned about his victory Tuesday night. It has been a long time since we’ve seen this kind of civic engagement and excitement. Catch the moment below and watch his victory speech here.
Back in May, This American Life (iTunes — Feed — Web Site) aired an episode called The Giant Pool of Money (stream here). The show, which demystified the mortgage crisis in an unsual way, became a major hit. Now, they have aired a sequel: Another Frightening Show About the Economy (stream here), and it explains the ripple effects of the original mortgage crisis that have pushed the American financial system to the brink. How did commercial paper freeze up, and why does this paper matter? What exactly are credit default swaps, why wasn’t this massive market regulated, and how does this poorly understood market threaten our economic well being? It’s all answered here. Give a listen.
I mentioned this free course back in July, but, given the historic nature of Tuesday’s election, it seems worth giving it another mention.
On Stanford’s YouTube channel, you’ll find a complete series of lectures from an undergraduate course called “African-American History: Modern Freedom Struggle.” Taught by Clayborne Carson, a prominent history professor who has edited and published the papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., the course overviews the struggle for liberty and complete equality, moving from W.E.B. Du Bois (early 20th century), to MLK and Malcolm X, down to Barack Obama today. The lecture below, entitled “Barack Obama’s American Dream,” situates Obama within the larger sweep of African-American history. It’s rather conversational in style, and it does a good job of getting into Obama’s personal biography. The complete lectures can be watched in their entirety on YouTube here, or downloaded in video via iTunes. And be sure to see our larger collection of 250 Free Online Courses from Leading Universities, where you’ll also find this course.
We’re down to the next to last lecture, taking you from Nixon to Bush. (Next week, this Stanford course ends with a postmortem of Obama’s victory in 2008.) You can access Lecture 4 via Tunes U in high resolution or watch the YouTube version below. If you missed the previous lectures, grab them on iTunes here and YouTube here.
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