Video: Niall Ferguson on Milton Friedman's Legacy

Video: Raghuram Rajan, Niall Ferguson, etc. on The Future of Capitalism

This video from the Milken Institute Conference unfortunately appears to begin after the panel has already begun and cuts abruptly, but still features a very good discussion of economic issues in the U.S., Asia, and Europe.

Video: The Great Stagnation vs. The Singularity

For anyone who missed Tyler Cowen's presentation at the Singularity Conference from earlier this year.

Video: Niall Ferguson on Charlie Rose

Video of Niall discussing his new book, Civilization, as well as his current views on the European debt crisis, Turkey's resurgence, and Iran's future here.

Video: Jeffrey Sachs Full LSE Talk on The Price of Civilization

Video: Bank Transfer Day, Bravo!

Very nice to see consumer activism working to solve Too Big to Fail. My SeekingAlpha article encouraging something similar last year can be found here.

For more info about Bank Transfer Day the link to the Facebook group is here.

Video: Nassim Taleb On Occupy Wall Street

Video after the jump:

Podcast: Carmen Reinhart on the Coming Financial Repression

Link to audio stream here.

Video: Niall Ferguson's TED Talk on the Great Divergence

Greece Can Legally Introduce Capital Controls Under EU Article 143

From Spiegel:

Contrary to earlier assumptions, restrictions on the movement of capital, which could be used to prevent Greek citizens from moving their money abroad (something that would endanger the country's banks), are now seen as being compatible with EU law. Article 143 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union offers a loophole, in that it permits certain countries to "take protective measures."

The new line is not entirely uncontroversial, however. This became apparent at a meeting of the euro zone's deputy finance ministers last Monday, when the so-called troika of the European Commission, European Central Bank and IMF gave its report on the situation in Greece. 

The group was divided in the end. For the first time, there was a majority, led by the Germans, Dutch and Finns, that advocated pulling the ripcord on Greece. 

The southern countries, including France, were considerably more reserved. They feared that if funds were cut off for Greece, they could be next in line. 

Can someone please explain to me why so many Greeks still have their euros in a Greek bank? According to the latest official figures since Jan. 2010 Greek bank deposits have only declined by 20%. Assuming these figures are accurate (a big assumption) I would have expected the outflow to be much greater.

Video: The Commanding Heights - the battle between government and the marketplace

No less relevant today than it was roughly ten years ago when it first premiered, below is Part 1 of the must watch video series The Commanding Heights. Globalization, Keynes vs. Hayek, the future capitalism -- it's all here. Especially recommended for those interested in intellectual history. You'll find the remainder of the episodes at PBS here.

Video: Financial Repression in China

Victor Shih, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University, on China's three trillion dollars of foreign exchange reserves. Shih discusses how China could run out of reserves pretty quickly in the event of a crisis.

Shih has collected data on banks and wealthy households in China, and he warns that the wealthiest 1% of households hold enough deposits in the banking system that if they start moving money out of the country, $3T could start to seem like a much smaller number.

Capital flight on the order of half a trillion -- that's no problem for China's banking system, Shih says, because China has the world's highest required reserve ratios, acting as cushion. But at around the $1T mark, the central bank would be forced into large-scale asset sales to avoid illiquid banks.

From INET

My Dream TV Setup and the Present Nightmare

I'm not a huge TV or movie watcher, but I would like to do the following:

1. hang a flat panel HD TV on my wall
2. connect it wirelessly to broadband internet so the only cable I need is the TV power cord
3. use my smartphone or laptop as my remote
4. and (here's the hard part) watch all the world's video content (in full HD resolution when available), whenever I want for a reasonable price.

That's my seemingly simple (in terms of the necessary technology) TV dream.

Now, let me introduce you to the present state, which amounts to a nightmare of massive fragmentation.

TV Hell

Not surprisingly given the money at stake, nearly every major tech firm, media conglomerate, TV manufacturer, along with a number of innovative startups, are angling for a piece (or more often control) of the connected TV market. The result is today's dizzying array of incompatibile and walled off offerings, such as:

• Content sources: iTunes,  Bravia Internet, Hulu, SeeSaw, Plex, Netflix, Freeview, LoveFilm, etc.
• Wireless technologies: WHDI, WiDI, WirelessHD, Wireless USB, WiGig (see Wired's article for more on this topic)
• Devices: separate boxes like Apple TV, Boxee, Revue, Roku, PS3, Xbox, and TVs like LG's Smart TV and Google TV which have features built into the TV itself

The net-net of this media-tech cacophony is consumer confusion and painfully slow progress on delivering a complete wireless HDTV solution.

The failure is not for lack of effort. Google TV tried to bring it all together and promptly had the door slammed in its face by the major U.S. television networks. Scrappy startups like Boxee and Plex have developed innovative offerings, but they lack the heft at present to deliver the goods. On the content side, Hulu is great, but it engages in an extensive game of cat and mouse to keep users from outside the U.S. and Canada from accessing the site. The same is true of the BBC's iPlayer for users outside the UK. Apple has a lot to offer, but Apple TV can't do full HD and the iTunes pricing model makes it significantly more expensive than Netflix. Lovefilm doesn't stream content in HD, only standard definition at present.

It is Netflix, with its large catalogue of streaming HD content, that is perhaps the best of the lot. But it is only available in North America at present and (worse) the company is still beholden to content owners which means it can't control prices (e.g., the recent unpopular price increase).

In short, many have tried but everyone including some of the most creative and powerful companies in the world have failed to deliver wireless, on-demand HD TV.

Keeping the Dream

For now the Big Boys have all decided that, rather than sharing with other kids in the sandbox they're going to try to keep their toys to themselves. But what they fail to realise is that on demand, HD, wireless, anywhere, any device TV is coming whether content owners (Hollywood) like it or not. Hollywood can either get out in front of this tsunami and try to ride the wave of the future, or it will get crushed by it.

The future of TV will look something like Spotify or Netflix, meaning it will be:

• On demand
• HD
• With a comprehensive library of content
• And reasonably priced for all you can watch

When? The wireless and smart device technology exists right now, so it's all about content licensing. It was hoped that 2011 would be the breakthrough year for connected TV, but it's July and I don't see it happening.

Hollywood and content owners are fighting tooth-and-nail to maintain the lucrative status quo for another season. Freeview, talk of Netflix international expansion, and perhaps other important steps are in store for 2012, so here's to hoping we'll see major advances in wireless HD TV next year.

Chart of the Day: Generation U

Perhaps its time to rename Gen Y as Gen U, as in Generation Unemployed.

Not surprisingly, the PIIGS occupy five of the top seven spots in this primarily European country sample. Chronically unemployed young males are often a key ingredient in social unrest and revolution.

Source: The Economist

Video: Niall Ferguson - The West and the Rest (Chatham House Talk/Q&A)

Financial Repression Redux

The latest from Carmen Reinhart and Co. on the return of financial repression has been published on the IMF's website here. If you're a little turned off by academic papers then you'll find this latest short, magazine-style piece much more appealing.

For more thoughts on financial repression, including how to protect oneself from it, see here.

Video: 60 Minutes on High Frequency Computerized Trading

Can the U.S. Government Stop Silk Road and Bitcoin?

No sooner than a week after widespread news broke describing Silk Road, a website which some are calling the Amazon.com of online illegal drugs, we have two U.S. Senators seeking to pull-the-plug on the site and the peer-to-peer virtual currency used to pay for drugs called Bitcoin.

ArsTechnica has a nice summary of Bitcoin:

Bitcoin is a virtual currency, designed to allow people to buy and sell without centralized control by banks or governments, and it allows for pseudonymous transactions which aren't tied to a real identity. In keeping with the hacker ethos, Bitcoin has no need to trust any central authority; every aspect of the currency is confirmed and secured through the use of strong cryptography. 

Over the last few months, Bitcoin's value has risen by an order of magnitude as the sagas of Wikileaks and Anonymous (among others) have highlighted the limits of a financial system which relies on centralized intermediaries. With a current estimated market capitalization of about $100 million, Bitcoin has recently graduated from a theoretical techno-anarchic project patronized by libertarians and hackers to a full-fledged currency prompting comment from technologists and economists. At the time of this writing, one Bitcoin (BTC) is worth about US$15.

Here's the original Bitcoin white paper published by Satoshi Nakamoto.

Can the U.S. Government Stop Silk Road and Bitcoin?

Government has had success shutting down centrally managed peer-to-peer services, like Napster. However, 'pure' peer-to-peer sites like Gnutella and Tor, have proven more difficult. Data and services can simply move from a server in one country to another, and pure peer-to-peer is widely distributed by it's very nature. In short, it could prove extremely difficult for the DEA to take down Silk Road.

Bitcoin, however, does link back to actual bank accounts, which perhaps leaves more room for the government to maneuver.

I should have more to say on Bitcoin in the not too distant future.

Was putting a man-on-the-moon peculiarly un-American?

First-image of ISS docking by a soon-to-retire U.S. space shuttle

The Economist has an interesting read on the 50-year anniversary of President Kennedy's speech which set a goal of putting a man-on-the-moon within a decade.

Here's the key excerpt:

He (Kennedy) set out to make America’s achievements in space an emblem of national greatness, and the project succeeded. Yet it did not escape the notice of critics even at the time that this entailed an irony. The Apollo programme, which was summoned into being in order to demonstrate the superiority of the free-market system, succeeded by mobilising vast public resources within a centralised bureaucracy under government direction. In other words, it mimicked aspects of the very command economy it was designed to repudiate. 

That may be why subsequent efforts to transfer the same fixity of purpose to broader spheres of peacetime endeavour have fallen short. If we can send a man to the moon, people ask, why can’t we [fill in the blank]? Lyndon Johnson tried to build a “great society”, but America is better at aeronautical engineering than social engineering. Mr Obama, pointing to competition from China, invokes a new “Sputnik moment” to justify bigger public investment in technology and infrastructure. It should not be a surprise that his appeals have gone unheeded. Putting a man on the moon was a brilliant achievement. But in some ways it was peculiarly un-American—almost, you might say, an aberration born out of the unique circumstances of the cold war. It is a reason to look back with pride, but not a pointer to the future.

Barring a crisis or existential threat, are the prospects for the U.S. undertaking an ambitious, focussed transition to a sustainable energy based system, or an affordable healthcare system, extremely remote?

In short, was the U.S.'s Race to the Moon success, as The Economist puts it, a 'glorious one-off'?

Rogoff: 'Sovereignty and currency co-habitation do not mix'

Reflecting on the latest twists and turns in the Eurozone debt crisis here are some other choice quotes from Professor Rogoff's FT editorial:

• the euro is looking very much like a system that amplifies shocks rather than absorbs them
• even if the euro system was not at the heart of the crisis, it needs to be able to withstand two standard deviation shocks
• markets are more worried about the US’s lack of a plan A than Europe’s lack of plan B
• It is sometimes said that the euro is a creature of politics that would never be justified by economics. The present episode could well turn this statement on its head.

Full editorial here, and here is a recent Charlie Rose panel discussion he participated in with Paul Krugman and others.