Tag Archives: Financial Crisis

Movies: Business Ethics

INSIDE JOB

Charles Ferguson, Documentary Filmmaker, Inside Job and No End in Sight, believes that the crisis was no accident. His latest documentary, Inside Job, makes the powerful case that an out-of-control finance industry took advantage of a deregulated atmosphere and purposely sought to get rich at the expense of others. Through extensive interviews with financial insiders and government officials, Ferguson crossed the globe to find proof that the financial industry intentionally engaged in unethical behavior. His gripping account of the global recession is sure to evoke feelings of disgust, anger, and concern that this all may happen again unless our regulatory system is changed. Ferguson’s previous film, No End in Sight, was nominated for an Oscar, and Inside Job brought home the grand prize at this year’s awards ceremony.

Click here to watch the Documentary Inside Job

Click here to watch the Documentary Inside Job

No End in Sight

Capitalism: A Love Story

The men who crashed the world

The first of a four-part investigation into a world of greed and recklessness that led to financial collapse.

In the first episode of Meltdown, we hear about four men who brought down the global economy: a billionaire mortgage-seller who fooled millions; a high-rolling banker with a fatal weakness; a ferocious Wall Street predator; and the power behind the throne. The crash of September 2008 brought the largest bankruptcies in world history, pushing more than 30 million people into unemployment and bringing many countries to the edge of insolvency. Wall Street turned back the clock to 1929.

But how did it all go so wrong?

Lack of government regulation; easy lending in the US housing market meant anyone could qualify for a home loan with no government regulations in place. Also, London was competing with New York as the banking capital of the world. Gordon Brown, the British finance minister at the time, introduced ‘light touch regulation’ – giving bankers a free hand in the marketplace.

All this, and with key players making the wrong financial decisions, saw the world’s biggest financial collapse.

Financial Crisis: India

Economic mess: Is India staring at a financial crisis?

Is India immune to the economic crisis in US & Europe?

Global economic crisis and its impact on India

The ongoing financial crisis is affecting markets across the globe, and there are concerns that we might be entering into a phase of global recession. While India has also been affected, there is a palpable sense of relief that the damage was not as large as it might have been, had India been integrated with the global financial system. Is this a false sense of relief—is Indias insulation only a benefit? Are the long-term benefits of integration with the global financial system much bigger? This session sought to examine these two inter-related facets of the global financial crisis.

The session was moderated by T.N.Ninan, Editor, Business Standard and the panel featured
Shankar Acharya, Member, Board of Governors and Honorary Professor, Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations; Analjit Singh, Chairman, Max India Group of Companies; Tushar Poddar, Chief Economist, Goldman Sachs and Omkar Goswami, Founder and Chairman, CERG Advisory Private Limited.

Twenty years ago, India had to borrow $6bn from the International Monetary Fund to prop up its economy. Now, however, New Delhi is helping the IMF bailout some of the world’s more developed countries. The country’s economy is expected to grow by seven per cent in 2012, a percentage low by recent standards but higher than most around a recession hit world.

India’s love affair with gold

“No gold, no wedding,” is a saying in India, indicating the importance of gold to Indian culture and tradition. Byron Pitts reports on India’s obsession with gold.

Financial Crisis: Primer

Interesting reads:

Which Capitalism? Lessons From the East Asian Crisis

The Great Leveraging

THE ASCENT OF MONEY

A Financial History of the World

Niall Ferguson follows the money to tell the human story behind the evolution of finance, from its origins in ancient Mesopotamia to the latest upheavals on what he calls Planet Finance.

Bread, cash, dosh, dough, loot, lucre, moolah, readies, the wherewithal: Call it what you like, it matters. To Christians, love of it is the root of all evil. To generals, it’s the sinews of war. To revolutionaries, it’s the chains of labor. But in The Ascent of Money, Niall Ferguson shows that finance is in fact the foundation of human progress. What’s more, he reveals financial history as the essential backstory behind all history.

Through Ferguson’s expert lens familiar historical landmarks appear in a new and sharper financial focus. Suddenly, the civilization of the Renaissance looks very different: a boom in the market for art and architecture made possible when Italian bankers adopted Arabic mathematics. The rise of the Dutch republic is reinterpreted as the triumph of the world’s first modern bond market over insolvent Habsburg absolutism. And the origins of the French Revolution are traced back to a stock market bubble caused by a convicted Scot murderer.

With the clarity and verve for which he is known, Ferguson elucidates key financial institutions and concepts by showing where they came from. What is money? What do banks do? What’s the difference between a stock and a bond? Why buy insurance or real estate? And what exactly does a hedge fund do?

This is history for the present. Ferguson travels to post-Katrina New Orleans to ask why the free market can’t provide adequate protection against catastrophe. He delves into the origins of the subprime mortgage crisis.

Perhaps most important, The Ascent of Money documents how a new financial revolution is propelling the world’s biggest countries, India and China, from poverty to wealth in the space of a single generation—an economic transformation unprecedented in human history.

Yet the central lesson of the financial history is that sooner or later every bubble bursts—sooner or later the bearish sellers outnumber the bullish buyers, sooner or later greed flips into fear. And that’s why, whether you’re scraping by or rolling in it, there’s never been a better time to understand the ascent of money.

THE MIDAS FORMULA OF STOCK MARKET

The story of the mathematical formula that transformed capitalism and the world

COMMANDING HEIGHTS

Interaction of government, markets and societies

Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy confronts head-on Americans’ critical concerns about the new interconnected world. Based on the best-selling book by Pulitzer Prize-winner Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, this groundbreaking series explores our changing world—the great debate over globalization and the future of our society.

Commanding Heights reunites the team that created The Prize— award-winning producer William Cran (From Jesus to Christ) and Daniel Yergin—and is the first in-depth documentary to tell the inside story of our new global economy and what it means for individuals around the world. Filmed on five continents, the powerful narrative combines stunning film footage with dramatic stories and extraordinary interviews with world leaders and thinkers from twenty different countries, including: Bill Clinton, Dick Cheney, former USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev, Mexican President Vicente Fox, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, Singapores Lee Kuan Yew, former Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin, Rep. Richard Gephardt, and President George W. Bush’s Economic Advisor Lawrence Lindsey.

Commanding Heights dramatically captures the issues that have defined the wealth and fate of nations and shows how the battle over the world economy will shape our lives in the twenty-first century.

DERIVATIVES

‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ or Generators of Market Stability?

Roger Lowenstein, financial journalist and former Wall Street Journal columnist, and Gillian Tett, U.S. managing editor and an assistant editor of the Financial Times, participated in a public discussion titled, “Derivatives: ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ or Generators of Market Stability?”