To follow up Mike's previous post on the situation in Greece, here's a youtube video excerpt from what looks like a UK based television program. The program features three panelists in an entertaining exchange about the situation in Greece and some potential workouts. The panel includes Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz.
For now, we will have to settle for clips of foreign programming of this type, as our TV executives on this side of the Atlantic would prefer to present shows of less intellectual and entertainment value.
5 comments:
Check out the speculator in the second clip, though. Comes off like a real snake. We've got a world of these guys making life hell for everybody.
Matt, this is brilliant. Thank you for posting. I cannot stop watching the second video and the behavior and remarks of this idiot speculator, Hugh Hendry (whoever he is).
The guy is totally clueless and you can see and hear Stiglitz's exasperation in trying to educate this dope. Around 05:50 Stiglitz tries to explain how absurd it is that speculators are bidding up CDS on U.S. debt even though there is absolutely no possible way for the U.S. to default because, as Stiglitz points out in language that this crude nitwit should understand, the U.S. can "print" money to pay any debts. Yes, there might be an inflation argument to be made, but that's it, no default. The guy looks dumbfounded. (BTW, as you know and readers of this blog know, I have been making that very same argument forever!)
Everyone should check it out and check out the smug look on this guy's face; a look that I'd like to knock right off, I might add.
After watching this jerk I am almost ready to throw in the towel on my euro short, which had been doing well, but if this guy represents the world of hedge fund managers who are currently shorting the euro (all of them, like a bunch of ignorant "Schiffs" making their stupid arguments about debt) then the euro's probably going to go up. At the very least I feel like cheering for it to go up.
These guys are brain dead but dangerous nonetheless because of the money that they wield. Makes you wonder what kind of person gives these dolts their hard earned dough.
If they're "geniuses" at anything it's getting people to part with their money so that they can gamble on things that they don't have an iota of knowledge about.
Scary stuff. This Hendry should be poster boy for a new movement to ban speculation entirely.
What the Fed should do is be an open-ended seller of CDS in unlimited size. Take the opposite side of these guys' trades and crush them. The U.S. is not going to default and the Fed can write the check so it wouldn't be a problem, but it would eliminate any possibility of CDS market manipulation being a factor in the ratings agencies' decision making of whether or not to downgrade. I know in the past they have used CDS market behavior to change credit ratings. Specs are aware of this and routinely manipulate the CDS market to achieve their malevolent acts.
First time I heard a mainstream economist say that he US could never default. Why doesn't that message get through to Obama?
JC,
He's come to it very slowly because apparently Stiglitz (and throw in Krugman) doesnt even read anything posted by many of his fellow "Braintrusters" at NewDeal2.0 Blog. I guess once you get a Nobel, you dont have an inclination towards information "not invented here".
That's why he can only provide a Half-as___ed response to Hendry. We need Mike at that table!
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