Ballad of Bernie Madoff Video, via Flinch Studio and Blog Maverick

In keeping with the "Economic Sounds and Sights" theme of this blog, I'm sharing the following parody of a familiar ad, highlighting the Ponzi scheme created and maintained by Bernie Madoff. Enjoy!



"Parody of the Free Credit Report.com "Pirate" ad featuring Financial Supervillain Bernie Madoff. Sentenced to a lifetime of Restaurant servitude, perhaps he will pay off the money he owes a few bucks at a time. Written and produced at Flinch Studio for Mark Cuban's "Blog Maverick"


I visited Mark Cuban's blog and found that he has some interesting things to say about the Bernie Madoff scam:

Breaking Down Bernie Madoff
"Find the programmers who wrote the software and you will find out how the whole thing worked."

Breaking Down Bernie Madoff P2 & 3
"Curiosity got the best of me. So I started doing some searching on the electronic trading platform Bernie built. They called it Primex. Its an electronic auction system for securities. According to media reports, it was the “brainchild of Bernie and Peter Madoff"."

4 Different Looks at Job Losses During Recessions: Via Flowing Data

The following charts were posted by Nathan on his Flowing Data blog

, inspired by a debate on Barry Ritholtz' blog, The Big Picture about the extent of the job losses experienced during the current recession. (Nathan's blog provides links to related sources and articles.)






Time to Recover from Job Losses in Post WWII Recessions


Household Employment

WSJ's Video: How Iceland's Financial System Crashed - massive debts, government falls

Over the past few months, Iceland's financial sector imploded, and recently, the government collapsed. The following two videos, from the Wall Street Journal Online, explain some of the dynamics behind this country's reverse of fortune.

HOW ICELAND COLLAPSED 12/26/08

"WSJ's Andy Jordan examines how Iceland's economic miracle came to an abrupt end and explains why the world should care about the collapse of the small country's financial system."

ICELAND COALITION GOVERNMENT COLLAPSES 1/26/09

"Iceland's Prime Minister Geir Haarde is preparing to step down after announcing the collapse of the county's coalition government. Video courtesy of Reuters."

RELATED
Website: The Icelandic Government Information Center: The Icelandic Government Center regarding the current financial circumstances in Iceland
ABC News Video: Iceland's Banking Meltdown (10/21/08)
BBC News Video: Icelanders' fury over economy (12/19/08)

"Iceland's people have been venting their fury over Iceland's economic collapse at public meetings."

"27 years on my job, is like you say, thrown out the window."

BBC News Video: Protesters hit Icelandic PM's car (1/21/09)
BBC News Video: Crisis claims Icelandic cabinet (1/26/09)

Articles:
Timeline: Iceland economic crisis (BBC News, 1/26/09)
Iceland's Coalition Government Collapses (Charles Forelle, WSJ, 1/26/09)
Banking Crisis Brings Down Iceland Government (Guardian UK, 1/26/09)
"Ruling coalition falls; First government to fail as result of global economic crisis"
Waking up to reality in Iceland (Analysis by Jon Danielsson, Economist, Financial Markets Group, London School of Economics - BBC News, 1/26/09)

"The bankers and government effectively turned Iceland into a gigantic hedge fund sitting in the middle of the North Atlantic...What they failed to implement was the necessary supervision or enforcement of banking regulations."

Sound familiar?

The Power of Pictures: The Financial Crash and Survival on the Hudson

Pictures, graphs, and charts, if done well, provide a powerful way of representing information that will be part of our historical time-line in the future.

We've all read about the growing mortgage foreclosure problem. Most people probably pass at least one foreclosed property when they are out and about. The following picture puts it the problem in perspective:

Detroit Metropolitan Area Foreclosures 2006, 2007 & 2008 -Detroit Free Press

It might make a powerful impression if this graphic was integrated into an interactive map of the states, along with related info-graphics & data visualizations. In my opinion, the impact would last in my memory more so than the volume of text I'd have to read if I did not have access to the visualization.

Another example of powerful imagery is the slideshow of photographs related to the events surrounding the financial crash, posted on the Wall Street Journal website:

THE YEAR IN PHOTOS: FINANCIAL CRASH (I was not able to embed the slideshow.)

Photo Journalism By and For the People

Now that so many people carry around cell phones with cameras, recording powerful images as history is in the making is becoming common. A recent example, pointed out by Matthew Reichbach, of the New Mexico Independent, is the pictures that were taken after a US Airways plane safely "landed" in the Hudson River on 1/15/09.

The flight was on the way to Charlotte, NC, from New York City. Many of the passengers were employees of Bank of America who were flying home after talks regarding the merger with Merrill Lynch, according to an article in the Charlotte Observer. I shudder to imagine how the story would unfold if there were no survivors. The family, friends, and colleagues of the passengers would be devastated. The loss of so many key bankers involved in the merger of two corporate cultures would have dire consequences as well.

The following picture crashed Twitpic not long after it was uploaded by jkrums:

"There's a plane in the Hudson. I'm on the ferry to pick up the people. Crazy."

Photo of Hudson River plan crash downs TwitPic (Daniel Terdiman, cNET News, 1/15/09)

Social Media, citizen journalism trumps traditional media--on the plane crashes beat (Matthew Reichbach, the New Mexico Independent, 1/16/09)

As the news was breaking, CNN encouraged eye-witnesses to upload pictures and video to their iReport website, resulting in some moving pictures of what now is called a miracle:

iReport photos by EricinParis, a passenger on Flight 1549:


Miracle on the Hudson (Ann Doss Helms and Steve Lyttle, Charlotte Observer 1/16/09)

Finally, Charlotte Catches a Break (Corey Dade and Betsy McKay, Wall Street Journal 1/17/09)

John Quiggin's Series on Refuted Economic Doctrines

Ryan Lanham shared a link regarding John Quiggin's series on refuted theories of modern economics and finance. I am sharing this link not to support one doctrine over another, but simply to add the information to my on-going collection about economy and finance.

I know that many people are hoping that if they just cross their fingers and hold their breath, the economy as we previously understood it during the best years of the first decade of this century will return. Things simply will not work the same way as before, in my opinion, partly because of the pervasiveness of this many-layered phenomenon.

It is important for everyone to look at the various plates of economic theory spinning around!

The Walking Zombies of Wall Street: Video Discussion by WSJ's Evan Newmark and Dennis Berman

The problem? How will Wall Street bankers make money? What jobs will they do?

"They just don't have much work. Debt and stock markets are virtually shut, merger volume is down by 28%, and whole lines of structured finance are closed for good"

Link from Visualizing Economics: Flashback Economy/Prices

I came across a link on the Visualizing Economics blog to the Flashback website , where you can find information about the economy as it was from the 1960's to the present.

What we really need now is "flash-forward" website!

Business Week: "They Warned Us About the Mortgage Crisis"

A recent article in Business Week explains how some state officials were concerned about lending practices, and why their concerns went unheeded several years ago:

"They Warned Us About the Mortgage Crisis"
10/09/2008 by Robert Berner and Brian Grow


FYI: Business Week's Learning Center provides a good overview of stock market and investing basics, including definition of terms.

Links to Data and Information Visualization Resources for Economics, Finance, and the Current Crisis

If you are interested in learning more about data and information visualization, in light of our current economic crisis, take the time to explore the following links. This list is just a start!

(Warning: A few of the links have a political slant, in one way or another.)

Wikipedia: Visual Analytics
Robert Kosara: Eager Eyes
Nathan Yau: Flowing Data
Nathan Yau's post: Great Data Visualization Tells a Great Story
IBM: Many Eyes
"Many Eyes is a bet on the power of human visual intelligence to find patterns. Our goal is to "democratize visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis."
Visual Complexity
Meryl.Net: 175+ Data and Information Visualization Examples and Resources
Death and Taxes 2009 : A Visual Guide to Where Your Federal Tax Dollars Go (from WallStats
: The Art of Information)
Aaron Schiff: 26econ.com
Aaron Schiff's post: Building Interactive Economic Models with Excel
Aaron Schiff's Economic Blog Directory and Rankings
They Rule: Create maps of the interlocking directories of the top US companies from 2004
Hans Rosling and GapMinder
Gapminder World Blog
Hans Roslinger's Gapminder Ted Talk video
Barry Ritholtz: The Big Picture: Macro Perspective on the Capital Markets, Economy, Geopolitics, Technology, and Digital Media
Follow the Oil Money (Interactive chart that provides views of companies, politicians, and relationships)
Presidential Watch 08: A Map of the Political Blogosphere
Enron E-Mail Explorer

Economic Data Resources
Economic Indicators.Gov
Economic Statistics (Whitehouse)
US Bureau of Economic Analysis, U.S. Department of Commerce
The World Bank
The International Money Fund Data and Statistics

IMF Data Animation, October 2008

Deja Vu-Doo Economics

Deja Vu-Doo Economics is a term used in the media that refers to economic policies and philosophies that echo those put into place by President Ronald Reagan during the 1980's. Reagan's policies were called "Voo-Doo" economics by his nay-sayers, and were also known as "Reaganomics".

Reaganomics helped improve the economy during that decade, and as a result, which helped us forget how bad it was in 1981 and 1982.

.

Some of us forgot that this led us to 1987, the year of Black Monday. The date was October 19, 1987. The stock markets around the world crashed to the ground, but by the end of the year, there was an uptick.

From Wikipedia:



I know I will have to dig a little deeper for the "truth"....sadly, much of what I've found that relates to economics is intertwined with politics and half-truths from both sides of the line.


The following article discusses topics such as Tobin's Q, the "Greater Fool Theory", and Professor Irving Fisher, of Yale University:

Why the Bull is a Compulsive Climber
Peter Passell, The New York Times
October 20, 1996

"Up, up, up it goes, and where it stops nobody knows. Since stock prices began climbing out of the trough of the 1990 recession, the Dow Jones industrial average has grown at 10 times the pace of the American economy. Perhaps as remarkable, investors have brushed aside every bit of troubling news -- from interest rate increases to the defeat of an incumbent Republican President -- with barely a hiccup. Not once in the last six years have stock prices fallen by as much as 10 percent."

Deja Vu-Doo Economics

Reagonomics or 'voodoo economics"?
BBC News, Saturday, June 5, 2004

The return of voodoo economics
Salon.com, September 5, 2002
Arianna Huffington

"There's another blast from the Reagan past that is a little more relevant to most Americans' current financial health than trickle-down dreams. Ask yourself, my friends, are you better off today, after all that tax cutting and deregulating, than you were four years ago?"

Additional resources:
Carlson, Mark (2007) "A Brief History of the 1987 Stock Market Crash with a Discussion of the Federal Reserve Response,"Divisions of Research & Statistics and Monetary Affairs Federal Reserve Board, Washington, D.C.

Black Monday Ten Years After: The Motley Fool's 1987 Timeline
(1997)

(The above resources were found on Wikipedia.)

CNN Money.com website's timeline of our economic woes...

Note: This photo is from the CNN Money.com website, and the photo is attributed to Spencer Platt/Getty. I am using this for educational purposes. The fall of the market is dramatically depicted on the screen the upper right hand corner of the photo, and the human response to the shock is reflected in the body language and expression of the man staring at his computer display. I will take the photo it down if it is requested.

CNN Money.com has a time-line of the recent events surrounding our current economic woes:

The crisis: A timeline
"A shocking series of events that forever changed the financial markets"

The CNNMoney.com timeline offers a bit of interactivity, but it is primarily text-based. Each article embeds links to related information, which is a good feature.