The Story of Bottled Water, released on March 22, 2010 (World Water Day) employs the Story of Stuff style to tell the story of manufactured demand—how you get Americans to buy more than half a billion bottles of water every week when it already flows from the tap. Over five minutes, the film explores the bottled water industrys attacks on tap water and its use of seductive, environmental-themed advertising to cover up the mountains of plastic waste it produces. The film concludes with a call to take back the tap, not only by making a personal commitment to avoid bottled water, but by supporting investments in clean, available tap water for all.
Our production partners on the bottled water film include five leading sustainability groups: Corporate Accountability International, Environmental Working Group, Food & Water Watch, Pacific Institute, and Polaris Institute.
LECTURE DESCRIPTION
Real Estate is the biggest asset class and of great importance for both individuals and institutional investors. An array of economic and psychological factors impact real estate investment decisions and the public has changing ideas of real estate as a profitable investment. People’s demand to buy a home by taking on long-term debt, called a mortgage, is often tied with the overall health of the economy and financial markets. In recessions, home buying tends to fall and the opposite holds in a strong economy. Commercial real estate, held indirectly by the public through partnerships and real estate investment trusts (REITs), is vulnerable to similar speculative activity. The most recent real estate boom illustrates the speculative nature of real estate, and its relation to financial and economic crises.
COURSE DESCRIPTION
Financial institutions are a pillar of civilized society, supporting people in their productive ventures and managing the economic risks they take on. The workings of these institutions are important to comprehend if we are to predict their actions today and their evolution in the coming information age. The course strives to offer understanding of the theory of finance and its relation to the history, strengths and imperfections of such institutions as banking, insurance, securities, futures, and other derivatives markets, and the future of these institutions over the next century.
RELATED RESOURCES
Lecture Transcript and Reading Assignment
COURSE INDEX
Finance and Insurance as Powerful Forces in Our Economy and Society
Review of Probability and Statistics; Intro to Present Value
Technology and Invention in Finance
Portfolio Diversification and Supporting Financial Institutions (CAPM Model)
Insurance: The Archetypal Risk Management Institution
Efficient Markets vs Excess Volatility
Behavioral Finance: The Role of Psychology
Human Foibles, Fraud, Manipulation, and Regulation
Investing for the Long Run
Debt Markets: Term Structure
Stocks
Real Estate Finance and Its Vulnerability to Crisis
Banking: Successes and Failures
The Efficiency of Markets
Guest Lecture by Carl Icahn
The Evolution and Perfection of Monetary Policy
Investment Banking and Secondary Markets
Professional Money Managers and Their Influence
Brokerage, ECNs, etc
Private Equity and the Financial Crisis
Forwards and Futures
Stock Index, Oil and Other Futures Markets
Options Markets
The Democratization of Finance
Learning from and Responding to Financial Crisis, Part I
Learning from and Responding to Financial Crisis, Part II
With more stars than there are grains of sand on Earth it’s difficult to imagine that some are as big as a billion times the size of our sun. Catch the series – Mondays at 9PM on Discovery UK