Business

The Midas Formula: Trillion Dollar Bet

The history behind perhaps the greatest formula ever created in finance: the Black-Scholes-Merton options pricing model. Two of its creators were awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1997. A year later their hedge fund Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) had collapsed with staggering losses of $100 billion due to significant leverage of the strategy. The Black-Scholes Formula was derived by obs

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The Lightbulb Conspiracy

The Lightbulb Conspiracy is a documentary about the negative effects of consumerism and planned obsolescence.The light bulb conspiracy is a theory that the leading manufacturers of incandescent light bulbs have conspired to keep the lifetime of their bulbs far below their real technological capabilities. This way, they ensure the continuous demand for more bulbs and hence, long-term profit for t

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The Google Boys

Google’s meteoric rise to internet stardom is one of the great business sagas of our time. The sons of college professors, Larry Page and Sergey Brin – two brainy Stanford University grad students who founded the company – say their goal was to make the entire world’s information searchable and instantly accessible. At last count, they were answering 200 million queries a day. As with the inventio

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The Divide

In 1979 an economic experiment was launched in the United States an the United Kingdom. It was supposed to provide a better life for all. Today, in both countries, inequality is at its highest level since 1928. Reaganomics is one such term for this series of economic experiments and policies.This film examines the lives of seven individuals currently striving for a better life in modern day

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The Diamond Empire

What we think about diamonds, is in fact, a myth. At the center of that myth is an illusion, that diamonds are valuable because they are rare. When writer Edward Epstein set out to investigate the diamond trade, he discovered that diamonds aren’t rare at all. Second only to Christmas, Valentine’s Day is the holiday when diamonds are most often given as the ultimate token of love. Central to the di

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The Day of the Dollar

Do we live on a bubble? Is it possible for the heavily indebted American economy to collapse and take all of us down in a free fall with it? Have the days of the dollar been counted? Is it really unimaginable that we will see the time of the Great Depression repeating itself? VPRO Backlight and Dutch national newspaper NRC Handelsblad present this ‘what if’ scenario. What if the dollar collapses?

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The Dark Side of Chocolate

While we enjoy the sweet taste of chocolate, the reality is strikingly different for African children. In 2001 consumers around the world were outraged to discover that child labor and slavery, trafficking, and other abuses existed on cocoa farms in the Ivory Coast, a country that produces nearly half the world’s cocoa. An avalanche of negative publicity and consumer demands for answers and soluti

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