House of Cards: America's Mortgage Meltdown
What better way to understand a financial disaster than to meet the kind of people who created it? This CNBC Original documentary investigates the origins of the global economic crisis through eyewitness accounts from mortgage brokers, investment ba...
The Heart of the Nation
This program explores the central values of Japan, Germany, and the U.S. and focuses on what drives each of these societies. America’s hallmark is individualism, Japan’s the preeminence of the group; in America, freedom and diversity are primary...
Economic Indicators
How do countries evaluate the performance of their economic systems and national economies? In module one of this program, the Italian Statistical Office applies the U.S. concept of Gross Domestic Product, while in module two economists in Finland c...
Financial systems for growth
Economic growth requires a variety of financial institutions that can provide a steady stream of capital while managing risk. Traditional banking, as demonstrated in a rural Austrian village, is the focus of module one; module two concentrates on th...
International trade
Free trade is a vital source of economic growth, yet it is frequently endangered by the protectionist demands of special interest groups. Module one of this program uses the Hungarian clothing industry to illustrate the comparative advantages of int...
Ditching the Dollar: Is It Time for a Global Currency?
Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Mundell helped create the euro. But why stop at Europe, he wondered. In the aftermath of 2008’s global financial crisis, why not create a legal tender for the entire world? In this program, Mundell, Nobel Laure...
The bottom line: privatizing the world
Some call it a winner-take-all opportunity. Others call it the exploitation of scarcity in its most extreme form. This program challenges big business's alarming rush to commodify the world's common resources - things as basic to life as drinkable w...
The market mechanism
Supply and demand is the basic relationship that fundamentally shapes any market-based economy. Module one of this program shows how S&D sets the price of a rose at the Aalsmeer flower auction in the Netherlands; module two reveals how Germany's Fle...
The Flaw: Markets, Money, Mortgages and the Great American Meltdown
In October 2008, a humbled Alan Greenspan admitted to the US Congress that he had been mistaken to put so much faith in the self-correcting power of free markets and that he had failed to anticipate the self-destructive nature of wanton mortgage len...
Bill Moyers Reports: Trading Democracy
While the benefits of the North American Free Trade Agreement are still being argued, the perils of one of the treaty’s most powerful secrets are beginning to emerge. Bill Moyers Reports: Trading Democracy is the first television investigation of ...