I have to give you credit, you don't fuck around, but I'll have to wait until later to attempt to assimilate this, it's past my bedtime. Keep up the most excellent work trying to educate the masses Wraith, me most especially.

Good evening, Mr Wraith.
Reconstituted, eh?
I was unaware that the Dark Wraith had been condensed.
I would like to express my sincere wish that such condensation occured through depressurization within a controlled chamber rather than boiling at room temperature, for your own sake.

Sometimes, I boil rather easily at room temperature, and I know how terribly uncomfortable that can be.

However, I must pay a visit to Friend With Cable Modem to watch any videos.
Current laptop was invented in the Stone Age, and is, at best, a rather crude implement for hunting small animals, sometimes merely wounding them.

Good evening, Progressive Traditionalist.

I had collapsed my original series of lectures from the widely available forum at YouTube. I did so because of an increasingly shrill band of Leftists who thought themselves some sort of truth squad charged with attacking me for being what they consider a Right-wing economist.

I reposted smaller versions of some of my videos at Revver.com, and those are available to watch in the sidebar, here.

The video I have just now published is a full-blown, complete lecture with no substantive edits for size or time; as such, it represents the reconstitution of my original intent to produce and publish real, complete lectures.

An unfortunate consequence of the large size and duration of such presentations is that you will need broadband.

You will also need to devote an hour and fifteen minutes of undivided attention. That time will, of course, be well spent.

The Dark Wraith is, however, offering no money-back guarantee.

Oh, I am going to like this series. It's so much easier to pay attention when watching than by just listening. (For me, anyway.)

Thank you, Wraith. This is great.

Hey, what the hell? You give the class a break at the 47 minute mark, but us poor schmucks have to keep going to the end. Man, that ain't right.

Wow, if this was your plan all along, then I must put your name in at the Vatican as the patron saint of education. St. Ebon or sumpin. This is a very generous and worthwhile effort you make here. Thank you.

As to the unfortunate comments at YouTube, and really, if that's what America has come to, as referenced by the usual comments there, then I'm ready for the gulag now, please. Hopefully I'll be dead before any of the real miscreants are rounded up.
"What's he talkin' 'bout?" "I dunno...prolly some rightwing crapola."

Global Research.ca:
"The Financial Tsunami has not reached its Climax "
"Credit Default Swaps: Next Phase of an Unravelling Crisis"

The next phase of the unravelling crisis in the US-centered "revolution in finance" is emerging in the market for arcane instruments known as Credit Default Swaps or CDS. Wall Street bankers always have to have a short name for these things.
(...)
Now the other shoe is about to drop in the $62 trillion CDS market due to rising junk bond defaults by US corporations as the recession deepens. That market has long been a disaster in the making. An estimated $1,2 trillion could be at risk of the nominal $62 trillion in CDOs outstanding, making it far larger than the sub-prime market.

Good evening, trog.

Although it was, indeed, 47 minutes into the video that I called for the break, it was more like an hour into the actual class that I called that break. The video had to be edited to remove the first ten minutes or so, when I'm doing administrative nonsense like calling the roll, which I have to do every day anymore because of school rules that require me to keep precise records of the exact day that non-attending students stop showing up for class. I also spend a few minutes at the beginning of class discussing general matters of academics, politics, pop culture, and personal stuff. That kind of interaction gives students the misimpression that I am actually sort of human.

That aside, I really do appreciate you folks who actually watched this video. Only 42 people had done so as of yesterday, but that is certainly more than enough to make it worth the effort to put the three or four hours into producing, editing, and uploading this feature, so I shall do it again on occasion.

Eventually, I'll be publishing these without using the Google video service. I would have done it as a stand-alone product this time, but for some reason I could not successfully upload the massive .flv (flash video format) file to my own host server. I've uploaded huge files before, but the upload kept failing about halfway through, this time. I even went so far as to upload it in .wmv format, but it still kept failing, even though the .wmv format version was only about a third of the size of the flash format version. Oddly, I uploaded the .wmv format version to the Google video server without even so much as a glitch.

I'm still trying to figure out what was going on with that whole mess.

Nevertheless, again, I appreciate the positive feedback on the video.

Oh, by the way, the test is next week.

The Dark Wraith will find out how many of those 42 people were taking good notes.

Good evening, Peter of Lone Tree.

Although the CDS mess will cause some rocking of the Good Ship LoliFed, it's fairly minor stuff in the grand scheme of things: the whole $60 trillion isn't going to disappear; and besides, the whole $60 trillion was sort of a figment of imaginative valuation, anyway. It was paper when it was $60 trillion, and it will be nothing more or less than paper when it gets marked to market at about five to ten percent of that value.

That Good Ship is not really going to take on major sea water as long as it's just the exotic, marginal, and lower quality instruments that are heading for their dirt naps. The real fun begins when the core instruments—the higher quality secondary mortgage market paper, the ETFs, the peripheral public paper, including some munis, and other can't-lose deals—head for the drink.

Will it go that far?

Naw. Not all the way.

Not, at least, until Mr. Bush is out of office and one of the two incompetents running to replace him has a chance to sit down and notice the rising water getting his throne in the Oval Office soaking wet.

The Dark Wraith cannot help but smile at the irony of a Republican or a Democrat paying the price for his party's refusal to deal with Mr. Bush years ago.

Which one will be the last to admit it?

I'm sure a few of us will have to review before the test.

Good afternoon, trog.

I need to make a correction to something I wrote above: I noted that 42 people had watched this video. In my defense, that was the number I saw in the report for my video account at Google Video.

As of late last night, however, Google Video was reporting that no one had ever watched it.

Not a single person.

I knew I should have done that lecture in the nude.

The Dark Wraith forgot to consider mass market appeal.

Mebbe I'll just go back to the mp3s. HA!

The only pertinent info from a NYTimes article about Sweeney of the AFL_CIO having a problem with Obama's new Economics aide:

Mr. Furman emphatically agreed. “I am not here to tell Senator Obama what to think about Wal-Mart,” he said, “but to help him implement his ideas, and they are ideas I share, like universal health insurance, progressive taxation and not privatizing Social Security.”

"I knew I should have done that lecture in the nude."

Well, yes. Now that would do a lot to focus concentration…

...on the teacher! ;-)

Good evening, Dark Wraith.

Since Google uploaded so painlessly, they had to leave something out. The statistical reporting component must have been the piece they had to omit.

So, anyway, I started to watch your video the other day. I didn't watch all of it, thinking I'd catch up another day. When I read in the comment section that you did part of it in the nude, I decided to finish watching.

Imagine my annoyance to find that I had misread your comment! Oh, well. I enjoyed it, anyway. By the way, Helga was my grandmother's name. Of course, she wasn't Helga the Big. She was a very small lady.