| Tonight on The Daily Show, Bond...James Bond. As in Daniel Craig, the latest tall, strapping British guy to play 007. Tonight on The Colbert Report, Niall Ferguson, author of The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World. |
A quick programming note: Our beloved hostess-with-the-mostest TiaRachel is taking a few days off to say goodbye to her beloved Catkin, who's suffering from end-stage renal failure. I'm taking over for tonight, but I have other diary obligations tomorrow, so if someone would step up and volunteer I'd appreciate it. Rachel will be back as soon as she's ready.
Bond. James Bond. And he was also in The Golden Compass and The Young Indiana Jones and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. But now he's just Bond. Seriously does anyone even remember any other movies Timothy Dalton or Roger Moore were in? Once you're Bond, you're just...Bond. It's okay though...he's the highest-paid actor in Britain and was nominated for a BAFTA award for his portrayal of the wily British intelligence operative, so I'm sure he's okay with the whole thing
Anyway, he's on TDS promoting his new movie Defiance. The blurb on IMDB says it's about three Jewish brothers who escape into the forest in Belarus and attempt to survive and outrun the Nazis. For what it's worth, the other brothers are played by Liev Schrieber and Jamie Bell of Billy Eliot fame. One of these things is not like the others...one of these things doesn't belong.
|
In all this bailout and financial crisis nonsense we've heard endlessly about how Americans don't save enough money, how our national savings rate is something like 1-2%, and how it's the end of the world because a) we're living outside our means, and b) if we lose our jobs we have no savings to fall back on. In his book The Ascent of Money, Niall Ferguson actually argues that China and Japan have created a "savings glut" and an insatiable appetite for American investment products (T-bonds), which has created a market full of cheap and easily available credit here in the United States. It's an interesting theory, I guess, although it strikes me as passing the buck with regard to who's responsible for this mess. We'll see. Really heady intellectual interviews don't usually go over well.
|
That's all I've got. Chat amongst yourselves. Tomorrow we're back with Fareed Zakaria (oh joy oh rapture) and Alan Khazel from Be The Change, Inc.