[MUSIC]

Hello.
I'm Robert Shiller, a professor at Yale
University, and this is Financial Markets,
a course for Coursera Online.
Right now, I am at Davenport College,
which
is one of the colleges of Yale University.
This course derives from an earlier course
that I had in 2011 on what
we called Open Yale.
It had the same title, Financial Markets,
but it was a longer course.
We've decided to condense it somewhat and
get the
key points this time, but expand it in
another direction.
That is to add problem sets and exams, so
that the
experience of someone taking the course
online is much more solid and
more similar to the experience that my
students here at Yale have had.
But I think that there is a problem that
in excerpting it down, we sometimes found
it, that some terms might not have been
defined as well as I'd like.
For example, in the sections that we'll
follow this
week, I, spoke of the, VOC, or Dutch East
India Company, and it wasn't defined.
Well I can tell you now, to help that,
that the Dutch East India Company was the
first, company in the world, that was
traded regularly on stock market.
VOC stands for Vereenigde Oost-Indische
Compagnie.
That's Dutch, and I'm sure I didn't
pronounce that right, but it was
just an example that I used to illustrate
what finance
does and how wonderful an invention our
financial institutions are.
When people in Holland in 1602, when that
company
was first launched, when they discovered
that they could trade
the stock every day and watch its price go
up and down, it developed a sense of
excitement and
possibility in their lives, and it led to
the financing of many more corporations.
When I gave these lectures, we were in a
period of economic
crisis.
It's been called the Great Recession.
It was the biggest world recession since
the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Among the events
which triggered the Great Recession was

the 2007
sub-prime crisis in the United States, the
2008 Lehman Brothers crisis, the failure
of an investment bank, Lehman Brothers.
And then in 2009 and into 2010 and beyond,
the European
sovereign debt crisis which originated in
Greece and rapidly spread to
Spain, Portugal, Italy, and other places.
These were the crises that launched the
Great Recession.
And these crises caused great
consternation because the,
the Great Recession caused millions of
people to lose their jobs, or lose their
homes, and, and, and find that their
career prospects were derailed.
And fingers
were pointed at the financial community.
That's the problem.
It seemed like the financial community was
the cause of our most serious problems,
but
I found myself thinking, yes, this is a
problem, and I don't mean to minimize it.
But what about all of the strength that
has developed prec, preceding this crisis.
The strength of our economies.
The world is going through an amazing
revolution.
Ever since Deng Xiaoping in China or Boris
Yeltsin in
Russia, we saw the development of
financial capitalism all over the world.
That development is real and important,
and it has
its ups and downs, it has crises, but
those
crises are manageable if one understands
finance.
So, I, I wanted to start with the first
week.
My impulse was to plunge into some of the
technology at the beginning, and then
leave some of the more
philosophical eh, forays into it later.
So the very first week [COUGH], I wanted
to, get right into, what I think is the
core
model underlying finance.
It's something that's called the capital
asset pricing model.
And this model is the model that
helps us understand how risk is spread and
diversified and managed, and it helps us
understand the really important
concept of leverage, which tells us how
ri, risk
can be magnified or reduced in very simple
terms.

It also helps us understand our own

individual investing decisions.
What does it mean to invest well?
How important is diversification?
And what does it mean really to diversify
anyway?
I wanted to start
with the capital asset pricing model.
Maybe that sounds formidable.
But maybe it should be because it is real
and important technology.
And that's what we're going to do at the
beginning.
Then I'm going to talk about, in, also in
this first week, I'm going to talk about
insurance.
Insurance is sometimes considered a
separate field outside of
finance, but I, I think it has to be
integrated
in with finance because it deals with the
same issues.
It's a somewhat different tradition, and a
somewhat
different jargon, but it deals with the
same
issues of managing risks and allowing
people and
organizations to get on with their goals
effectively.
Now in, we have an outside speaker in the
first week.
That is Hank Maurice Greenberg, who was
for better part of
a half century the leader, or CEO, of the
biggest
insurance company in the world, AIG,
American International
Group.
This company, unfortunately, took a hit,
in the recent financial crisis after 2008.
And that was after Hank Greenberg had
left.
The company was a spectacular success
before
the financial crisis and on until
Greenberg left.
After the crisis, it rapidly fell apart,
and in fact, the United
States government decided to bail out the
company to keep it going with
bailouts that set a record.
The government committed $182 billion to
bail out AIG.
I felt a little diffident about inviting
Hank Greenberg to come and talk to my
class of undergraduates because I thought,
i, it's a difficult time for him.
The company that he'd spent a lifetime
building up had gone through a terrible

turmoil.
But he agreed
to do this, and he spoke quite candidly
about what
happened in, in his life.
It's a little bit technical.
Some of you again, you might find that he
uses jargony terms, from finance that are
not explained.
But I think that you'll get the general
picture,
from Hank Greenberg, and it's a picture of
both
institutions and technology and people.
And it highlights, for me,
the really essential drama that underlies
finance.
Hank Greenburg was a man with big and
important vision.
He was driving a company that was setting
new standards for
its breadth of risk management, of risks
that impinge on people's lives.
But du, driving such a big company is
like, like a ship.
It could be either the Titanic or it could
be a successful voyage.
Nobody knows in advance.
And so, it, it left him with some life's
adventure.
I think you'll detect a little bit of
sadness in his voice
because he'd built such a great
enterprise, which went through such
terrible problems.
It's reemerging, and that's the hopeful
sign.
But
I, but I, I just want to conclude this
little introduction to this week with the
thought that
maybe I'm repeating myself a bit, but
finance is a very important technology.
It has a mathematical basis.
It has a intellectual underpinning that
makes
it a infrastructure for our, our whole
economy.
And I want this course to help people
understand this technology so that they,
they are
not buffeted by it, so they can react to
the technology and its
opportunities constructively in whatever
walk of life they choose.
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