Thirty years ago, on Aug. 1, 1981, MTV began to beam a budding art form — the music video — into homes across the U.S. TIME takes a look back at the most memorable clips from three decades' worth of music television
By Sean Gregory
TIME follows bobsled driver Steve Holcomb and his teammates as they train for the winter Olympics in Vancouver. The U.S. four-man crew is currently ranked number one in the world.
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/video/player/0,32068,58142566001_1949010,00.html#ixzz0bwHCs3T1
While on the phone with his son 16 years ago, Pablo Escobar stayed on the line just long enough for Colombian police to trace the call. Minutes later, the world's most violent and notorious drug lord was gunned down on a Medellín rooftop. Fearing for their lives, Escobar's wife, son and daughter sought safety in exile, but most nations shut their doors. After stopovers in Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, South Africa and Mozambique — a whirlwind on par with the deposed Shah of Iran's desperate 1979 world tour — the widow and her children finally entered Argentina as tourists on Christmas Eve 1994. They've lived relatively quiet lives in Buenos Aires ever since.
But the son on the phone on that fatal day is breaking his silence. Now an architect and industrial designer, Juan Pablo Escobar, 32, has changed his legal name to Sebastián Marroquín to avoid scrutiny and notoriety. He is, nevertheless, emerging as the central character in a documentary about his father's brutal legacy, Los Pecados de mi Padre (The Sins of My Father). The film shows Marroquín returning to Colombia to renounce Escobar's violent legacy and apologize to the families of some of the victims. "I wanted to do something positive that would help Colombian society," Marroquín told TIME in a telephone interview. "I wanted to show the errors of getting involved in drug trafficking." (See the tale of Pablo Escobar's son.)
Some observers wonder about the value of an apology from the son of the perpetrator of the crimes and not the criminal himself. But the film's Argentine director, Nicolás Entel, says the point is to promote reconciliation in Escobar's homeland. "Colombia is a nation in which cycles of violence can continue from generation to generation," he says. "If you do something to me, my family members will look for your family members ... So [the film] has the value of saying, 'It stops here. We are not going to inherit our parents' hatred.' " (See how police tracked and killed Pablo Escobar.)
Among the documentary's highlights are emotional meetings between Marroquín and the son of one of his father's most famous victims: Colombian Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara, who was killed in 1984. Lara's son, also named Rodrigo Lara, is a Colombian senator. He was just 8 years old when he helped bodyguards bring his bullet-riddled father to the hospital. Still bitter about the assassination, he was skeptical about Marroquín. But after receiving a gracious letter from drug lord's son, he met Marroquín in a Buenos Aires suburb and the two ended up embracing. (See a 1990 TIME story on the ferocious war against Pablo Escobar.)
In the film, which premieres this month in the Argentine city of Mar del Plata, Marroquín also meets with the three sons of Luis Carlos Galán, a charismatic presidential candidate whose public denouncements of Escobar prompted the kingpin to order his death in 1989. Marroquín says the meeting with the Galáns was more nerve-racking than the time when he, as a teenager in Medellín, was summoned by pistol-packing leaders of a rival cartel. (At the time, he made out his will beforehand.) "I felt 10 times more afraid, even though I knew that no one was going to hurt me physically," he said, "because I felt an enormous responsibility [to the Galán family.]"
At first, Carlos Fernando Galán, the slain politician's youngest son, wondered if his father would approve of the meeting. But he kept reminding himself that no one chooses their parents. "My father always told us that the first victims of the drug traffickers are themselves and their families. And that's something I found when I met Sebastián Marroquín. He was a victim, and he suffered a lot because of that. And I thought my father would say that this is the right thing to do."
Los Pecados de mi Padre also delivers a poignant message from Marroquín to Colombian youths, some of whom still view his father as a romantic, Robin Hood–like figure and remain tempted by the wealth and power of a new generation of drug lords. "Marroquín knows his father was an evil man, and he doesn't want to be like his father," Lara says. "Coming from the son of the most important and violent drug trafficker ever ... He says, 'Hey, I'm the son of Pablo Escobar. Don't be like my father.' That's an important message for the Colombian people."
Marroquín, who has the same thick face and wide girth of his father, describes Escobar as a doting parent. But as the manhunt for the drug lord intensified in the late 1980s, the family was forced underground and Marroquín saw his father only sporadically. Still, Escobar encouraged his children to lead their own lives. "My father did everything to keep us separated from his business," Marroquín says. "If I wanted to be a doctor, he said he would give me the best hospital. If I wanted to be a hairdresser, he said he would give me the finest salon in the whole city."
After his father's death, Marroquín suffered from depression. Landing in impoverished, war-ravaged Mozambique as his family sought refuge, he contemplated suicide as he considered how far his clan had fallen. The family's troubles continued in Buenos Aires. Escobar's widow, now known as Maria Isabel Santos, started a real estate business, but her accountant learned her true identity and tried to blackmail her, Marroquín says. His mother reported the extortion attempt but was forced to reveal her ties to Escobar. Startled Argentine authorities abruptly detained Santos, who was held for 18 months on charges of money laundering while Marroquín spent 45 days behind bars. Escobar's daughter, who is now a 25-year-old university student, was also ostracized as nervous parents demanded that she be expelled from school.
After a seven-year legal battle, the charges were dropped against the family. Marroquín married his longtime Colombian girlfriend and now, along with an Ecuadorian partner, designs buildings in Buenos Aires. Still, his upbringing among fabulously wealthy criminals can show through in his blueprints. "He's a very good architect," say Entel, the filmmaker. "But sometimes you can see the way he grew up around Pablo Escobar reflected in his ideas. Because I would never think of designing furniture for inside a swimming pool."
The Big One
Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve in Alaska is the largest park in the country. At six times the size of Yellowstone, it is the meeting point of four major mountain ranges and includes nine of the 16 highest peaks in the U.S. The preserve contains three climate zones, which means that it has everything from giant glaciers to wetlands to one of the largest active volcanoes in North America — in the Wrangell Mountain range, pictured here.
Some Big Trees
They're world famous. The redwoods at the Redwood National and State Parks — in Oregon and on the north coast of California — are the tallest trees on the planet. Many of them stand more than 30 stories high. Up until 2006, the 370-ft. Stratosphere Giant held the title for tallest tree on Earth, but three others — the Hyperion (378.1 ft.), Helios (376.3 ft.) and Icarus (371.2 ft.) — superseded it when they were discovered in Eureka, Calif.
Not So Faithful?
If you're looking for a reason to trek to Yellowstone National Park, consider this: the geyser dubbed Old Faithful might not be reliable for long. The lapse between steam blasts has lengthened by about 14 minutes in recent years, most likely because of an earthquake in 1983 that altered subterranean water levels. At least four other geysers in the park have been permanently damaged by vandals who threw litter into the geysers' mouths.
Growing More Than Sequoias
National parks have been coping with a spate of unwelcome visitors recently — marijuana growers, who raise thousands of plants on federal lands. Usually tied to Mexican drug cartels, the pot plantations inflict considerable environmental damage and pose serious safety risks: they're frequently guarded by traffickers with automatic weapons and night-vision goggles (park rangers often arm themselves with M-16s as they scout for drug fields). In August, authorities at California's Sequoia National Park found a $36 million marijuana-cultivation operation just half a mile from a popular tourist site.
Be Alone with Nature. Really Alone
The National Park Service boasted about 275 million visitors last year; virtually none of them went to Aniakchak. The national monument and preserve in rural Alaska recorded just 10 visitors in 2008, mainly on account of the park's remote location in the Aleutian Islands, 450 miles southwest of Anchorage, and its abysmal weather. (The most visited park site, by contrast — the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina and Virginia — drew more than 16 million people.) Aniakchak is accessible only by boat and seaplane, which often can't land because of fog and wind (the gusts can lead to hypothermia even in summer, the Park Service warns). If you make it, don't expect much in the way of luxury or even a gift shop: the government has no public facilities on the 600,000-acre site.
An Indonesian woman gave birth to a 19-lb. 2-oz. baby behemoth on Sept. 24, but that was only the second weirdest pregnancy tale of the month. The strangest belongs to Julia Grovenburg, a 31-year-old Arkansas woman who has a double pregnancy. No, not twins — Grovenburg became pregnant twice, two weeks apart. Isn't that supposed to be impossible?
Almost. There have been only 10 recorded cases of the phenomenon, dubbed superfetation. In Grovenburg's case, she became pregnant first with a girl (whom she has decided to name Jillian) and then two weeks later with a boy (Hudson). The babies have separate due dates — Jillian on Dec. 24, Hudson on Jan. 10. (See pictures of pregnant-belly art.)
Dr. Robert Atlas, chairman of the obstetrics and gynecology department at Baltimore's Mercy Hospital, says he has never encountered a case of superfetation during practice. He says such pregnancies occur when a woman continues ovulating after becoming pregnant and when that second, fertilized egg is able to implant itself in the lining of the womb — two things that wouldn't happen in a normal pregnancy. Typically, hormonal changes prevent further ovulation and thicken the lining of the uterus to preclude a second embryo from attaching. Why didn't that happen with Grovenburg? No one's really sure. (See how to prevent illness at any age.)
Despite the rarity of Grovenburg's case, Atlas tells TIME the phenomenon shouldn't be cause for concern. Grovenburg's babies should behave much as twins do; in all likelihood, the second baby will be born slightly premature when Julia first goes into labor. Since the difference between the babies is only two weeks, the second baby will be nearly at full term anyway. Indeed, the last known case of superfetation had a happy ending. In 2007, a British woman gave birth to a boy and girl who were conceived three weeks apart, with no undue complications.
UPDATED: Aug. 5, 2009, 12:45 P.M.
Since this story was published, it has emerged that the photo in Michael Jackson's Stasi file showing him at the Berlin Wall is actually a shot of a look-alike, hired by a German TV station and good enough to fool East Germany's secret police.
Since the death of Michael Jackson on June 25, the pop star's life and history have become the subject of intense scrutiny. Now we can add a new item to the pile of Jackson resources: his Stasi file.
According to a report from the Stasi, the East German secret police, that has recently come to light, on June 18, 1988, at precisely 2:52 p.m., several cars arrived at Checkpoint Charlie on the West Berlin side of the Berlin Wall, and a handful of passengers emerged. One of them was Jackson. (See the last pictures of Michael Jackson.)
The King of Pop was accompanied by two West German TV crews and an unidentified woman described in the report as "approximately 25 years old, 165 cm tall, slim figure." The TV crews filmed Jackson at Checkpoint Charlie, and three minutes later he and his entourage climbed the stairs to the viewing platform and peered into the East. A photograph taken from the East Berlin side and pasted into the two-page report in the Stasi file shows Jackson in a tight-fitting dark jacket, his hands clasped, and wearing sunglasses and a hat. Next to him is the mystery woman in dark sunglasses and a sleeveless dress. A TV microphone dangles on the right-hand side of the photo.
As it turns out, the man at the Berlin Wall was not the King of Pop, but a look-alike hired by the German television channel SAT 1 for a broadcast that day. Since the reclusive Jackson refused to go out in public in West Berlin, Sat1 reporters decided to hire their own double and see how Berliners reacted. They hired limousines and body guards, fooling the public, local media, and, as we now know, the notorious Stasi secret police. The coup was so successful that it worked again 20 years later when Jackson's Stasi file, and the infamous pictures, emerged. This time SAT 1 nearly fell for its own prank. "We certainly would have fallen for the Stasi pictures but by chance a colleague was on duty who happened to be at the shooting of the Jackson double back in 1988," said Diana Schardt, spokeswoman for SAT 1 television. "We almost went with it, but then cleared it up." (See TIME's Top Ten fake bands.)
Jackson gave a concert that day in West Berlin as part of a three-day festival on the West Berlin side of the Wall. He was touring to promote his album Bad and was joined on the bill that day by Pink Floyd. And judging by the meticulous notes the agent kept, the Stasi considered it one of the most threatening moments for the security of the now defunct East German state. (See the top Michael Jackson items for sale.)
For weeks, the East Germans had been trying to figure out a way to prevent Jackson's moonwalk through West Berlin from becoming political dynamite for East German youth. These were the days of Perestroika, when the Soviet Union's iron grip on Eastern Europe was slipping and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev was becoming a source of hope for reformers in the East and the West. The Stasi was determined not to repeat the events of the year before, when East Germans amassed at the Wall to listen to a concert by Genesis, David Bowie and Eurythmics in West Berlin. As the bands played, the East Berlin crowds chanted "Gorby, Gorby" and "Down with the Wall," until they were silenced by East German security forces who beat them with batons and made scores of arrests. A short time later, U.S. President Ronald Reagan gave his now famous speech at the Brandenburg Gate, calling on Gorbachev to "tear down this wall." (See the top 10 Michael Jackson moments.)
Details in the Stasi's report on Jackson suggest that the Western promoter, the concert's sponsor and Jackson's management were more than willing to accommodate the East Germans' concerns. In the minutes of a preparatory meeting of Stasi officials, dated May 4, 1988, the Stasi notes discussions that it was having with the head of the West German company that was organizing the concert. The names are blacked out in the report. According to the report, the organizer "together with Jackson's management is willing to build the stage at such a height that it is not visible from Unter den Linden" — the boulevard on the eastern side of the Brandenburg Gate — "and to position the speakers appropriately." The plan also involved broadcasting the Jackson concert in a stadium in East Berlin with a two-minute delay, so the East Germans could replace the live performance with a videotape of a previous performance should Jackson make any undesirable political comments.
Watch TIME's video "Appreciating Michael Jackson, the Musician."
See TIME's full Michael Jackson coverage.
Why would the West Berlin promoter be so willing to cooperate with the East Germans? Possibly because the concert was sponsored by Coca-Cola, which had a stake in keeping East-West relations smooth. "The Coca-Cola company has economic interests in a relationship with the G.D.R.," the report says. "A meeting between the company's management and the General Secretary [Erich Honecker, head of the Socialist Unity Party and G.D.R. leader] is planned."
A crowd of about 5,000 people did gather on the eastern side of the Wall, according to a June 20, 1988, wire report by West Germany's Deutsche Presse Agentur news service, which is included in the Stasi file. It says that hundreds of East German security forces rushed the crowd in the early morning hours after the concert, and estimates that about 30 people were arrested. (See pictures of the young Michael Jackson in his own backyard.)
But though it's difficult to verify the accuracy of the Stasi report, it appears that the East Germans who ventured to the Wall that night in the hope of hearing Jackson were disappointed. Alfred and Scarlett Kleint, who today write scripts for German television, were not Jackson fans but were curious to see the spectacle. They marched down Unter den Linden, past the Soviet embassy, the streets full of people. Alfred describes seeing a lot of police but says the atmosphere was peaceful. He climbed partway up one of the trees on the median on Unter den Linden. A policeman tugged at his leg and ordered him down from the tree, but Kleint says he shook him off and kept peering over the heads of the crowd.
"He was a young guy who apparently didn't want any trouble on his beat," Alfred says. "He let me go. And off in the distance you could faintly hear music, not very enjoyable. And then we went home." (See TIME's full Michael Jackson coverage.)
Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, a historian at the government agency that maintains the Stasi files today, was a teenager in 1988 and worked as a doorman in East Berlin. He was also a die-hard Pink Floyd fan and determined to get close enough to the Wall to hear the concert. He wound his way through backstreets to a building near the Wall and climbed onto the roof from a window in the building's attic. Yet despite his efforts, he could hardly hear a thing. (See pictures of people around the world mourning Michael Jackson.)
"The wind must have been coming from the wrong direction," he says. "I was really close to the Wall and could see the Reichstag. But I couldn't hear the concert."
It's impossible to say whether the Stasi's fears of Michael Jackson were justified. But two decades later, Checkpoint Charlie is a museum, the Wall all but gone, and Berlin Mitte, the city center, has been returned to shopkeepers, restaurants and offices. Maybe the power of pop had something to do with it.
See pictures of Michael Jackson's live performances on LIFE.com.
(BEIJING) — China performs about 13 million abortions every year, mostly for single young women who experts say know little about contraception, state media said Thursday in a rare disclosure of sensitive family planning statistics.
The China Daily newspaper said the real number of abortions is believed to be even higher since the 13 million accounts for procedures in hospitals but many more are known to be carried out in unregistered rural clinics. Also, about 10 million abortion pills are sold every year in China, the paper said. (Read "China's One-Child Policy")
It quoted Wu Shangchun, a government official with the National Population and Family Planning Commission, as saying that nearly half of the women seeking abortions in China had used no form of contraception.
China imposed strict birth controls in the 1970s, limiting most couples to just one child. Sterilization and the use of intrauterine devices, or IUDs, for women are widely promoted — and subsidized — forms of contraception for married women. However, the policy tends to overlook the contraception needs of unmarried women even as attitudes toward casual sex have dramatically liberalized. (See TIME's China covers.)
The report said around 62 percent of the women undergoing abortions were single and aged between 20 and 29 years old.
It called the widespread use of abortions "an unfortunate situation" but did not directly say whether abortions were on the rise. No year to year statistics were given.
Wu told the paper that reducing the number of abortions was a tough challenge facing the country.
Peking University professor, Li Ying, was quoted as saying that sex education needed to be improved at the university level and that Chinese parents also needed to teach their kids more about sex.
The government says its family planning controls since the 1970s — including contraception, sterilization and abortion procedures — have prevented an additional 400 million births in the world's most populous country of 1.3 billion.
About 1.2 million women have abortions each year in the United States, which has a population of just more than 300 million people.
For decades, the French have relished any opportunity to mock Americans for their supposed childish Yankee puritanism when it comes to matters of sex. These days, though, France is experiencing its own blush of youthful prudishness as an entire generation of younger French women says "Non, merci," to the summer tradition of topless sunbathing.
Since France's summer vacation season kicked off in early July, the French press has repeatedly sounded the alarm over the shrinking number of topless women on the nation's beaches. As eagle-eyed reporters have made quite clear, the prevailing trend among sun-loving women these days is to use both pieces of their bikini. Le Monokini, C'est Fini! , shouted Le Parisien in its report from a Mediterranean beach. "Nude Breasts Are Less Trendy" concurred free daily Metro France. "The practice has become common, and therefore less compelling as a fashion," says sociologist Jean-Claude Kaufmann. "When the local baker takes off her top despite her 60-year age and sagging breasts, the gesture loses its social distinction as one of youthful beauty." Some note that the return to more modest costumes is in part a response to rising concerns about skin cancer. (Read "In France, a Government-Led Revolution in Entrepreneurship.")
But the trend is also part of a wider social movement by younger French women who are shunning the less-inhibited habits of previous generations. If burning bras and going topless were the ways French women of the 1970s and '80s demonstrated their freedom, their daughters and grand-daughters seem less comfortable with exposed flesh. "The values of our time are more conservative, traditional and familial," says Kaufmann.
A survey titled "Women and Nudity" by polling agency Ifop captures the mood. It found that younger French women not only have a problem with nudity — but actually consider themselves prudish. Fully 88% of the women questioned qualified themselves as pudique — a term that can mean anything from "modest" or "prim" to "priggish." And they aren't joking. Though 90% said they get naked with their husband or partner, 59% avoid being nude around their children. Sixty-three percent said they refused to undress around female friends; 22% said they considered a woman in her underwear already naked. (See TIME's France covers.)
With sensitivities like those, it's little wonder the poll found French women had strong opinions about public nakedness. Nearly 50% said they were bothered by total nudity on beaches or naturist camps, and 37% said they were disturbed by publicly exposed breasts or buttocks. Forty-five percent of respondents reported they'd prefer to see a lot less flesh hanging out in full view — male or female.
Those attitudes got even more pronounced with respondents aged 18-24. A quarter of women within that group described themselves as very pudique, and 20% saw any nudity as tantamount to indecency. That, sociologists say, explains the changing scenery on French beaches. Younger women disinclined to baring themselves make up the majority of female sunbathers; those still willing to go topless are usually older French women. (See pictures of sunbathing in France on LIFE.com.)
"There aren't any rules, but, yeah, it's true when you're at the beach and look around, the only topless women anymore are older," says Elodie, 19, as she visited an artificial beach along the Seine known as Paris Plage recently. Elodie pointed out that a municipal fine — and frequently lousy weather — make going topless at Paris Plage a nonstarter. When asked whether she went topless on vacation beaches — and what factors made her decide when she did and didn't — Elodie's reply was as chilly as it was logical. "All those things," she said, "are personal concerns."
The contrast with U.S. practices is hard not to notice. American women visiting France these days have few qualms about going topless. And plenty of young American women are only too happy to playfully flash their wares in exchange for a few beads. In some ways, the puritanical swimsuit now seems to be on the other torso — a new French squeamishness that will doubtless leave some Americans, well, titillated.
A man shows the scar from the removal of a kidney as he sits outside his house in the shantytown of Baseco in ManilaJES AZNAR / AFP / Getty
On July 23, a lengthy FBI probe into corruption in New Jersey ended in the arrests of 44 people, including two mayors, a prominent real-estate developer and several rabbis. But amid the bribery and money-laundering allegations, the element of the sweeping sting that grabbed the most attention was the accusation that Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, a New York City resident, had tried to orchestrate the sale of a human kidney for $160,000. The black-market kidney trade is a growing problem — the World Health Organization estimates that organ-trafficking accounts for 5% to 10% of all kidney transplants worldwide. So how do kidney sales work?
The organ market is largely made up of impoverished and desperate sellers, wealthy, ailing customers and predatory middlemen. Most sales take place in developing countries, where a kidney can often be purchased for the price of a high-end TV. In Iran — the only country in the world where organ sales are legal — a healthy kidney retails for about $6,000. The going rate is less than half that amount in India, which has an abundance of doctors capable of performing the procedure and destitute masses often unable to raise cash any other way. In January 2008, police busted an organ racket outside New Delhi that allegedly conned or forced poor laborers to relinquish their kidneys to wealthy clients. Investigators say the ring operated for years and included a doctor, Amit Kumar, who would use scouts to spot potential marks. Another kidney ring flourished in South Africa from 2001 to 2003, and black markets thrive in nations like China, Pakistan and the Philippines. (Read a TIME story about the debate over legalizing the organ trade.)
Buying or selling a kidney in the U.S. is much more difficult, not least because there are easier ways to make a buck. Selling organs has been illegal since 1984, and is punishable by five years in prison and a $50,000 fine. Even if breaking the law doesn't deter you, it's difficult to hoodwink a doctor into believing that a fraudulent organ donor's motives are purely altruistic. U.S. hospitals run donor-recipient couples through a series of interviews, including a meeting with a social worker, who checks to make sure that no money is exchanging hands and ensures that both parties understand the details of the surgery. Dr. Arthur Matas, renal-transplant director at the University of Minnesota's medical school, says that hospitals ask unrelated donor-transplant couples how they met each other, but that there is no "hard rule" or set of fixed guidelines to help authorities determine if the donor is receiving payment.
Donors also must meet an array of requirements before a hospital will operate. You must be healthy enough to withstand a four-hour operation. You must be free of disease — HIV, hepatitis or cancer will disqualify you — and, of course, you need to have the same blood type as the recipient. It takes an average of three months for hospitals to assess and approve a transplant. Kidney donation is a major commitment — you can't drive or lift anything for six weeks, and it can be over a month before you're ready to return to work. (See pictures of crime in Middle America.)
Rosenbaum would be the first person to face federal organ-trafficking charges in the U.S. According to investigators, he called himself a "matchmaker" who connected those in need of a transplant with those in need of cash. Rosenbaum allegedly found sellers in Israel, where a network of operatives targeted recent immigrants to the country. He is said to have paid donors an average of $10,000 for their services and charged recipients more than ten times that amount.
More than 80,000 people are currently awaiting a kidney transplant in the U.S. The climb to the top of the waiting list takes anywhere from one to six years, and the delay is both agonizing and potentially deadly — each year, some 6% of patients die while waiting to be matched with a donor. Given those grim statistics, some argue kidney sales should be legalized. Paying in the ballpark of $100,000, Matas argues, is a better economic bet than our current system, in which Medicare pays for indefinite dialysis treatment — which is both costly and debilitating — for nearly all Americans.
But for many people, the concept of a legalized market for human organs is repugnant. "Payments eventually result in the exploitation of the individual," Francis Delmonico, a Harvard University professor, told the Wall Street Journal in 2007. "It's the poor person who sells." But Matas disagrees, noting that compensating kidney donors is no different from sanctioning sales of other body parts. "People get paid to be surrogate mothers. People get paid for sperm and hair," he says. "People say, 'Oh, those are safe and replenishable, but egg donation and surrogacy are risky, and yet they're legal.'" A legal market for kidneys may still be a long way from being socially and politically palatable, but at least it would cut down on cases like Rosenbaum's.
Read about China's alleged policy of harvesting organs from dead patients.
It has been over a year since we published our feature "The 25 Best Financial Blogs." A great deal has changed. Some of the blogs on the list are gone or no longer have regular posts. Others have grown and become better.
This is a list of independent blogs. However, several major media outlets have excellent blog sections. David Gaffen at WSJ.com, Fortune.com's Apple 2.0 blog, BusinessWeek.com's Fine On Media, and BloggingStocks at AOL (24/7 contributes content to this site). Obviously, these blogs have a level of financial support that independent blogs do not enjoy. Their writers are paid salaries. They have greater exposure due to their relationship with larger websites. They are excellent, but really should not be compared with websites operated by one person or a small group of individuals. Nevertheless, they should be recognized for their own commentary as well as the exposure that they give to independent blogs.
Financial information on blog sites is not readily available. Most financial blogs are much too small to bring in enough direct revenue to support their writers. Some have newsletters, but it is impossible to know what they yield. A number run Google AdSense links on their sites to generate ad revenue, but, based on data gathered from a few financial blogs, if a site is not in the top of its category as measured by audience tracking sites like Quantcast, Alexa and Compete, it is unlikely to have enough revenue to support even one or two people.
Financial blogs end up being either labors of love or ways to promote small money management or paid newsletter businesses. It would seem to be a tough way to make a living.
Over the last month 24/7 Wall St. has looked at more than 100 financial blog websites. The list came from those blogs mentioned at major media sites and the largest aggregators of financial blogs, SeekingAlpha and BloggingStocks. We also reviewed the lists of "blogrolls" —favorite blog lists—at long-established financial blogs like The Kirk Report and financial commentary sites like Minyanville.
After we narrowed the number of financial blogs down to about 50, we tracked posts for several weeks before picking the final twenty-five.
Original content was our most important measurement: specifically, content that was well-written, well-researched and crisp. Blogs that were mostly aggregations of content from mainstream media did not make the cut. This meant that the majority of the copy had to be directly written by the blog's author(s).
Blogs that used profanity were also excluded from the list. It is well recognized that traders are a notoriously bawdy bunch. And, unfortunately, a number of these blogs are incredibly insightful. However, our aim was to create a list that avoided offending any of our reader's delicate sensibilities.
Anonymous blogs also did not make the cut. It is too difficult to understand the agenda of a blog where readers cannot figure out the writer's identity and potential motivations.
The final major metric was frequency of posting. If a blog had very good content, but the author only posts once or twice a month, it becomes too hard to follow without referring back to the same story and waiting for weeks for it to change.
24/7 Wall St. also looked at how well read the blogs were based on the number of other blogs that linked to each websites on our list. These figures were provided by Technorati, the internet's leading blog search engine. (Because Technorati indexes more than 1.5 million new blog posts in real time, these numbers are subject to change.) This is the one audience or traffic metric that is universally available for all the websites on the list.
Here are Top 25 financial blogs, in no special order:
1. Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis (7,903 links). Although Mish (aka Mike Shedlock) is not an economist by training, he adroitly gets into the thick of economic data. Mish uses observations made by those in major media, so-called experts and government officials and serves up analysis based on his impression of their relevance and validity. The author is not afraid to attack conventional wisdom.
2. Footnoted.org (598 links). The blog's author, Michelle Leder, digs through SEC filings and comes up with some of the best insights about the "hidden" comments found in 8Ks, 10Qs, and other government filings that rarely get as careful a review. This is one of the oldest financial blogs, founded in 2003.
3. Bill Cara's Cara Community (389 links) analyzes the capital markets, stock movements, and the economy with an eye to technical guides including volatility, cash flows, trading volume, and price performance and is prolific almost beyond comparison.
4. Infectious Greed (3,822 links) Blogger, Paul Kedrosky, is considered one the preeminent financial market pundits. His site reflects the perspective of a former technology analyst, institutional money manager, and venture capitalist. Infectious greed provides a running commentary on global markets, economic trends, and emerging business trends.
5. Bespoke Invest, also known as "Think Big" (6,112 links), is the blog for a money management and research firm. The site provides a combination of technical analysis and commentary on macroeconomic trends, major sectors of the stock market, and currencies.
6. Angry Bear (2,447 links) is the product of a half dozen Ph.D economists, an historian, and financial professionals. The writers provide individual perspectives on broad sectors of the economy based on their unique training. They look at topics as varied as worldwide trade and industrial production and US government programs and regulations like Social Security.
7.The Big Picture by Barry Ritholtz (11,223 links) has recently moved to http://www.ritholtz.com. Ritholtz is one of the most well-respected market and economic pundits and bloggers who manages money as his day job. Multiple posts a day on subjects as diverse as criticisms of the business press, digital media, and key economic indicators. An excellent job of using relevant and interesting charts, tables, and graphs.
8. Naked Shorts (833 links) covers ETFs, hedge funds, monetary policy, and current events. Bangs on hedgies and the accounting profession and its practices. Not fond of the practices of many US government agencies.
9. A VC (2,777 links). Long-time venture capitalist Fred Wilson passes along his opinions on new technology and how it converges with emerging parts of the economy. Wilson talks in detail about where he is investing his venture capital money and why. His Union Square Ventures has taken positions in new ventures including Del.icio.us, Feedburner, and Twitter.
10. SeekingAlpha (63,563 links), the grandfather of financial blog aggregation, also has its own editors and columnists. This is by far the largest collection of financial blog posts in the world. Readers who want to find articles from hundreds of sites get a one-stop-shop at SeekingAlpha. If it were not for this website, a large number of blogs would have almost no readers.
11. Clusterstock (1,613) links) follows and comments on business, the stock market, and economic news throughout the day. It has a staff of several outstanding writers lead by Henry Blodget. Articles by John Carney are particularly good. It is now combined with another strong site called Silicon Alley Insider.
12. 1440 Wall Street (1,216 link). Although the site is "intended for the institutional equities crowd," we won't hold it against them - it's still very good. Covers money markets, sell side, buy side, private equity, Wall St. research, and media. Strong analysis. Strong on multimedia.
13. The Kirk Reports (1,571 links). This is one of the oldest financial blogs and it has been consistently good. It has a number of articles which are simply links to other sites. Strong on stock analysis, market recommendations, and volume investing. Too bad some of the content requires being a "member."
14. Calculated Risk (11,057 links) is among the most thoughtful and thorough financial commentary on the internet. Period. Tears apart poor economic assumptions. Gets to the heart of the elements that move the economy and markets. Big focus on housing and economic analysis.
15. Abnormal Returns (1,009 links). Disregarding our own rules for what blogs should be on this list, this site is the only one that simply provides lists of links to other financial sites. However, there's a reason we're making an exception as these are carefully selected and come with good short intros. Links are regularly organized by subject.
16. Trader Feed (2,437 links). The author, Brett Steenbarger, is one of the most intelligent voices in the financial blog business. Strong on technical analysis, broad market commentary, and the psychology behind trading behavior.
17. Alpha Trends (1,046 links). Extremely strong technical analysis. Good video commentary which it claims is the highest subscription membership for financial videos on YouTube. Covers stocks, ETF, and index movement.
18. Econ Browser (6,597 links). Run by two professors, both with economic backgrounds. What readers would expect from academics looking at the markets. Indepth and often complex analysis of a broad range of topics from infrastructure to policy making to consumer spendings. More than any other site on this list, Econ Browser is not for sisses.
19. Peridot Capitalist (192 links). Written by a money manager, one of the oldest and better regarded financial blogs. Good corporate earnings analysis and looks at undervalued stocks.
20. Information Arbitrage (957 links) The author has been in the M&A and derivatives businesses for some time. Strong and rich commentary on current financial events, investment risks and rewards, and the current credit and economic crisis.
21. Maoxian (290 links). Strong pieces on day trading, technical trading, balance sheets, and ETFs. Strange graphics. Writer tries to be anonymous, but it hasn't worked.
22. 10Q Detective (277 links). Writer has been an equity analyst. Good at digging through government filings to find information for investors which is both helpful and sometimes amusing. Good place to read how public companies "game" the process of SEC reporting.
23. Ticker Sense (538 links). This site may be the most well known for its weekly poll of financial blogger sentiments about the market. Written by money management firm Birinyi Associates. Has excellent analysis of global economy and major sectors of the stock market. Use of tables and graphs is among the best.
24. Upside Trader (356 links) Good technical analysis which follows the market carefully. Strong charting on individual companies. Great place for day traders.
25. Carl Futia (133 links). One of the best financial forecasting blogs. Employs various technical analysis including some he has developed. Notable for his thoughtful and approachable writing. Posts very regularly.
Europe's single currency has come of age early. The euro turns 10 on Jan. 1, a milestone for one of the most powerful symbols of European identity. It has already endured a rite of passage over the past few months, as the global financial crisis battered European markets yet failed to fluster the euro. And, like any debutante, it has its suitors: a string of countries lining up to dump their national currencies and join the euro zone.
It's a remarkable achievement for a currency whose only global rival is the U.S. dollar. The greenback has more than two centuries of history behind it. But it wasn't until Jan. 1, 1999 that 11 E.U. countries locked their national currencies together into a fixed exchange rate. Three years later, physical coins and notes became available, replacing national cash in a massive changeover operation. (See the top 10 business deals of 2008.)
The euro zone is now 15 members large and has a combined population of about 320 million. However, many more people are directly affected by the currency, from would-be members whose money is already pegged to it, to countries like Montenegro and Kosovo, whose effective national currency is the euro. France's former African colonies also peg their common currency to Europe's. That means about 500 million people rely on the euro or euro-pegged currencies.
European Commission president José Manuel Barroso credits the euro for delivering lower inflation, lower interest rates and greater price stability, and helping to create 16 million jobs. More immediately, the euro is shielding member states in this time of economic turmoil, preventing a currency crisis in addition to the credit crunch. "The euro is sheltering businesses from the exchange rate volatility, which has battered them in previous downturns," Barroso said on Monday. "To put it simply, the euro works."
Before the euro, a financial crisis in Europe went hand in hand with currency woes: a run on weaker currencies, heavy intervention by central banks and finally a collapse of the parity system. "I've lived through currency devaluations, and they are fraught with anxieties," says Hans Martens, chief executive of the European Policy Centre. "But the way the euro coped with the financial crisis was absolutely great. You have a big island of stability, with small nations protected when the big waves became rough."
The euro's 10th anniversary will see the euro zone take on a 16th member, Slovakia. Eight other central and East European countries have set the goal of joining within the next six years, including Poland, whose political establishment dropped its longtime opposition after a recent run on the Polish zloty. The euro has found some other unexpected converts too, thanks to the financial crisis. The Danes voted against joining the euro zone in 2000, but they are set to hold another referendum in March. Iceland — not even an E.U. member — is pondering "unilateral euroization" after seeing its krona plunge nearly 80% against the euro in September and October.
And the biggest prize of all, Britain, is said to be warming to the euro. Barroso recently claimed that London is "closer than ever before" to euro-zone entry and that "the people who matter in Britain" think it should join. That may be overstating things a bit, but a report by research group Chatham House warns that as the euro zone grows, the U.K. risks being excluded from "deeper intra-E.U. economic consultation and coordination, including in areas of significant national interest, such as financial market regulation." (See pictures of the financial crisis in London.)
It doesn't help that the pound is wilting. Two years ago, one euro was worth just £0.65. Now, humbled by bank crashes, government bailouts and a collapsing housing market that has forced massive interest rate cuts, Europe's currency is within a pence or two of parity with the pound. "The debate has changed from a total fantasy in the U.K.," says Jean Pisani-Ferry, director of Brussels-based think tank Bruegel. "The political obstacles still remain strong, but it has changed the perception of the U.K. as the perfect system."
Pisani-Ferry says the financial crisis has been a defining moment for the euro, but he cautions against too much praise. The euro is still some way from dethroning the dollar as a global currency; just 27% of global foreign exchange reserves are held in euros compared with 62% in dollars.
And, he says, the euro's first decade has been characterized by budget rows and debates about the European Central Bank's monetary policy, when the focus should be on correcting big macroeconomic divergences, like Spain's and Ireland's recent (and ultimately doomed) property bubbles. "The euro zone needs more ability to act in times of real crises, or to prevent them," Pisani-Ferry says. "It is a slow process." But one that has come a long way in 10 years.
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