Say what you want about so-called “elitist” Ivy League schools, there’s no denying that Yale University is doing everyone a huge service when they publish their excellent, full-length courses on YouTube (GOOG) , through their “Open Yale Courses” program.
Case in point- Econ 252, better known as Robert Schiller’s Financial Markets class. The video embedded here is the introductory lecture of 2011, so it is still fairly contemporary. The full semester is available, meaning that there are 23 of these videos, each running approximately 1 hour and 15 minutes.
The 2011 course features a number of guest speakers include David Swenson, Maurice “Hank” Greenberg, and Laura Cha. One can also watch the 2008 version of the same lecture, which is interesting in its own right because it was delivered in the wake of the financial crisis, and also for its relatively more star-studded list of guest lecturers that include Carl Icahn and the famous/infamous Lawrence Summers.
The topics covered constitute a thorough and fairly comprehensive list of all the basic components of financial markets: risk and financial crises, technology & invention in finance, real estate, theory of debt, the efficient markets hypothesis, behavioral finance, oil & futures markets, and much much more.
These return-to-the-basics lessons, especially when delivered in accessible language by such a widely recognized authority, make these videos relevant to everyone, from the financially illiterate to the seasoned investor, and are as such highly recommended.
For self-education-minded readers, Yale Open Courses also covers other subjects, such as American literature (“Hemmingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner” and “Introduction to Theory of Literature”), African-American History, Physics, Philosophy, and Science, to name a few. The offerings are really very wide-ranging, and very much worth perusal.
