Max Keiser
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Max Keiser is an inventor, a podcaster, broadcaster and financial journalist. He is a regular presenter for Al Jazeera English and is host of the popular podcast, Karmabanque Radio, a daily look at what today's market prices are telling us tomorrow's political news will be. He also hosts the weekly The Truth About Markets on Resonance FM in London every Saturday night.
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[edit] Background
Max was born and raised in Westchester County, New York.
At the age of 18, he hosted the weekly King Keiser show at Mamaroneck High School. The King Keiser show turned the morning announcements into ground breaking must see TV. It was directed by David Gumpel one of the directors to emerge from the Larchmont-Mamaroneck pioneering program of bringing television into public schools.
While studying at New York University, Max became a well known radio presenter at WNYU, where he regularly hosted The New Afternoon Show as well as "Comedy Hell" with guests including Alec Baldwin and Eric Bogosian.
After working on Wall Street where he witnessed the beginning of one of the biggest bull markets in history and survived the crash of 1987, Max retired to Paris for five years. While in Paris, he wrote a film treatment that was bought by Miramax Films. When the film, developed for Alec Baldwin, was put into turnaround, Max set about creating the Hollywood Stock Exchange.
[edit] Virtual Markets & A Price Point Called Free
As the New York Times pointed out, the Hollywood Stock Exchange (HSX) is unique amongst virtual markets for more closely mimicking the real markets. Max's design for moviestocks, starbonds, virtual mutual funds, and the virtual currency whose value is controlled by a virtual central bank has been awarded three patents . HSX is the world's first patented prediction market.
While co-chairman of HSX, Max presented a weekly segment, "Battle at the Box Office," for NBC's Access Hollywood. Max's segment caused the sort of controversy that often follows him when the major Hollywood studios threatened to boycott NBC if they continued to allow Max to predict that weekend's box office. According to E! Entertainment in an item called Hollywood Fights Access,
"The studios consider the predictions "research and development" information; if released to the public, the stuff can handicap a film's box-office performance."
In response to the controversy, Max was quoted in the Village Voice as saying,
"People are saying, 'Why declare a winner in the race before the weekend box office tally is even in?'-but the race started the second you began production on your movie. When a film goes into production it automatically begins trading on HSX, so all we're doing is giving long-lead marketing awareness to movies in a way that didn't exist before."
And in Variety as saying,
"I'm still amazed at the degree of convergence we see between television, film and the Internet, and this is a primary example of what can (come) from it. Right now it's really tough to tell who's affecting whom and to what degree."
Max furthmore predicted that the price point called free would ultimately alter the course of the Hollywood business model. Again, Max's insight caused controversy. A June 26, 2000 Variety item, For some, Internet offers free ride, the industry trade publication said,
"Positioning himself as a counterculture leader, the "Jim Morrison" of the Internet as he put it, Hollywood Stock Exchange founder and vice chairman Max Keiser said that the lure of free content will always win consumer eyeballs. "Everything is inescapably going to a price point called free," he said. "Your competition will always have something up for free." Keiser's comment drew the ire of just about every other person on the panel, including Kevin Tsujihara, execexec veepeeveepee of new media at Warner Bros., who railed against the notion that "Piracy.com" will be the victor if superior content is available on sites supported by advertisements. Others agreed, and pointed toward the ongoing traumas in the music industry, where artists are assailed by the Internet paradox: Does online attention -- legal or illegal -- lead to more or fewer offline sales?
The Village Voice's November 24, 1999 piece,Buying Stock In Celebrity: Will predictions incite a Hollywood crash? said,
But Keiser also glimpses a broader problem: namely, that the Man (old-school media systems like the TV and film industries) is trying to suppress the Internet's free information flow, even while trying to ride the online wave by dot com-ing everyone to death. "People want to be involved in entertainment in a much more interactive way," says Keiser, "and I think that the studios may be underestimating the sophistication of the audience a bit. But before Blair Witch Project, they didn't really want to think about it ... [Blair Witch] changed the rules overnight, and now studios are facing reality."
Also while at HSX, Max hosted a one hour weekly radio show for CBS/KLSX in Los Angeles.
[edit] Karmabanque & Monetizing Dissent
On July 14, 2002, Max launched Karmabanque. After the Seattle riots, or WTO Ministerial Conference of 1999 protest activity, Max smelled "a bull market in dissent" and decided it was possible, using his knowledge of virtual markets and currencies, to 'monetize dissent.' Karmabanque introduces smart boycotts where the balance of power in deciding stock prices shifts from corporations to activists.
From June 2004, Max was invited to write a monthly column for The Ecologist magazine in which he profiled the idea of an activist hedge fund targeting the multinational corporation most vulnerable to a boycott, Coca Cola. The hedge fund was greeted with wide spread publicity and controversy. Coca Cola responded by saying,
"It's unfortunate that anyone would attempt to hurt Coca-Cola shareholders by waging such an effort without knowing and recognizing the facts."
Private Eye magazine said,
"Goldsmith's Ecologist has been championing a campaign by the organization Karma Banque to drive down the share price of the Coca Cola Company. Karma Banque, the brainchild of green activist, Max Keiser, organizes "smart boycotts" of companies it considers unethical, and, at the same time, sells the company's shares short, inviting hedge funds to pile in and do the same. Every time the company's share price drops, Karma Banque collects a profit, which it pledges to use to help the world's poor." That is, until Goldsmith joined the Tory party as environmental policy adviser under the Tory's, Sir John Gummer, chairman of Coca Cola's UK environmental advisory board.
Within months, David Cameron, leader of the Tory party was pushing Coca Cola as a beacon of corporate social responsibility.
[edit] Al Jazeera English
Recently, Keiser has been working as a presenter for Al Jazeera English.
[edit] Kinooga Finance
Kinooga Finance is a new finance site devoted to raising capital for the production of film and music content. Kinooga Finance employs a patent-pending micropayment technology to offer "shares" to "investors" in movie "stocks". The project reflects Max's longstanding involement in virtual currency development.
