Guess what? Reality shows aren’t that real. This news shouldn’t come as a shock. Yet it is still surprising—and worrisome—to hear about the latest scandal involving the home-buying show “House Hunters.” Each of the program’s episodes is presented as a real-life example of individuals walking through the house purchasing process, with lessons on making offers and estimating home values and renovation costs throughout. The problem is that apparently much of the program is staged, fake, or otherwise totally untrue.
The Hooked on Houses blog (hat tip: Consumerist) recently spoke to a woman whose family was featured on the HGTV program “House Hunters.” The program shows people scoping out three possible homes they’re considering for purchase, and at the end of the show, the buyers decide which home they’ll buy. Viewers get to “play along” by being voyeurs on tours of the houses, and by guessing which home the individuals will wind up selecting.
The woman, a mother of three from Texas named Bobi Jenson, exposed just how much of what’s shown on TV is fake. First off, before HGTV agreed to feature the Jensons, the family’s home search was already completed. The network accepted them only after they’d closed on their new home. Because the family was already done with the buying process, HGTV had to stage a fake home search to build the drama necessary for a half-hour program. Of the three homes shown on the program, one was the house the Jensons had already bought—and the other two weren’t even for sale. They were the homes of the Jenson’s friends, who’d agreed to help them out and cleaned like crazy in order to get ready for the cameras.
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HGTV also pumped up the Jensons’ back story in order to make the narrative more compelling. The family was buying a slightly larger house and turning its old home into a rental, but that story wasn’t sexy enough. So, Jenson says, the show’s producers “wanted to emphasize how our home was too small and we needed a bigger one desperately. It wasn’t true, but it was a smaller house than the one we bought so I went with it.”
Shows such as “House Hunters” are hardly documentaries filmed by silent camera people capturing the drama unfolding naturally either. During their house tours, directors regularly asked the family to do five or six takes for each “scene.”
After Jenson’s admissions became public HGTV released a statement, which doesn’t claim that any of the allegations are false:
“We’ve learned that the pursuit of the perfect home involves big decisions that usually take place over a prolonged period of time — more time than we can capture in 30 minutes of television. However, with a series like House Hunters, HGTV viewers enjoy the vicarious and entertaining experience of choosing a home — from establishing a budget, to touring properties and weighing the pros and cons of each one. We’re making a television show, so we manage certain production and time constraints, while honoring the home-buying process.”
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The key phrase here is: “We’re making a television show.” This is first and foremost about entertainment. Does the program actually honor the home-buying process? That’s debatable.
Slate’s Marcelle Friedman laid out some of the arguments for why the show is misleading consumers, and what harm that can do:
Showing houses that aren’t even for sale at prices divined by its producers, House Hunters is presenting dangerous misinformation about the home-buying process and deleting all of the accompanying complications and consequences. It’s turned what is actually a messy, frustrating, often dead-end process into a seamless (and perhaps necessary) path toward fulfillment.
A “messy, frustrating, often dead-end process” does not make for a good, satisfying 30-minute TV narrative. So HGTV fudges a lot of the details and fakes a lot of the drama. The result is an easy-to-digest TV show with a beginning, middle, and end. What it is not is a true depiction of the home-buying process. This may be “reality TV,” but it’s sure not reality.
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“House Hunters” is hardly the only reality TV show that’s been accused of faking scenes and fudging the facts. Skipping “The Bachelor,” “The Amazing Race,” and other shows that are based entirely on manufactured premises, programs that purport to show business and consumer activities in journalistic fashion sometimes also stray far from reality.
The History Channel’s “Pawn Stars,” for instance, has been accused of faking scenes and negotiations. In one episode, a man comes in to sell a rusted old Coke machine—which the pawn shop later brings to Rick Dale, of another History Channel show, “American Restoration, to have it restored. What the program never says explicitly is that the original seller of the Coke machine was Dale’s brother.
The money-saving techniques shown on the TLC show “Extreme Couponing” have also been accused of being bogus. The allegations say that men and women on the show have used counterfeit or invalid coupons—lots of them—and store managers have gone after the shoppers demanding that they pay for the merchandise in full. None of this action is shown on camera, of course.
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The point is that, in the same way that dating in the real world bears little resemblance to “The Bachelorette,” couponing, pawn shop negotiations, and home buying are often quite different than what you see on TV.
Brad Tuttle is a reporter at TIME. Find him on Twitter at @bradrtuttle. You can also continue the discussion on TIME’s Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIME.
Executive coach: 'Finance is an amoral world, bordering on the immoral' - The Guardian
This blog suffers from an inevitable selection bias, as it can only feature those people in finance who agree to be interviewed. Hence, a second category of interviews with people who come into close contact with the kind of bankers who are unlikely to talk to me. Such as this elegantly dressed man in his early 40s. A psychologist by training, he has been working as an 'executive coach' for the past few years. He orders a coffee, then a glass of red wine.
"In two decades as a psychologist I have encountered perhaps half a dozen people in whom I could not detect at least something positive, if only a sliver. The psychopaths are a really rare breed. But they seduce the rest.
"I am sure your readers are familiar with psychological research comparing the personality traits of prison populations with those of successful managers. It found remarkable similarities; they are narcissistic, egocentric, manipulative … The research has been replicated over at least 12 different populations and the findings are consistent. Criminals and CEOs are remarkably similar.
"We're moving slightly beyond my field of expertise but a question I often ask myself is: who are the owners of those major banks and corporations who figured out that if they want to make so much money, they need to get a psychopath in who will then turn the entire organisation into a ruthless money-making soul-destroying machine? That's pretty clever, isn't it? To find a psychopath to do that for you?
"In youth psychology there's a well-known phenomenon regarding collective self-harming. You have a shelter that's housing, say, 50 boys. All of a sudden and apparently out of nowhere, they all start mutilating themselves. A wave. It's only natural for outsiders to assume that something must be very wrong with that shelter. However, research and experience demonstrate that all you need to do is find the one person who started it. Isolate him from the group and lo and behold, the wave stops and everything goes back to normal.
"Individuals have very powerful influence over groups, and it makes you wonder about banks and financial firms; what if they were like the shelter, and you need to find that one switch, that one person, to turn a whole group around?
"I am an optimist, humans are good animals, we have a tendency to get distracted and be led astray. As for this financial crisis, well, it's only a crisis. That's right, psychologists consider a crisis as simply one point in a cycle of growth; it's when the patient is about to make a breakthrough, and evolve.
"This is what's intriguing about the current financial crisis so far … Where are the thought leaders indicating the path to a new phase in our economic evolution? Who will augur in the growth moment from this crisis? I don't see new ideas coming to the fore.
"My clients are predominantly working in finance, aged somewhere between 32 and 47. They are the cum laude crowd who were always at the head of the pack. All of a sudden and to their astonishment, they find themselves being overtaken by less talented people; it's office politics and they don't know how to play it.
"Firms are pyramids, and a lot of talented people in their late 30s get shunted out. It's a typical bottleneck and my clients come to learn how to navigate it.
"Mid-30s is also when people are just before their mid-life crisis. They have more or less found out who they are, they can sort of see the limit of their potential, and it leads to disenchantment, disillusionment. 'I will not become the next Richard Branson', they realise. "At the same time they see that all good intentions aside, the world is tough place, and you need to be tough to survive and succeed. This is the age when you see people suddenly become serious. They have lost their innocence.
"My clients are from all over the world and they've come to London to fight. This is the top of the top, over here, and the fighting can be ruthless. My clients are the slightly more creative ones, not the standard pin stripe/porte manteau types.
"You asked me earlier what kind of animal the executive coach might be. Maybe it's a salmon, naturally inclined to swim upstream, against the current.
"I have worked in many areas of counselling, including at the very bottom of society; from illiterate heroin prostitutes to bankers. Differences? Bankers and others in the corporate world have extremely high intelligence. They think very much in transactional terms; how can this guy help me get what I want? My first consult is free, and when there's a click between us, I can see them smell a profit. They decide, if I pay this guy his fee, he will help me make much more money myself.
"They have little time so when I work with bankers I am less suggestive. I take charge of the process, lead them to where I think they should go.
"About a quarter of my clients are corporate but not finance. Is there a difference? They are all incredibly tough and everyone says their motivation is money. But when you drill down into what's driving people in the corporate world, other motives come to the surface. With people in finance, it really is money, I find.
"Finance is an amoral world, bordering on the immoral. Take the financial transaction tax. The idea: there is horrific poverty so let's levy a tiny tax and use it to alleviate that. But when I suggest to my clients this might be a good idea, I practically get lynched. No way, they say. They want to pay as little tax as possible, and that's it.
"As I said, amoral bordering on the immoral. Take the PPI mis-selling where essentially banks sold people insurance that was worthless. They get caught and the banks have to pay people their money back. Next thing you know, banks hire incredibly expensive 'consultants' to find ways to pay as little as possible.
"It's almost a perversion. The CEOs such as Fred Goodwin and Jamie Dimon and the like. They present themselves as to the outside world as posh and erudite and sophisticated; as supermen. But they are just like you and me, with similar needs and fears. We shouldn't fall for their spiel.
"What would shock readers most when they saw what I see? Let me think. How so many brilliant, arrogant, super-talented young people get abused, sucked dry, burned out and then tossed aside by corporations and banks. In the early days of capitalism it seems the game was to exploit the less gifted; miners, factory workers etc. Today it's about taking advantage of talent. People are used, then discarded. Especially these days with the crisis. Fear rules supreme. You can get fired any moment, five minutes and you're gone. Corporations fan out over universities making all these promises. But very few people make it to 'the boardroom'. That's the key concept for everyone, 'the boardroom'.
"One of the chief causes of stress is boredom. Now, those people on the trading floor, they may go through hours and hours with nothing to do. Another cause of stress is when the level of control you have over your own life is very low. Banks are managed very badly, in fact they are over-managed. Imagine you have lots of bosses and every week you're told to do your job differently. It can drive people nuts.
"For psychologists like me the world of finance is very interesting, if only in purely clinical terms. You're a CEO and you pay yourself £8m. Now, look at the kind of organisation you need to put in place in order to make that amount … It's almost dirty.
"It gets more interesting still when your company has failed on a range of issues, and at the end of the year you still pay yourself those £8m. There's an outcry but you say: 'it's in my contract'. Now, take a step back, how has that £8m become so important to you that you can't even see why you shouldn't get them? Apparently your need for the money is so strong you stop registering the anger you provoke.
"Those CEOs and managing directors at banks with their millions … They deserve our pity, really. They are the victims of their own twisted minds. And it will bring them down. Whether you are a paedophile or pervert or control freak or psychopath; sooner or later a twisted mind will turn on itself.
"For many years I worked with paedophiles. It is simply astonishing how vulpine, how cunning these people have become. The same with hard drug addicts; their brain seems to have taken on a life of its own, and developed into something so clever, so entirely focused on satisfying their needs. For those brains, lying and cheating become acceptable, normal even.
"When we treated them, or tried to, the key was to make them realise that they created victims, that people suffered because of them. One thing that struck me about this group of patients – we'd call them 'clients' – was how they seemed to derive immense pleasure from surreptitiously screwing people over, then getting away with it. At the same time they seemed to have a deep urge to get caught.
"The biggest misunderstanding about the people I work with? That they are going to solve this.
"The truth is, there is no system, there is no 'they'. There are just individuals."
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MONEY MARKETS-Spanish bond shortage distorts repo - Reuters UK
* Spanish bond shortage distorts repo market
* Italian rates rise but market still functioning
* Interbank cash rates fall on rate cut expectations
By Kirsten Donovan
LONDON, June 18 (Reuters) - A lack of available Spanish government bonds, due to so many being used to obtain funding at the European Central Bank, is distorting pricing in repo markets and causing investors headaches as they seek to cover hefty short positions.
As international investors sold Spanish government bonds this year, domestic banks bought them and parked them at the ECB in return for funds - particularly during the two recent three-year funding operations.
As a result, investors who need the bonds because of their own short positions must pay a premium for the paper.
When this happens in repo markets - where banks commonly use government bonds as collateral to raise funding - bonds are said to be trading "special".
Effectively, the investor who needs the bonds pays a premium to their counterparty in the trade - the opposite of a typical repo trade where the party borrowing cash pays the premium.
"There's some good evidence of a collateral shortage out there," said ICAP rate strategist Chris Clark. "Quite a lot may be being used at the ECB and the market short (positions) out there will be increasing the demand for specific bonds."
It is the opposite of what might be expected when a country's debt comes under pressure. Then counterparties are usually more reluctant to be left holding the bonds.
"The collateral just isn't there. That's one of the problems and the few bonds that are still available are highly sought after by people who want to cover their short positions," said Commerzbank rate strategist Benjamin Schroeder.
Ten-year Spanish government bond yields have risen more than 130 basis points since the start of May, while two-year yields are up over 2 percentage points.
That prompted international clearing house LCH.Clearnet SA to increase the cost of using Spanish bonds to raise funds via its repo service last month. Analysts said their trading desks had since seen volumes over the platform drop.
"It's a further segregation of European money markets, where banks are retreating from central clearing houses and going back to domestic clearing or bilateral agreements," Schroeder said.
As the euro zone debt crisis intensified this month, mainly due to worries about Spain's banking sector, Italian general collateral (GC) repo rates, paid to borrow funds against a basket of government bonds, have been pushed higher.
There is little trade in the Spanish general collateral market but banks are still able to borrow using Italian bonds as collateral, despite Italy being seen as vulnerable to contagion from worries about Spain.
Three-month Italian GC rates rose to 0.42 percent at the end of last week, compared to the Eonia overnight rate at around 30 basis points, according to ICAP. The Italian rate had traded below Eonia from the time of the ECB's second three-year funding operation at the end of February until the end of May.
"There's been a rise in Italian general collateral rates, both outright and relative to the Eonia OIS curve," ICAP's Clark said. "Despite a reduction in the amount of term activity that goes on, the Italian market is still very much functional."
RATE SPECULATION
Three-month Euribor interbank lending rates eased again, hitting their lowest since the second quarter of 2010 as speculation grew the ECB may cut interest rates.
ECB president Mario Draghi heightened expectations the bank could cut interest rates or take further policy action soon after saying on Friday that the euro zone economy faced serious risks and no inflation threat.
September and December Euribor futures contracts rallied to contract highs, pushing implied rates lower.
Markets are pricing in a 50 percent chance of a 12.5 basis point cut in the ECB's 0.25 percent deposit rate this year, and a 25 percent of the rate being cut to zero, according to RBS.
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