the brilliant steampunk jeweler whose work I've featured here before, has a new TV show in more than five years that I would actually put my butt on the couch for, every week, without fail. Leverage is an hour-long tensely plotted, technologically literate heist/caper show whose likable, flawed, comedic foursome of infiltration specialists are well-cast, funny, and given some damned good lines. The direction and camerawork is distinctive and fearsomely great: this show feels like a graphic novel (in a good way) -- that fast-moving, highly visual, stylized thing that the Wachowskis got so right in the first place).
Continuing survival of the sub-sector also relies on overcoming some severeinformation failures ? absence, uncertainty, asymmetry, and communicationproblems. These have produced many examples of both opportunism and adverseselection, with trading bringing uncertainty, risk and negative consequences. Asexpected, these seem likely to have suppressed real-money trading well below its"natural" level, and to have induced sellers into (potentially-hollow) assertions abouttheir trustworthiness. Because of its virtuality, though, real-money trading has seenonly a little of the localisation and intermediation one might otherwise expect in thepresence of such information failures.
