The true story of Wall Street and the Governments role in the Banking Crash of 2008. I'm not one that toots any horns for PBS but this story has to be seen!
Explains, Over the counter derivatives, the Black Box, Bankers Trust and lawsuit brought on by Procter and Gamble in 1999 that started it all, and Greenspan, Rubin and Sommers role in the whole mess.
And where is L. Summers these days (the guy who once proposed dumping toxic waste in "under-polluted" nations in Africa, the guy who lost a billion dollars of Harvard's money investing in derivatives, the guy who was being paid millions by companies recently bailed out by the taxpayer and whose executive salaries he is still trying to protect)? Why he's Director of the National Economic Council, advising Pres. Obama on economic policy. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Yep ....and they have been for 20+ years. Check out the episodes on credit cards and poison water. They exposed the dot com crash a decade ago. The problem with Frontline is, if you watch too many of them at once, yer liable to slit your wrists.
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I used to say "If you're not depressed, you're not paying attention". I've since changed "depressed" to "angry". We are all on the same heading as before. Nothing has changed yet. Tom
And what cracks me up, "these are the Smartest Guys in the World". The only ones that can make it right, yeah right!!!
There are smarter ones than can make it right. Too bad the previous batch couldn't be trusted.
I admire your optimism. Tom
On 10/24/2009 6:56 AM tom spake thus:
Got you beat by a decade at least. My old car's bumper sticker read "If you're not outraged, you're paying attention".
(Of course, my friends read that back to me as saying "If you're not outraged by the way I drive, you're not paying attention".)
And yes, concerning the new boss vs. the old boss, I say that Obama should change his slogan to "Continuity we can believe in".
I saw the one on credit cards years ago, it's remarkable. Somehow they got an interview with the guy who persuaded the banks they were doing credit cards all wrong, and they needed to drop their minimum monthly payment and increase interest rates, fees and penalties. Credit cards were originally for people with good credit, those the banks could trust to pay up promptly. But this guy had figured out the ideal credit card customer was someone who managed money badly and thus would *never* pay off their balance, they'd make far more in interest and fees on someone like that than a customer who paid in full every month. Ironically the card industry's name for someone who pays their balance off every month is "deadbeat."
I've seen the opposite.
The other problem is that they only telly you the part of the story that suits their subtle, but evident, biases. This particular piece is excellent. Curiously though, it only shows behaviors of denial and stupidity by the political right. To actually tell the story fairly, they should have spent time on the post-Clinton era, for example, and show the GWB administration *repeatedly* requesting reregulation of some aspects of the lending industry. Who said "No, everything is fine"? Why, good old Barney Frank - a far leftie lunatic. Like I said, it's curious and this end of the idiot spectrum often gets a pass from Publicly Funded Whiner TV.
You must have seen a different program. The one I saw showed the Clinton administration following the same program as both Bush admins. Who's biased?
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You're missing my point. The program shows stuff going on during the Clinton administration - both in his immediate circle of advisors and in the legislature. However it only shows Repuglican legislators in denial. What is does NOT show is:
- The GWB administration thereafter repeatedly warning that some reregulation was necessary and getting shut down by the Dem-controlled congress.
- Far *left* congress critters like Barney "There Is No Problem With Freddie and Fannie" Frank.
I'm not picking on the Left particularly here, but an unbiased presentation of this topic would fully show the following:
- The banks behaved badly
- The hedge funds acted stupidly
- The *government* - BOTH SIDES - acted to create a regulatory environment that encouraged idiot banking policies and unreasonable risk taking by borrowers.
- The *public* was greedy, expecting markets and real estate would go up forever.
- The government poured gasoline onto the fire by insisting that the very people that were instrumental in these disasters got bailed out because "they were too big to fail". This is code from political classes for "We want government to be in charge because it makes us all so very important."
---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Tim Daneliuk snipped-for-privacy@tundraware.com PGP Key:
I doubt it.
Let's face it, there will never be a totally unbiased view of anthing, ever. You say Frontline has a biased liberal view. Probably. OTOH, I don't see the conservative right exposing this stuff. Or did I miss that one, too. ;)
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I agree that once you get beyond mere reporting of fact, any kind of analysis always has some degree of bias in it. It just annoys me that people like Frank - who were fundamentally responsible for creating the insane regulatory environment - get a pass while everyone else gets blamed.
And yes, there has been some reporting of the lefty's insanities by the right-bent press. However - and again, let's be fair - there are far, far more mainstream news sources (+NPR, +PBS) that bend to the left, than the single successful right-bent news outlet of Fox. Why else do you think Fox is so very successful? The entire community of rightwingers have more-or-less only one network to consume, while the lefties (who are overall smaller in number) are divided across CBS, NBC, PMS-NBC, ABC, CNN, PBS, and NPR.
I assure you that I am not choosing sides on this one. Both sides acted *horribly*. I just wish people would figure out that government itself was instrumental in this mess - it enabled it, it ignored it, it made things worse, and now government is in bed with the same bozos that were part of it in the private sector. When folks wake up to this, perhaps they won't be so quick to sign up for "more government is the answer".
Agree with most of what's been written in this POST. All are to blame. The sad fact, we are still pawns in a much bigger game that make us expendable to the rest of the chess board. OBTW this is change we can believe in?
Absurd on the face of it.
There can be no doubt. Anyone who thinks pure capitalism does not require regulation is adled.
They've ALWAYS been in bed. Do you honestly believe $$$ has never influenced politics?
Well, that's pretty much the crux of it, isn't it. When people wake up! Like you said, the people who expected real estate to continue to rise indefinitely, are just as much at fault. Bingo! Greed will out.
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On 10/25/2009 4:17 AM Maxwell Lol spake thus:
Dang! Of course you have: how did I forget to type "not" there?
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