The warning that went unheeded
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| Tue, 10-27-2009 - 10:23am |
Who in the 1990's had heard of derivatives or understood them. Brooksley Born head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) warned congress & the financial powers that be of a future financial melt-down. Needless to say they didn't heed her warning.
I'd recorded the program & watched it last night. Most enlightening.
Brooksley Born on Frontline Tuesday
“We didn’t truly know the dangers of the market, because it was a dark market,†says Brooksley Born, the head of an obscure federal regulatory agency — the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) — who not only warned of the potential for economic meltdown in the late 1990s, but also tried to convince the country’s key economic powerbrokers to take actions that could have helped avert the crisis. “They were totally opposed to it,†Born says. “That puzzled me. What was it that was in this market that had to be hidden?â€
In The Warning, airing Tuesday, Oct. 20, 2009, at 9 P.M. ET on PBS, veteran FRONTLINE producer Michael Kirk unearths the hidden history of the nation’s worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. At the center of it all he finds Brooksley Born, who speaks for the first time on television about her failed campaign to regulate the secretive, multitrillion-dollar derivatives market whose crash helped trigger the financial collapse in the fall of 2008.
Born’s story is well-known, but it will be interesting to hear her tell it in her own words. If you can’t catch the show on PBS, it will be available online as well.
If you have time watch the entire program, if not take a look at the Sneak Peek links below.
The Warning.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/warning/
"The Warning": Sneak Peek 1 PBS
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qP4d5paLECs
"The Warning": Sneak Peek 2 PBS



I can't say I believe much of anything coming out of the financial industry.
When questioned during the MSNBC special "House of Cards" many high end Wall Streeet
Greenspan's faith in the market
"I am a Brooksley fan."
Indeed.