A Must See on PBS: Frontline: The Warning (full episode)

via TheBigPicture
*Brooksley Born, the first female ever selected to head the CFTC, was blackbailed by Greenspan, Summers and Rubin for all her talk of how the derivatives that Wall Street had created were about to blow us up if we didn't start regulating them. First, a little known fact is that a woman from MIT who was later scooped up by JPM and god only knows where she is now, invented the Credit Default Swap (better known as CDS). This little financial tool was largely responsible for devaluing RISK at banks, hedge funds and corporations. Second, Clinton's economic team, and make no mistake about it, Greenspan, while a PUBBY, was part of Clinton's inner circle, was determined to stop Born's rantings at all cost. Story goes that she resigned in tears and was blackballed in the industry. Now she is a GODDESS and you MUST SEE this episode from the award winning Frontline series. Hindsight is always 20/20 but this will rock your socks off. The Wizard (Greenspan) is to BLAME for this crisis. His hubris is still alive and well and maybe, just maybe, this will be plastered all over the place so he can finally disappear into oblivion where he belongs. CRIMINAL charges should be brought, at a minimum, hearings should start immediately. I will be calling my Senators and Barney Frank next week until they do something about getting this slime ball off the airwaves for good. See for yourself.



A sample
In The Warning, 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.

“I didn’t know Brooksley Born,” says former SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt, a member of President Clinton’s powerful Working Group on Financial Markets. “I was told that she was irascible, difficult, stubborn, unreasonable.” Levitt explains how the other principals of the Working Group — former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan and former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin — convinced him that Born’s attempt to regulate the risky derivatives market could lead to financial turmoil, a conclusion he now believes was “clearly a mistake.”

Born’s battle behind closed doors was epic, Kirk finds. The members of the President’s Working Group vehemently opposed regulation — especially when proposed by a Washington outsider like Born.

“I walk into Brooksley’s office one day; the blood has drained from her face,” says Michael Greenberger, a former top official at the CFTC who worked closely with Born. “She’s hanging up the telephone; she says to me: ‘That was [former Assistant Treasury Secretary] Larry Summers. He says, “You’re going to cause the worst financial crisis since the end of World War II.”… [He says he has] 13 bankers in his office who informed him of this. Stop, right away. No more.’”