Are you Born again?

[ddeclue]

As in Brooksley E. Born?



I watched Frontline's "The Warning" last night and it was like watching Admiral Kimmel and General Short try to explain why they parked all the financial battleships and airplanes in neat rows close together.

:nuke:

On second thought Kimmel and Short didn't have the kind of inside info and connections that Geithner and Summers had so I'll have to cut the the Admiral and the General at least a little slack.

Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers on the other hand ought to be summarily fired and investigated for their connections to Wall Street banks!

I'd demand we fire Alan Greenspan too but he's out now anyways.

:argh:

Brooksley is my new hero of the week and I'd love to be able to buy a t-shirt with her picture saying "I'm a Born again Common Sense Economist".

:applause:

We have to put an END to derivatives - 360 TRILLION dollars of phony baloney monopoly money is more than the entire accumulated actual wealth of the entire world since the beginning of time.

If you haven't seen this, you need to:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/warning/view/

"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 -- 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?"

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 Larry Summers. He says, "You're going to cause the worst financial crisis since the end of World War II."... 13 bankers in his office who informed him of this. Stop, right away. No more.'"

....

snip


http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/warning/view/

[Autumn]

1. #5 Now that woman

should definitely be in the Administration.

[ddeclue]

5. +360 TRILLION..

:rofl:

[LeftHander]

2. More like rode hard and put up wet....and twice baked....nt

[madmax]

3. Frontline was amazing.

Hope Rachel, Ed, Dylan or Olbermann make her a household name. People NEED to know about this courageous woman, who knew too much.

[ddeclue]

4. I'm doing MY part to make her a household name... I'm going to bring her up with Congressman Grayson

next time he's back in town at a party event.

[madmax]

15. Good on you!!

I've been emailing the link to friends and foe ;) Now, I'll sit back and wait for the shitstorm to hit.

[barbtries]

6. bookmarked

i'll watch it this evening, thanks

[Bigmack]

7. All-star lineup....

Remember that game that kids play. "If you could put together a baseball team from all times and all teams, who would be on it?"

Born, certainly, and Elisabeth Warren, and Marcy Kaptur, and Barbara Jordan, and .....

[ddeclue]

12. Which is what Greenspan, Geithner and Summers thought THEY were..

:rofl:

[philly_bob]

8. And Greenspan admitted he was wrong!

How many public figures ever do that? McNamara over Vietnam is the only one that comes to mind.

In my mind, Greenspan gets points for honesty, after 40-years of delusion.

[ddeclue]

9. and like McNamara he only realized his mistake after a monumental catastrophe.

I saw the Fog of War and it was like watching an interview with some former SS officer in Argentina in 1965. Very clinical, very dispassionate, very creepy. McNamara is very creepy. I wonder if Don Rumsfeld will ever do a "Fog of War" interview on Iraq?

[bertman]

10. Points for honesty isn't enough. That arrogant SOB has brought suffering and homelessness

and joblessness onto millions of Americans--and peoples of other nations.

His "the market will regulate itself" bullshit was bullshit when he said it and it always will be bullshit. And he knew it. He was just too caught up in his own self-importance and "wizard" status to take a hard, honest look at what happens when financial institutions are unregulated. He had the perfect example to learn from--the years leading up to the Great Depression--and he had the perfect fix to the problem--Glass-Steagall--but he CHOSE to ignore both because of his adoration of Ayn Rand's bogus philosphy of free markets.

There is no punishment harsh enough for Greenspan. But I suggest that his personal fortune be taken from him and distributed to the poor and the homeless and that he be made to panhandle on the streets of Detroit for the rest of his life. And let his faux-journalist wife hold the sign for him.

Alan Greenspan was worse than the worst traitor who ever harmed America's security.

[ddeclue]

11. This is in the same category as 9/11 or Katrina,, arrogance and stupidity are a deadly combination!

:argh:

[philly_bob]

13. You're saying he KNEW his Chicago School stuff was wrong at the time?

I don't think he did. He was a True Believer in the Ayn Rand libertarian self-correcting free market. And True Believers don't have self-doubts.

I say compared to all the free-marketeers in federal government and private business who HAVEN'T admitted they were wrong -- I'm especially thinking of some of the tools who pushed Chicago School ideology in federal regulatory agencies and, as judges, in court -- Greenspan's admission of error is an extenuating circumstance.

I'll bring him a glass of water in whatever circle of hell he inhabits.

And that's all I'll say in defense of Greenspan.

I most emphatically do NOT disagree with you about the damage his soul-less, Greed-is-Good, foreign economic theory did to the American economy.

(Incidentally, I believe another Ayn Randian who admitted he was wrong after the crash was Judge Richard Posner.)

[ddeclue]

14. there's no fool like a blindly arrogant fool.

and Greenspan was certainly that.

[philly_bob]

16. We agree completely. Not to speak of the media that anointed him 'genius'. n/t

[Gin]

17. god...how sad this whole mess is...she is one strong female...and all the

players that caused it are still in the game with the exception of the "genius"..