Frontline is my favorite TV show. I like the way they take the viewer inside places we'd normally never be permitted. (Deep inside.) And I like their understated narrator » Will Lyman.
Yesterday they released a documentary titled » Inside the Meltdown. One of the most hair-raising programs I've seen.
Many smart people (and very highly-paid, too) were so enchanted by the glitter that they apparently failed to notice they were undermining the foundations of our economy. (Or maybe they did notice, but didn't care.)
Sad. Tragic. Disturbing.
Speaks volumes about certain parts of our culture and its priorities .. where profit-n-loss usurp right-n-wrong .. and even common sense gets shoved aside .. when there's money to be made. These people give capitalism a bad name.
It wasn't like nobody saw this coming, or didn't try to stop it. The Chairman of the FDIC, Sheila Bair, was one of those waving a red flag far back as 2001 regarding a potential crisis in the subprime market. (That had to be a frustrating experience.)
If you play the video-excerpt posted on THIS page, you'll hear Sheila say (in her own words):
"For years there were bills in congress to try to address 'predatory lending'. They just couldn't get the political momentum to get anything done. And I think that's because everybody was making money. It's very difficult to get the political will in Washington to move when everybody is making a profit."
On THIS page, we read reports of Bernanke telling members of Congress things like, "After today, we won't even discuss the Great Depression, because this is much worse. Nothing like this has ever happened before."
The new term we learn is » moral hazard (or lack thereof) .. tho I don't see how 'morals' has anything to do with it.
The big day came on Monday September 29, 2008, when the Dow plunged 777 points, its biggest-ever single-day drop .. shortly after the government (suffering from bail-out fatigue) let Lehman Bros fail.
Watch the remarkable hour-long special » HERE. What a picture it paints of how close to the edge we live, and the condition of our (fracturing) economic foundations.