Anyone who didn't catch "The Warning" on Frontline....

[Robeson]

...be sure and check it out. They're replaying it on Frontline tonight

[niceypoo]

1. What is the topic?

[Robeson]

4. From the description....

..."Early warnings of the economic meltdown are traced to the 1990's, when regulation of the emerging derivatives markets failed to occur."

The show starts off by recounting how Alan Greenspan was a disciple of Ayn Rand. And goes from there. A must watch.

[Make7]

7. Brooksley Born of the CFTC warning about dangers of derivatives in the '90's.

 

"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?"

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.


http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/warning/etc/synopsis.html

[sharesunited]

2. What's it about?

[marmar]

3. PBS here in Detroit is showing "Digital Nation" on Frontline tonight.

nt

[marmar]

8. OK, the PBS 2 channel on cable is showing "The Warning"

nt

[gateley]

5. For those of us who CAN'T check it out, could you give us an idea of the topic?

Maybe even a recap?

[Robeson]

6. See post #4. Maybe it can be seen on their website if you can't get it locally.

[ellenfl]

9. fwiw, it's a repeat . . . but worth the look if you did not see it the first time.

it centers on brooksley born and her attempts back in the 90s(?) at warning the establishment of the coming financial meltdown. of course, she was ignored by all the greedheads.

she should be on the tv every day saying 'i told you so'.

ellen fl

[subterranean]

10. You can also watch it online

here:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/warning/view/?utm_campaign=homepage&utm_medium=proglist&utm_source=proglist