On Thursday, Sept. 18, 2008, the astonished leadership of the US Congress was told in a private session by the chairman of the Federal Reserve that the American economy was in grave danger of a complete meltdown within a matter of days. “There was literally a pause in that room where the oxygen left,” says Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.). As the housing bubble burst and trillions of dollars’ worth of toxic mortgages began to go bad in 2007, fear spread through the massive firms that form the heart of Wall Street. By the spring of 2008, burdened by billions of dollars of bad mortgages, the investment bank Bear Stearns was the subject of rumors that it would soon fail. “Rumors are such that they can just plain put you out of business,” Bear Stearns’ former CEO Alan “Ace” Greenberg tells FRONTLINE. The company’s stock had dropped from 1 to a share, and it was hours from declaring bankruptcy. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke acted. “It was clear that this had to be contained. There was no doubt in his mind,” says Bernanke’s colleague, economist Mark Gertler. Bernanke, a former economics professor from Princeton, specialized in studying the Great Depression. “He more than anybody else appreciated what would happen if it got out of control,” Gertler explains. To stabilize the markets, Bernanke engineered a shotgun marriage between Bear Sterns and the commercial bank JPMorgan, with a promise that the federal government would use billion to cover Bear Stearns …
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most people are stupid. just go out and look around. everyone you see is stupid. it is logical that the rich gets richer and the poor gets poorer.
I do not remember a time when congress pass laws to take money out of my pocket and give it to somebody else.
did Paulson write this show?
in my opinion it makes him look like a hero. He’s no hero in my opinion.
I say he was mad because his war money disappeared.
TOTAL BS. This is fiscal propaganda at its finest.
You must have a bad memory.
Did you catch that last line ? “All eyes are on Barack Obama to turn it all around”. Ha Ha.
LOL It was supposed to be sarcastic.
exactly this is the government stepping in to keep the rich rich, and if some poor guy lost his job and the bank was going to throw him and his family on the street the government wouldn’t give a shit.
You don’t understand. There are only 2 types of people. owners and slaves. If you are not one, you must be the other. Slaves have no rights to ask anyone anything.
WHy I got a feeling this documentary is NOT neutral?
i almost felt sorry for paulson. buahahaha…
Banksters or Gangsters ?
The biggest problem I have with this ‘documentary’ is it completely misses how the same right wing, free market ideology that Paulson et all espoused was what allowed the mess to be created in the first place. If regulations like the Glass-Steagall Act and leverage caps were not removed, if the banks were not allowed to operate in secrecy and keep this junk off their balance sheets and if the regulators were doing their jobs properly the mess probably would not have been created.
lol that was funny.
We’ve brought the world to the brink of financial armagedon, now it’s all down to you to save us, better not let us down ok! you better do your job properly!!
Captalism in the western hemisphere’s a funny thing.
how is this propaganda? This is just a documentary explaining what happened. What part of this did not happen?
Can you please give us a hint of what you mean by propaganda. This is explaining in detailwhat happened perhaps what you mean by BS is the very fact that the system they were running was designed to come this way eventually. I mean who the fuck studies the depression and yet avoids making a mistake like this. These people are not ignorant, they’re cowards. Quantitative easing will only postpone their cowardly acts
where to start? This doco is full of half truths and outright lies. If you cannot see them then I cannot point them out to you, for your mind is already made up?
Imagine a movie, you watch it and then you watch a version with commentary. Yes the commentary is truth and correct, all of the things the voice over highlights did happen, yet you are still watching an ‘imagination’ rather then anything that actually happened. Same applies to this film.
You can’t go through the 2008 crisis without showing this: /watch?v=HaG9d_4zij8
There’s better documentaries out there!
Fiscal policy has to do with government revenue and taxation. Monetary policy has to do with controlling interest rates, employment etc. These were monetary moves by the Fed and Treasury to prevent a systemic economic collapse. There was nothing fiscal mentioned in the doc. and for the most part it was just a play by play of what happened. If you want to discuss ‘why’ it happened that is another topic and documentary all together. But this was not ‘fiscal propaganda’.
It’s also logical that without some form of intervention, all the wealth will always eventually wind up in one place.
This has happened before and WW2 was the result. If anyone thinks that war was about anything other than money they are deluding themselves.
WW2 came about because the amount of free cash floating around for the minions to use dried up, and that fucks the system up big time. But instead of just giving the money back, the rich decided to use a war to redistribute their wealth.
The truth of the matter is that it’s precisely because of the unregulated free market economy that caused the financial crisis in the first place. Paulson had no choice but to fix his own mistake and ideology. Partial government intervention is always necessary and this crisis proves that it is true.This proves Paulson and former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan wrong that an unregulated market is the best option, it is not.
My questions is what’s to stop this from happining next time were is the american people’s safety net for wall street’s gambling.