The Warning

I don't usually cross post blog posts, but in this case I'm making an exception

I've just watched an excellent documentary which provides another important angle on the 2008 financial crisis. It actually first aired on PBS in the USA in Oct 2009. The Warning.

Hat tip to Ann Pettifor of Prime Economics for tweeting about this.

Asked about the financial crisis of 2007/8 and the subsequent recession/depression, the mainstream - including those still in charge of the economy - often reply that we could not have seen this coming. But this was only ever true because the mainstream were just not looking. Instead, they had their heads buried in troughs of money.

Brooksley Born

In American a woman called Brooksley Born did see it coming and was in a position to do something about it. She tried, but was shut down by Bill Clinton's financial advisors: Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, Tim Geithner and the Fed Chief,  Alan Greenspan.

Born warned that the market in derivatives--bets and insurance on the future price of assets and bets on those bets--was huge, completely unregulated, open to fraud, and likely to cause huge damage to the USA and world economies if they failed. Evidence that they certainly would fail was already evident in 1994 because of law suits brought by Proctor & Gamble and others against the hedge fund that lost their money in risky investments in derivatives. Banks were massively invested in the derivatives market. In 2008 this market was worth USD500 trillion. For perspective the UK's annual GDP is about USD2 trillion.

Greenspan was an disciple and acolyte of Ayn Rand. He did not believe in the necessity of pursuing fraud prosecution because "the market would sort it out". The others were like-minded. They shut Born down and made it impossible for her to continue in her role. The argued vociferously and repeatedly against any regulation of financial markets.

Greenspan retired in 2006. Then in 2007, Lehman Brothers went bankrupt. In 2008 the Great Financial Crash happened. Later, Greenspan recanted his free market ideology during a senate hearing. But does not seem to have been help culpable for this costly errors.

Rubin took over City Bank in time for it to be bailed out by the US tax payers because of it's reckless gambling in derivatives.

Obama's financial advisors are... Larry Summers and Tim Geitner. So we know that Summers and Geitner basically facilitated the financial crisis and they are the economic advisors to the President.

One of the problems for Hillary Clinton is that she is associated with this crowd of losers who wrecked the economy and walked away from it unscathed, like drunks who walk away unharmed from the multiple car pile they caused.

Brooksley Born is a name that ought to go down in history.


Further Reading

The Great American Bubble Machine (2010). Rolling Stone Magazine. "From tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression -- and they're about to do it again."

 The Woman Greenspan, Rubin & Summers Silenced (2009) The Nation.