thom hartmann discussing "the warning" on frontline.

"In the devastating aftermath of the economic meltdown, FRONTLINE sifts through the ashes for clues about why it happened and examines critical moments when it might have gone much differently. Looking back into the 1990s, veteran FRONTLINE producer/director Michael Kirk (Inside the Meltdown, Breaking the Bank) discovers early warnings of the crash, reveals an intense battle among high-ranking members of the Clinton administration and uncovers a concerted effort not to regulate the emerging, highly-complex and lucrative derivatives markets that would become the ticking time bomb within the American economy."
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/warning/

She could NOT know anything

Very accurate comparison. God I hope he doesn't fly on any small airplanes. :scared:

in the 90's to fix this problem is disturbing.

snip>>>

"..."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.'"

Greenspan, Rubin and Summers ultimately prevailed on Congress to stop Born and limit future regulation of derivatives. "Born faced a formidable struggle pushing for regulation at a time when the stock market was booming," Kirk says. "Alan Greenspan was the maestro, and both parties in Washington were united in a belief that the markets would take care of themselves."

Now, with many of the same men who shut down Born in key positions in the Obama administration, The Warning reveals the complicated politics that led to this crisis and what it may say about current attempts to prevent the next one.

"It'll happen again if we don't take the appropriate steps," Born warns. "There will be significant financial downturns and disasters attributed to this regulatory gap over and over until we learn from experience."

moving on how to protect my family. The last few weeks, I have been trying to ignore the gnawing feeling of impending financial disaster coming down the tracks. That light is getting brighter and bigger. I want to get my money out of the market but I don't know where to put it. And my financial advisor is out on maternity leave - Yikes!

He said he doesn't usually watch advance copies of TV shows, but this one had him riveted to the screen.

And if Thom is astounded, it must be dynamite.

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/edcut/370925/the_woman_greenspan_rubin_summers_silenced?rel=hpbox

snip>>>

"...But more than a decade ago, a woman you're likely never to have heard of, Brooksley Born, head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission-- a federal agency that regulates options and futures trading--was the oracle whose warnings about the dangerous boom in derivatives trading just might have averted the calamitous bust now engulfing the US and global markets. Instead she was met with scorn, condescension and outright anger by former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan, former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and his deputy Lawrence Summers. In fact, Greenspan, the man some affectionately called "The Oracle," spent his political capital cheerleading these disastrous financial instruments.

On Thursday, the New York Times ran a masterful and revealing front page article exposing the culpability of Greenspan, Rubin and Summers for the era of dangerous turbulence we live in.

What these "three marketeers" --as they were called in a 1999 Time magazine cover story--were adept at was peddling the timebombs at the heart of this complex crisis: exotic and opaque financial instruments known as derivatives--contracts intended to hedge against risk and whose values are derived from underlying assets. To cut to the quick, Greenspan, Rubin and Summers opposed regulating them. "Proposals to bring even minimalist regulation were basically rebuffed by Greenspan and various people in the Treasury," recalls Alan Blinder, a former Federal Reserve board member and economist at Princeton University, in the Times article.

In 1997, Brooksley Born warned in congressional testimony that unregulated trading in derivatives could "threaten our regulated markets or, indeed, our economy without any federal agency knowing about it." Born called for greater transparency--disclosure of trades and reserves as a buffer against losses..."

The wise folks lost out to the astonishingly corrupt and ideological.

KPFA.ORG morning show, between 8AM and 8:30