FRONTLINE "Breaking The Bank" on NOW!

Tune in fer sure!

i'll be back when it's over.

The Credit Default Swaps and not the notion that the poor people who were lured into sub prime melted down our economy.

And anyone can watch it any time - the video will be at the website once it is aired.

Oh sure, they'll call it free market, or high stakes gambling or a thousand other things but in the final analysis these bastards were driven by more than mere greed. Just as they were in the latter part of the each of the previous two centuries.

They never learn and we don't either.

http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/20090616_Ellen_Gray___Breaking_the_Bank__tracks_big_merger.html

Posted on Tue, Jun. 16, 2009

Ellen Gray: 'Breaking the Bank' tracks big merger


By Ellen Gray
Philadelphia Daily News
Daily News TV Critic

FRONTLINE: BREAKING THE BANK

9 tonight, Channel 12.

TOM WOLFE dubbed them "Masters of the Universe," and unless you're one of them, it's hard not to feel at least a glimmer of satisfaction in seeing Wall Street hot shots humbled.

If only they hadn't taken so many down with them.

Tonight, PBS' "Frontline" follows up "Inside the Meltdown" and "The Madoff Affair" with its season finale, "Breaking the Bank," in which Michael Kirk - who also produced "Meltdown" - looks at the events surrounding the merger of Bank of America and Merrill Lynch.

Remarkable for its interviews with the principals - Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis and former Merrill CEO John Thain - "Breaking the Bank" takes viewers behind the scenes for the fall of Lehman Brothers and the subsequent decision by then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to launch a massive government intervention.

Assorted other talking heads include more than a half-dozen writers from either the New York Times or Wall Street Journal (not counting Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman, who also weighs in).

Interview by interview, Kirk shows how a Republican White House and a Democratic Congress in a few short days forged a relationship with the financial system few ever expected to see.

more...

about having written a letter asking the Fed to say they demanded a merger, to fool his shareholders?

I was thinking that the banking and the investment industries used to be the most conservative, cautious businesses around. Here was John Thane who was at Merrill Lynch "only" 9 months, or so, but managed to spend a million dollar or so, on decorating his office.

And I did not realized that B of A is now a southern bank that was established to rebuild the South of the Civil War. I've always thought that it was the same San Francisco bank which has been a California institution.

And it really did not make sense why the banks did not want the money. I thought that they needed it to make loans..