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 $171 to $57 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 $30 billion to cover Bear Stearns …
Pt. 3 America’s Bankrupt Banks (Inside the Meltdown)
June 5th, 2010 | Credit
10 comments ↓
Wake up people. Capitalism is a Pyramid scheme, it always has been.
if you read paulsons book on the brink they knew there was going to be a crisis in 2007 but they were not going to come out and say that.
“I’m not an economist, but I do believe we are growing” classic Bush for ya!
Think about this. How many people would want to get an interview with all these people. The only way you get an interview is to make deals on how it is presented. With all these guys on board, I am sure that they had control of the content.
ya know Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac opened in 2003, the same year the US entered the Iraq war.
This debacle was likely engineered to fund war.
Note after the “crash” Oil shot up to about 170/B. Trying to keep the war funding up another way I suppose.
great vid! 5*s!
The religious of leaderships … belief … language of perfection decoration .. curtain shows of a free market capitalism … insensitivity of the needed .. go by the book indifferences
Mattessj you are right there was no way I could afford my house when I was spending 700 a month for my wife and I to drive to work.
it was the price of oil that accelerated the drop after bear stearns
if they decide who is allowed to fail, then they decide who is allowed to succeed. America WAS great because the market decided what was allowed and not our government, and certainly not an appointed central bank. That’s what it meant when we declared INDEPENDENCE. Financial independence is the only independence needed… the rest will fall in line.
it happens so fast, in the gwb days its all darwinian, you fuck up its on you. but is that the correct way to go. I don’t know, i think there were fucked from the get when they started doin this shit in 2005.
Leave a Comment