Before the Great Recession, “The Warning” (full documentary)

Long before the economic meltdown in the U.S. that led to the Great Recession, one woman tried to raise the alarm about the threat to the financial system. (Aired 2009)

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“The Warning” unearthed the hidden history of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression in the United States. Brooksley Born spoke for the first time on television about her failed campaign to regulate the secretive, multitrillion-dollar derivatives market whose crash helped trigger the financial collapse in the fall of 2008.

“We didn’t truly know the dangers of the market, because it was a dark market,” said Born, who was the head of an obscure federal regulatory agency — the Commodity Futures Trading Commission [CFTC]. Born not only warned of the potential for economic meltdown in the late 1990s, but also tried to convince the country’s key economic powerbrokers to take actions that could have helped avert the crisis.

The documentary also revealed an intense battle among high-ranking members of former President Bill Clinton’s administration and uncovered a concerted effort not to regulate the emerging, highly complex, and lucrative derivatives markets, which became a ticking time-bomb within the American economy.

Explore additional reporting on “The Warning” on our website:
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/warning/

#Documentary #UnitedStates #FinancialCrisis #GreatRecession #Economy

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CHAPTERS:

00:00 – Prologue
01:37 – Ayn Rand’s Influence on Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan
06:47 – Economic Leaders Under Former President Bill Clinton’s Administration
10:50 – Who Is Brooksley Born, a Former Head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission?
17:28 – What Are Over-the-Counter Derivatives?
22:46 – Why Some Economic Leaders Opposed Regulating the Derivatives Market
35:34 – Crisis Hits the OTC Derivatives Market
44:48 – Deregulation’s Economic Impact
52:49 – Credits

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