Skip to main content

Follow the Money


This documentary offers a penetrating look into the financial crisis of 2008, chronicling the 28 years of banking deregulation that led to it and the fallout of the crisis.  Charles Ferguson won an Oscar for his efforts.    Here's Charlie Rose interviewing Ferguson.  Avrds supplied a link on vimeo to the full documentary.  Seems to work best on Google Chrome.  It is well worth watching.

Comments

  1. Cool! Thanks for posting that.

    I also just (finally) watched Recount last night. Better late than never.

    Funny, when it finished, the t.v. was on Ezra Klein talking about voter suppression in Philadelphia. HBO is broadcasting Recount several times in August. I wonder if their programmers "get" the similarities.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Just finished watching Inside Job. Since I've read so much about the subject, there wasn't much of anything new, although I do seem to have missed the folks from Moody's et al. claiming that their ratings were only opinions. And the professor--Mishkin--who left the Board of Governors for the Federal Reseve at the height of the crisis to revise a textbook, he was a hoot.

    ReplyDelete
  3. And as the director said at the Academy Awards, not one of them is in jail.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

The Age of Roosevelt: The Crisis of the Old Order

A quarter of a century, however, is time enough to dispel some of the myths that have accumulated around the crisis of the early Thirties and the emergence of the New Deal. There is, for example, the myth that world conditions rather than domestic errors and extravagances were entirely responsible for the depression. There is the myth that the depression was already over, as a consequence of the ministrations of the Hoover Administration, and that it was the loss of confidence resulting from the election of Roosevelt that gave it new life. There is the myth that the roots of what was good in the New Deal were in the Hoover Administration - that Hoover had actually inaugurated the era of government responsibility for the health of the economy and the society. There is the contrasting myth (for myths do not require inner consistency) that the New Deal was alien in origins and in philosophy; that - as Mr. Hoover put it - its philosophy was "the same philosophy of government which...