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

O Pioneers!

It is hard not to think of Nebraska without thinking of its greatest writer.  Here is a marvelous piece by Capote, Remembering Willa Cather . I remember seeing a stage production of O Pioneers! and being deeply moved by its raw emotions.  I had read My Antonia before, and soon found myself hooked, like Capote was by the simple elegance of her prose and the way she was able to evoke so many feelings through her characters.  Much of it came from the fact that she had lived those experiences herself. Her father dragged the family from Virginia to Nebraska in 1883, when it was still a young state, settling in the town of Red Cloud. named after one of the great Oglala chiefs.  Red Cloud was still alive at the time, living on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, in the aftermath of the "Great Sioux Wars" of 1876-77.  I don't know whether Cather took any interest in the famous chief, although it is hard to imagine not.  Upon his death in 1909, he was eulogi

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, noting the gro

Colonel

Now with Colonel Roosevelt , the magnum opus is complete. And it deserves to stand as the definitive study of its restless, mutable, ever-boyish, erudite and tirelessly energetic subject. Mr. Morris has addressed the toughest and most frustrating part of Roosevelt’s life with the same care and precision that he brought to the two earlier installments. And if this story of a lifetime is his own life’s work, he has reason to be immensely proud.  -- Janet Maslin -- NY Times . Let the discussion begin!