The Warning

[Jim]

Great show on Frontline last night. Another indictment of Greenspans hands off policy, via Ayn Rand. What a friggin moron - he's quoted as saying that he doesn't think it's necessary to even have regulations aganist fraud because the market will take care of it!

 

Brooksley Born gets beat up and shut by by the financial wizards when she tries to regulate the black box of derivatives. Later, after the tumble - Greenspan admits he was wrong and that markets need regulation - Thanks!

 

Unfortunately a couple of these Masters of the Universe - Summers and Geitgner - are in the current adminstration. How can these guys be so wrong and have any credence?

 

"We didn't truly know the dangers of the market, because it was a dark market," says Brooksley Born, the head of an obscure federal regulatory agency -- the Commodity Futures Trading Commission [CFTC] -- who 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. "They were totally opposed to it," Born says. "That puzzled me. What was it that was in this market that had to be hidden?"

[JayB]

Seems like Greenspan had a mighty heavy hand on the interest-rate lever, no?

 

The fundamental problem was too much debt backed by too little income. If credit-default swaps had been traded in an exchange like wheat-futures that might have helped, but I'm not convinced that it would have affected the global boom-bust dynamics that much on its own.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Jim]

I hear ya and agree. But I think regulating it as a futures market would have taken off the edge

[Choada_Boy]

KKKKunt mindless "fuck you libtard" response in 5...4...3...2...

[Ponderosa]

 

"We didn't truly know the dangers of the market, because it was a dark market," says Brooksley Born, the head of an obscure federal regulatory agency -- the Commodity Futures Trading Commission [CFTC] -- who 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. "They were totally opposed to it," Born says. "That puzzled me. What was it that was in this market that had to be hidden?"

 

Who is being quoted here? They don't appear to be familiar with the markets labeling the CFTC as "obscure".