The Other School of Economics

PBS Encore #3 – The Warning

Asides
February 1, 2010 2

Here is the 3rd of the PBS documentaries from Veteran FRONTLINE producer Michael Kirk, who has provided a narrative of what happened around the Global Financial Crisis:

- Episode #3 The Warning {link}: the story is articulated around the fight between ultra-orthodox free-marketer Alan Greenspan and the Wall-Street establishment on one side, and Brooksley Born, head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CTFC) on the other side. Brooksley Born actively warned and campaigned for the regulation of the OTC [over-the-counter] derivatives market. She sensed that this derivative markets was carrying the seeds of a crisis in the making. The events of 2007 showed that her worst nightmares became true.
An mini-narrative within this story is the portrait of Alan Greenspan (quite a few similar points can be read in this NYTimes essay), and his relationship with libertarian thinker Ayn Rand (portait) who developed a philosophical system she called Objectivism. Objectivism holds that the only social system which fully recognizes individual rights is capitalism, specifically what Rand described as “full, pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism.”. This is an interesting school of thought to belong to, for someone like Greenspan who was supposed to be the Chief Influential Regulator.

Link to Episode #1 Inside the Meltdown
Link to Episode #2 Breaking the Bank
Link to Episode #3 The Warning

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