This week's Frontline, Inside the Meltdown was really outstanding. In very clear terms it walks through the timeline of what happened. Starting with Bear Sterns and then Fannie and Freddie, Lehman, AIG, the bailout money and the injection into the 9 largest banks. This was a great show and well worth an hour of your time.
They could have mentioned the dates a little more comprehensively but that's my only complaint. And the web site has a very clear timeline.
One thing I don't get is when Bear went down, there was a weekend where potential buyers looked through their books. For an enormous investment bank, I don't understand how you show up at 8pm on friday and 10 hours later have found enormous amounts of toxic mortgages and huge numbers of credit default swaps that made it a systemic problem. Could you walk into an office and find such info? And really, if someone could (and they did) how could it possibly be that Bear didn't know this itself?
No comments:
Post a Comment