<p>1 hour dramatation. We need a full length movie or a Ken Burns treatment.
Hank Paulson comes out to be pretty philosophical about USA’s plight.</p>
<p>My question, If the Paulson saw the future in BearStearns, Why didn’t USGov and FRB do something more, earlier?</p>
<p>I haven’t see the CNBC documentary but it sounds like it will be well worth looking for online.</p>
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<p>The US Government, specifically the SEC, didn’t understand the extent to which mortgage bonds were overvalued and thus poised to implode once housing prices stopped rising, mortgage interest rates were reset, and deliquencies rose. Most Wall Street banks didn’t seem to understand this either until it was too late. Lehman held on to a lot of its subprime bonds and got hammered as a result. The booming derivatives market magnified the effect.</p>
<p>Greenspan continued to believe (until it was too late) that the free markets would solve all problems. He admitted he was wrong.</p>
<p>Very few people forsaw the extent of fraud involved in the subprime mortgage market by nearly all the players - the ratings companies, the large Wall Street Banks that repackaged these crappy loans into bonds and then split them up into various tranches to obscure the fact that they were crap, companies like AIG that were eager to collect premiums on credit default swaps, plus the loan originators themselves who were happy to extend credit to anyone who could breathe.</p>
<p>I’d love to see a Ken Burns treatment on this dark chapter in our financial history.</p>
<p>Anyone interested in this would also enjoy a BBC produced radio-play entitled The Day That Lehman Died. It’s extremely well written and performed. So open a bottle of wine, find a quite place, put on your earphones and enjoy. </p>
<p>[The</a> Day That Lehman Died](<a href=“http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0043kcq]The”>BBC World Service - BBC World Drama, The Day That Lehman Died)</p>