{"id":16873,"date":"2016-01-24T18:33:56","date_gmt":"2016-01-24T23:33:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=16873"},"modified":"2016-01-24T18:33:56","modified_gmt":"2016-01-24T23:33:56","slug":"betting-on-the-wall-street-crash","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=16873","title":{"rendered":"Betting on the Wall Street Crash"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Betting on the Wall Street Crash<\/a><\/h3>\n

Exclusive:\u00a0<\/strong>The 2008 Wall Street crash resulted from a combination of unrestrained greed and political contempt for government regulators who might have prevented the devastation. In The Big Short, the tale is told from the perspective of a few players who saw the inevitable and made money on the crash, writes James DiEugenio.<\/p>\n<\/header>\n

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If you read Michael Lewis\u2019s book\u00a0The Big Short\u00a0<\/em>or see the movie by the same name, you won\u2019t find much about how the financial crisis of 2008 was set in motion more than two decades earlier. You won\u2019t learn much about the roles of Ronald Reagan and his disdain for big government or about Bill Clinton\u2019s faith in neo-liberalism, trusting that\u00a0the modern markets and the\u00a0supposedly sophisticated investors would\u00a0keep excesses in check.<\/p>\n

Nor will you find much about economist-turned-politician Phil Gramm who incorporated many of Reagan\u2019s and Clinton\u2019s beliefs into legislative actions, slashing taxes on the rich in the 1980s (and thus incentivizing greed) and, in the 1990s, brushing aside Franklin Roosevelt\u2019s painfully learned lessons from the Great Depression about the need for firewalls between the speculation of Wall Street and the hard-earned savings of Main Street.<\/p>\n

\"The-Big-Short-teaser-poster1-e1445275948938\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Also out of Lewis\u2019s narrative frame is Brooksley Born, the federal commodities regulator who foresaw the looming danger\u00a0from the\u00a0exotic new financial instruments that sliced and diced risky subprime mortgages and packaged them in bonds with ratings far above what they deserved \u2013 and the\u00a0even riskier tendency to lay bets on how the bonds would perform.<\/p>\n

But Born was out-muscled by bigger financial stars with larger egos, the esteemed Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan (originally a Reagan appointee) and Clinton\u2019s brash Deputy Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, a rising star in the neo-liberal establishment which treated the market\u2019s \u201cinvisible hand\u201d as a new-age god.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Betting on the Wall Street Crash Exclusive:\u00a0The 2008 Wall Street crash resulted from a combination of unrestrained greed and political contempt for government regulators who might have prevented the devastation. In The Big Short, the tale is told from the perspective of a few players who saw the inevitable and made money on the crash, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[952,4850,6963,303,305,383,11931,11934,3139,11932,11933,11251,860],"class_list":["post-16873","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-alan-greenspan","tag-bill-clinton","tag-consortium-news","tag-fed","tag-federal-reserve","tag-great-depression","tag-james-dieugenio","tag-lawrence-summers","tag-michael-lewis","tag-neo-liberalism","tag-phil-gramm","tag-the-big-short","tag-wall-street"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16873","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16873"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16873\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16874,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16873\/revisions\/16874"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16873"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16873"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16873"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}