These articles would detail the enormous courage this women had in the face of these tactics that reached back to Bush senior...
Rubin's crowning achievement was the repeal of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, which had separated largely unregulated and more speculative investment banks like Goldman Sachs from government-supervised and insured commercial banks like Citi, which play a key role in the nation's monetary policy. Glass-Steagall was designed to prevent the kinds of speculative conflicts of interests that pervaded Wall Street in the 1920s and helped bring about the Great Depression (and reappeared in the 1990s).
Glass-Steagall was steadily weakened by regulatory exceptions under three administrations going back to George Bush Senior. The premise was that tearing down the regulatory walls would promote competition. But the effect was to create greater concentration and renewed opportunities for insider enrichment.
Financier Sanford Weill gradually assembled the empire of insurance, commercial-banking, and investment-banking pieces that ultimately became Citigroup, helped by indulgent regulatory policies promoted by Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and Rubin. When Congress formally repealed Glass-Steagall, in November 1999, the act was termed in some circles the "Citigroup Authorization Act." Rubin had stepped down as treasury secretary that July. His new job, announced in late October, was chairman of Citi's executive committee. Rubin's initial annual compensation was around $40 million.http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/10/09/624863/-Sen-Obama-Must-Avoid-both-Rubin-and-Rubinism
In The Warning, airing Tuesday, Oct. 20, 2009, at 9 P.M. ET on PBS (check local listings), veteran FRONTLINE producer Michael Kirk (Inside the Meltdown, Breaking the Bank) unearths the hidden history of the nation's worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. At the center of it all he finds Brooksley Born, who speaks for the first time on television about her failed campaign to regulate the secretive, multitrillion-dollar derivatives market whose crash helped trigger the financial collapse in the fall of 2008.
"I didn't know Brooksley Born," says former SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt, a member of President Clinton's powerful Working Group on Financial Markets. "I was told that she was irascible, difficult, stubborn, unreasonable." Levitt explains how the other principals of the Working Group -- former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan and former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin -- convinced him that Born's attempt to regulate the risky derivatives market could lead to financial turmoil, a conclusion he now believes was "clearly a mistake."
Born's battle behind closed doors was epic, Kirk finds. The members of the President's Working Group vehemently opposed regulation -- especially when proposed by a Washington outsider like Born.
"I walk into Brooksley's office one day; the blood has drained from her face," says Michael Greenberger, a former top official at the CFTC who worked closely with Born. "She's hanging up the telephone; she says to me: 'That was [former Assistant Treasury Secretary] Larry Summers. He says, "You're going to cause the worst financial crisis since the end of World War II."... [He says he has] 13 bankers in his office who informed him of this. Stop, right away. No more.'"
Read more: http://articles.businessinsider.com/2009-10-21/wall_street/30087500_1_brooksley-derivatives-market-stock-market#ixzz2AVZkZF1n
"It'll happen again if we don't take the appropriate steps," Born warns. "There will be significant financial downturns and disasters attributed to this regulatory gap over and over until we learn from experience."
And here's the documentary:The Warning
Read more: http://articles.businessinsider.com/2009-10-21/wall_street/30087500_1_brooksley-derivatives-market-stock-market#ixzz2AVc3VSzT
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