Before the Great Recession, “The Warning” | Full Documentary

Jan 27, 2026 | Long before the economic meltdown in the U.S. that led to the Great Recession, one woman tried to raise the alarm about the threat to the financial system.

“The Warning” unearthed the hidden history of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression in the United States. Brooksley Born spoke 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.

“We didn’t truly know the dangers of the market, because it was a dark market,” said Born, who was the head of an obscure federal regulatory agency — the Commodity Futures Trading Commission [CFTC]. Born not only warned of the potential for economic meltdown in the late 1990s, but also tried to convince the country’s key economic powerbrokers to take actions that could have helped avert the crisis.

The documentary also revealed an intense battle among high-ranking members of former President Bill Clinton’s administration and uncovered a concerted effort not to regulate the emerging, highly complex, and lucrative derivatives markets, which became a ticking time-bomb within the American economy.



It is rather shocking to me that a man as clever as Alan Greenspan was considered to be was such a devotee of Ayn Rand. Ayn Rand was an émigrée from the Soviet Union. She had very extreme, laissez-faire ideas which were verging on the anarchic. That Alan Greenspan, known as ‘The Wizard’ because of his superior understanding of economics, couldn’t see through Ayn Rand’s cranky theories is enigmatic, to say the least. — © Mark Alexander

Derivatives Dispute Divides Islamic Finance Market
REUTERS: KUALA LUMPUR - Islamic banks are struggling to develop hedging tools as religious differences cast doubt on the use of derivatives, exposing the industry to risks of increased volatility as markets deteriorate.

Strict rules on transparency and simpler deal structures saved sharia lenders from the worst of the current credit crisis, but their ability to survive future shocks is in question because they have few instruments to guard against wild swings in currency and interest rate movements.

"To the extent there are not enough sharia-compliant liquidity and risk management products, then clearly Islamic finance would be disadvantaged compared to conventional banks and would be less able to manage their liquidity risks," said Hussein Hassan, head of Islamic structuring at Deutsche Bank (DBKGn.DE).

The $1 trillion (694 billion pounds) industry bans banking structures that are vague or ambiguous to avoid exploitation -- a rule which some argue shuts out the use of common hedging instruments such as currency and interest rate swaps and futures contracts.

But as more markets embrace Islamic finance, and the need for risk protection increases, there are growing attempts to find sharia hedging tools. >>> By Liau Y-Sing | Thursday, February 5, 2009

The Dawning of a New Dark Age – Paperback (US) Barnes & Noble >>>
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