Last night we watched the HBO movie "Too Big To Fail", based on the book of the same name by Andrew Ross Sorkin. I had felt like I had a pretty good handle on what happened, but the movie definitely filled in some gaps in knowledge, and provided some "behind the scenes" looks at just how incestuous the banking industry is. I highly recommend it.
It seems to paint Bush Treasure Secretary Paulson in a favorable light, and pretty much everyone else (including CEOs of the banks, House Republicans and even John McCain specifically) as self-centered dicks that are more concerned for themselves than they are their shareholders or the rest of the country.
While Republicans like to blame people buying "houses they couldn't afford", they forget that Bush was pushing home ownership, that banks were pushing loans they knew were going to blowup to people they knew were risks, and that the reason people were defaulting on their loans was because previous bank failures were affecting the job market. Essentially, the banks created bad economic conditions which made their own "assets" toxic, which had them teetering on the edge of failure.
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