Frontline Tonight: $600 Trillion Derivative Market Meltdown?
Watch Frontline tonight (online or on air) for “The Warning,” which describes the heroic efforts of Brooksley Born, chairwoman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) during the nineties, when the derivatives market began to heat up.
She wanted to regulate this market (“only” $60 trillion at that time), but was foiled by many of the same actors whom Obama now trusts to advise him on economic and banking matters (Rubin, Greenspan and Summers, formerly known as the “Committee to Save the World“).
Now that this market, which consists of instruments that Warren Buffet termed “financial weapons of mass destruction,” has grown tenfold to about $600 trillion (ten times the global GDP), could Brooksley Born’s warning finally come to pass in a financial cataclysm unlike anything the world has ever seen?
Here are a couple of “sneak previews” of what promises to be a fascinating program.