"The Warning" on PBS's Frontline: Typical Elitist Interventionism

I recorded "The Warning", a PBS episode of Frontline, last night. After reading the write-up about it, I realized I would likely not like it much, so I recorded it rather than subject Ms. Eclectic to my ranting and screaming. I then watched it early this morning. The programme met my expectations.

It appeared to photoshop portraits of Greenspan, Summers, and Rubin together in menacing poses at various points throughout yet had elegant interviews with Joe Stiglitz and with the heroine of the show, Brooksley Born. Born seemed to be an intelligent, sensible person who was concerned about the growth of the over-the-counter market in derivatives. She was bullied and/or out-maneouvered by the evil triumvirate into abandoning attempts to regulate the market.

What bothered me was that the programme showed Greenspan's mea culpa in which said he had over-estimated the potential for buyers and sellers in sophisticated markets to police their own activities. At the same time, it said little about Fannie May, Freddie Mac, the moral hazard created by the bail-out of Long-Term Capital, or any of the multitude of other examples of gubmnt failure.

I'm not enough of a libertarian that I want to leave it solely to the market to control fraud. And I expect there are many other regulations I would be content with, much to the dismay of my staunch libertarian friends. At the same time, I would like the laws and regulations governing finance and investment to encourage people to do due diligence or to hire people to do it for them (and to be able to sue those people for negligence if they screw up). It looked to me as if too much of the programme was concerned with providing ways to protect people from themselves, and I'm not nearly so keen on such programmes.

Comments

[Alan]

Amen. I think they worked too hard to force it into a PBS narrative. I'll give them credit that they made passing reference to the idea of the capture of the government by Wall Street, but in a trivial way, leaving out how deeply the whole government was involved in creating the problems that caused the cratering.
I think they overplayed the likely benefit of anything Ms. Born (who seemed to have some reasonable ideas) could achieve, but dumping the whole problem on Greenspan, Summers, Geithner, etc. leaves out a lot, and the pretense that she would have saved the OTC derivatives world from exposure is just crazy.