kossovo reach a boiling point as disputed border posts are seized by consulate forces local serbs set up barricades angry at the deployment of e.u. and cos of a customs officials on the frontier which was previously under surgery. and next who discovered the real story behind ponzi king a bernie madoff look into why white collar crime is driving that's up next. who had brought down wall street. hedge funds. back in two thousand and seven with the blues still in full swing my business partner e. o'connor attended this party just off wall street for traders under the age of thirty. it reeks of affluence. shiny cars the beautiful people. only clubs

where the sums can be invested in complicated vehicles in secret outside the prying eyes of wall street regulators soon all of the traditional investment firms have there is no wonder so many of these young people wanted in and at the top. and i personally spent five years in a private equity and then made the decision instead of going back to business school to move over to the public side so that was a conscious decision on my part i think most people probably get involved because there is an opportunity to move up the ranks and make more money at an earlier age in hedge funds and there isn't private equity which is the natural progression after a couple years in an investment bank program well if you're going to be in the investment world the best way to a good investor the best way to make money is to have a hedge fund because you get compensated much much higher. hedge funds were being

paid one percent of the assets and twenty percent of the profits in those areas so obviously that was the best way to make money if you were in a good insurance company ai g. was a leading seller of credit derivatives so a bank for example like goldman sachs would create a c.d.o. it would stick all kinds of subprime loans and packages packages or packages of them into a package and then it will go off to a. and you had a aaa rating credit rating and all that would say you know what you take this package of junk we've just created. kind of insurance you basically write. basically credit for it you got a much better rating than we do so our investors will buy it from you with that insurance you make money we make money everybody's happy bank regulator william black leaders this was all deliberate this stuff the stuff that you're talking about. was created out of things like plyers loans that were known to be

extraordinarily bad and now it was getting triple a ratings now aaa rating is supposed to mean there is zero credit risk so you take something that not only has significant it it has crushing risk that's why it's toxic and you create this fiction that it has zero risk that itself of course is a fraudulent exercise. in this case. listen to this crisis. period she made guarantees totaling more than their ability to pay an amount larger than the entire value of the company actually that's a bit of an understatement ai g. along with others who sold a rivet is and insured their policyholders to the tune of an estimated five hundred ninety six trillion dollars compare this to the gross national product of the

entire world and the problem should become more obvious so you were just gambling billions possibly trillions of dollars. but i would refer to it as gambling with you know these these transactions were individually individually underwritten very carefully maybe i can provide some of background see that might be helpful if they're very good but they were carefully underwritten how come no one wants to buy them how could a i.g. have possibly expected to make good on its promises one thing we know for sure ai g. executives made huge paychecks selling these credit derivatives to hedge funds and others right up until the economy caved. so we don't need to fear hedge funds i don't think you need to fear hedge funds i think hedge funds provide. a pretty intelligent investor base or savvy investor base for the fore.

out of. stock down by a the the wall street used to invest in the american economy in companies that used its money to produce goods and services but then wall street became the american economy our financial system was a reengineered through what's been called financialization with banks credit cards real estate insurance companies as the new power players. capitalism is sort of gone off the rails it's ceased to be kapil it's financial eyes. the fact that it's now all about speculation the fact that it's about ponzi schemes and the facts about selling and buying paper from an economy of real goods real commodities and real services to a system where people were buying and selling money buying and selling assets buying and selling other firms were no new value was created most sense should be

says the whole system has gone predatory i think we had a transition from what was a frame market system to something now that is out of control and probably what i would define as a predatory system frequently in markets that are manipulated or the. maybe a few out there who are investors mega investors it's even even that's very difficult to tell we still don't know point fact is making money while so many in fact are losing money on wall street right now as business week noted what we're observing in all of its bizarreness is the ancient paradox of what happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object the irresistible force in this case is the u.s. economy the immovable object is a wall of debt that now can't be paid back work in a position where the volume of dept mortgage debt corporate debt personal debt and

even state and local debt is larger than the ability to pay the rise of a credit based economy fear the growing disparity between rich and poor has transferred from the middle class to the upper class the middle class watched it savings literally drop to nothing has ever been spared dollar the paying off. the upper class meanwhile figured out how to make money from money who are accurately how to sell their dead promise to pay in the future. real estate expert ron silver men calculates the cost you are talking in recent years going to probably every year transfer hungry. dollar should reach the billions hundreds of billions of dollars billions. from the pockets of the poor. who are far better positioned.

show called victims to go the upper one percent of the population own thirty percent of america's returns to wealth that is dividends interest and capital gains five years ago they'd raise their proportion from thirty seven percent to fifty seven percent and today it's estimated that the upper one percent of america's population. it's almost seventy percent of the returns to. the percent seventy percent that's huge yes it is it's unprecedented it's essentially it makes america look like a third world banana republic. talking . to the mob barrister. ironically beer stearns was also the billions of dollars they received in the bailout did not go to the companies

cheer holders but to those to whom. it was a deal that ultimately saved the creditors to bear stearns by forcing it into j.p. morgan at the expense of equity holders michael hudson points out to the homeowners and corporate america on how in hock to the debt machine many corporations are effectively in negative equity or in and technically insolvent position headed by the financial sector by the banks themselves. maybe sympathy for the demonstrators in the building. i don't know if there was a lot of sympathy per se to their point of view i mean we were you know in a similar similar boat so to speak a similar boat perhaps only one has life preservers if the government now is funneling money to a major bank and saying if you can do that with a bank why not do it strapped homeowners facing foreclosure as democrats

thanks. to crisis increases desperation sides hudson says no street is leeching move on main street in a battle for survival we are seeing a second class war in this country such as you've never seen in the entire history of the united states a class with a class war except in this case the class war isn't the kind of war the marxist some socialist talk about it's not between employers and employees because employment is going to be shrinking. fourteen thousand employees would eventually be laid off by j.p. morgan sure it's a class war between creditors and debtors it's going to be a fight between the financial sector and what's called the real economy the economy of production and consumption and the financial sector has prepared well and positioned itself to come out on top by being able not only to foreclose on the

property of better but to get a government bailout for all of its losses. because . employment is going to go down market going to shrink people are going to default even more on their mortgage debts on their credit card debt on their student loans so you're going to have an exponentially rising trend of defaults you're going to see a transfer of property from debtors to creditors a depression not only a depression but an economic polarization it sounds bad yes it's very bad. the new deal was now out in force covering the protests many homeowners would not talk to them anything like that but that it wasn't really a president who. has seen a b c reporter turned to me when others were assigned

kelso why do you think people don't want to talk to you because they hate you they think the media is part of the problem they don't think that you're going to help them thinking out there that. bridge tonight of what's been called the first financial crisis hit bottom. certainly or was the media when all this was going on why were there so few naming those investigations in what was to be common economic catastrophe things are only going to get worse i want to talk a little bit more you've been incredibly pessimistic august two thousand and seven marked the beginning of the end of an era what had gone up was now coming down. ninety three percent from the year before. in london there was a run on northern rock bank more bank write downs followed billions a few b.s.

and citi group fannie mae the largest source for home loans reported a three point five five billion dollars loss for the fourth quarter in march two thousand and eight the fifth largest investment bank in the world bear stearns was on the verge of collapse many of the nation's most respected financial journalists are still getting it when i get my money out there no no no bear stearns is fine do not take your money as a risk if there is one day boy other than a plus four hundred pairs turns is not in trouble i mean if any are more likely to be taken over don't move your money from bear that's just been silly don't be silly the media was complicit says do you start a financial journalist now with the columbia journalism review the business press former colleagues of mine friends of mine did not really recognize and understand what they were up against how dramatically the the world that changed the lending industry had changes things that you've kind of documented how out of control wall

street had become and i think it's a real contributing factor to to how we got to where we are today. even compares the journalists who cover wall street to reporters sent to iraq he said they too were embedded but in the corporate culture. the great panic of two thousand and eight is the equivalent for the bit business media what the iraq war was from that for the washington press corps is the financial sorry of the last seven years so the parallel is fair you could further extend the analogy a little bit to think about the idea this concept of being embedded that the press corps itself was sort of embedded within a particular narrative. that has its origins on wall street i don't think that analogy is is out of whack at all. there was one more factor this you in the media

covered because it was about the media about the infusion of nearly three billion dollars in advertising revenues from dodgy lenders and credit card companies between two thousand and two when the housing bubble took off until its crash in two thousand and seven. vengefully an entire industry became predatory predatory like criminal. yet deceptive marketing and mass as a as a function of corporate it started in america and is now everywhere some say the united states has infected the world with a kind of financial aids. the people who these mortgages was sold to. a large majority of these people who are poor black people or that he know people in other words this was targeting

minorities especially so this resulted in the biggest transfer of wealth from the poorest people in america to the richest institutions in the world and think that the majority of people. they feel that this is a problem for as you say this is this is a banking problem stock market problem this is investment problems for their passion it's interesting because a gentleman says things are much more controlled here but i got to a bank to get my house they really make sure it's a body i think that america is heading for a really deep crisis of a whole proportion you have a you have a deep ideological cultural division you're going to have i don't see that having an ovoid mess of unemployment you have extreme wealth in extreme poverty and you have an population. that's not the case here i think what we're going to see in the

united states i hope i'm wrong but i think united states is heading towards an abyss as the crisis worsened politicians family will go up to realize that the economy they had deregulated was imploding congress was finally being asked to act ironically the pitch was made by a republican treasury secretary henry paulson a former c.e.o. of goldman sachs in the years that that firm made massive profits in housing securitization and speculation. when the stews in order to avoid the continuing series of financial institution failures and frozen credit markets that threaten american family's financial well being the viability of businesses both small and large in the very health of our economy the question would government intervention fix the problem or make it worse would it reward the companies that profited from massive fraud who would it lead to more fraud.

treasury secretary henry paulson and fed chairman ben bernanke he began a push through what might be called the final plunder the real story was not widely known except soon into the on c.-span on thursday at about eleven o'clock in the morning the federal reserve noticed a tremendous drawdown of the money market accounts in the united states to the five hundred and fifty billion dollars we were having an electronic run on the banks that their estimation was that by two o'clock that afternoon five and a half trillion dollars would have been brought out of the money market system of the united states would have collapsed the entire economy of the united states and within twenty four hours the world economy a shell shocked congress was given a three page plan in essence it gave paulson total control to spend seven hundred

billion dollars some saw it as a power grab others sold a deliberate creation of the crisis to push through a corporate agenda. troll the media enough to ensure that the public will not notice that this bailout will and get them for generations what was unique was the refusal of congress to hear any testimony from expert witnesses or to have eric billion dollar bailout for wall street is being driven by fear not backed this is too much money into short a time going to too few people while too many questions remain unanswered why aren't we asking wall street to clean up its own mess when we passing new laws that stop the speculation which triggered this why aren't we putting up new regulatory structures to protect the investors how do we even value the seven hundred billion in toxic assets why are we directly helping homeowners with their debt burden why aren't we helping american families faced with bankruptcy why are we reducing debts

for main street instead of wall street isn't it time for a fundamental change in our debt based monetary system so we can free ourselves from the nephew lation of the federal reserve by the federal reserve in the banks is this the united states congress or the board of directors of goldman sachs congressman kusin it's his remarks were not widely reported either they were still refusing to make new loans the oversight of paulson's program was criticized because millions could not be accounted for fraud is to seat and the essence of fraud is i create trust in you and then i betray that trust and get you to give me something of value and as a result there's no more effective acid against trust and fraud especially fraud by top elites and that's what we have although all the facts are not even about who got how much and under what terms many in the public see the bailouts as a way to loot taxpayers as fraudulent as the problems they were addressing.

yeah we're all over the capitol hill but the summer of two thousand and nine the crisis had not abated unemployment continued to climb foreclosures to mount bankruptcies to grow markets to shrink firms to fold and tensions to tear apart families and communities i think you will see a bunch of people get died it gets our prison sentences more importantly that the bigger question to me is when we see a structural change we go through bad recession while we waste our bodies struggling to rebuild the dod sustainable system that should have never been erected in the first place because new regulations were beginning to be put in place trillions had been spent by government on stimulus programs these measures were clearly not enough so-called reforms often pump money into the very institutions that caused the problems the bailouts benefited the wealthy deficits

and debt grew by the trillions it became clear that the structure of our economy has yet to be transformed to walk over the course or. in june two thousand and nine president obama announced new financial reforms saying the crisis was caused by mistakes. minute recognizing the government's inability to police wall street investor jim channels says his reforms are doomed to fail and it's a little bit tough because the the guys who are the bad guys are one step ahead of the cops on the beat every single day for starters we need a full investigation like the one that followed the great crash of one nine hundred twenty nine we need to know who benefited from one of the most insidious crimes in history how did wall street's wizards engineer dispossessed her and who is complicit with them who the big fish ever be prosecuted the media too has to wake

up to shift the debate to include the need. the deeper change going to crack down on white collar crime since this is my film i get the last word this financial crisis will not be turned off like a light switch millions are struggling to survive as conditions get worse. for you to get you the payoff ultimately. it's everything. to some people something very. creative there was all lot of partying there was a lot of back slapping there was a lot of extract a lot of extraction should lead to a major reaction. blunder in an age of major structural change or will there have to be an. end pitchforks first. when.

food. banks. experts. we thought. well thank you rob see our clubs. one.

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to sum the week's top stories on our t.v. a rebel forces fight on against gadhafi loyalists in one of his last strongholds but many in the capital tripoli say they're now living in fear from so-called freedom fighters. washington launches its missile defense plans its eastern europe with three countries signed up to host the u.s. shield even a small school reiterate some security concerns and calls for urgent talks. getting down to brass tacks moscow in london and new differences shouldn't stop them doing business with multi-million dollar contracts sealed during the first visit by a new kind of leader in six years. tension between serbia and breakaway kossovo region boiling point as disputed border posts are seized by casa the forces .