gretchen morgenson won the pulitzer prize for her fearless exposÉs of wall street's dirty secrets andreckless behavior. in her "fair game" column for "the new york times" she digs into some of the most disturbing and complex scandals of our time. her recent book with joshua rosner on crony capitalism at fannie mae is called "reckless endangerment: how outsized ambition, greed and corruption led to economic armageddon." welcome. >> thanks, bill. >> you just heard david stockman say it could happen again. do you think it could happen again? >> it will happen again and the unfortunate fact is we did not fix the problem. the dodd-frank legislation which was supposed to be the fix-it for the enormous crisis that erupted in 2008 failed in so many ways to really address the major issues, the most important being too big to fail, did virtually nothing to cut these big and impossible to manage banks down to size. but there are other elements to the dodd-frank law that i think are also problematic. now we have hundreds of rules being written by the regulators, and although it might make sense t

the second with david stockman and gretchen morgenson on "crony capitalism." in this edition, we'll look at a seminal moment when wall street and washington stacked the deck against the rest of us. remember, this is the political equivalent of a crime story, a mystery. how is it that our economy stopped working for the broad majority of americans? how did our political and financial class shift the benefits of the economy to the very top, while saddling us with greater debt and tearing new holes in the safety net? in other words, how did politics create a winner-take-all economy? well, it didn't happen by accident. this was an inside job, politically engineered by wall street and washington working hand-in-hand, sticky fingers with sticky fingers, to turn the legend of robin hood on its head -- giving to the rich and taking from everybody else. it's all on the record. the richest of the rich was citigroup, at one time the world's largest financial institution. when the 2008 meltdown hit, the bank cut more than 50,000 jobs, and taxpayers shelled out more than $

bill black responding to a nov twenty second two thousand and eleven new york times piece by gretchen morgenson and louise story and he's waited all this time to respond because he was so shocked at the allegations made by them that he was waiting for the obama administration to respond and basically what they said is that they talked to some long time lawyers who say that overall scarcity of cases related to the financial crisis might be in part because regulators want to avoid scrutiny of their own kind so they talk to some lawyers who were involved in like a former new york state attorney general dentist see voc go for example and he says that it's not just one thirty year old wunderkind who was responsible for the financial crisis once you start pulling the string through in these complex. as you might be surprised what you find at the other end and what you find is the government and the financial regulators and institutions that they were just as much involved in the corruption and the mortgage fraud that's right. of course the government isn't involved of course the great interest mediat

it's by gretchen morgenson, who happens to be a columnist and writer for "the new york times," and joshua rosner. it's entitled "reckless endangerment: how outside ambition, greed and corruption led to economic ar armageddon." and i can tell you, in this book, it points the finger directly at fannie and freddie. and i'd just like to quote one aspect -- one part of it. "because bonuses at fannie mae were largely based on per-share earnings growth, it was paramount to keep privates escalating to guarantee bonus payments. and in 1998, top fannie officials had begun manipulating the company's results by dipping into various profit cookie jars to produce the level of income necessary to generate bonus payments to top management. federal investigators later found that you could predict what fannie's earnings-per-share would be at year's end almost to the penny if you knew the maximum earnings-per-share bonus payout target set by management at the beginning of each year. between 1998 and 2002, actual nerngz the bonus -- earnings in the bonus payout target differed only by a fraction of a cent, t