Greenspan, Rubin, Summers, and the 'Warning' they blew off

Ten years too late, PBS's Frontline series has found a sympathetic hero - Brooksley Born, ex-head of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission - and three appropriate villains - ex-Fed chief and market ideologue Alan Greenspan, and ex-Clinton Treasury Secretaries Ron Rubin (ex-Goldman Sachs, later Citigroup) and Lawrence Summers (ex-Harvard president, now Obama's top economic adviser.)

"We didn't truly know the dangers of the market, because it was a dark market," Born tells Frontline in The Warning, produced by Michael Kirk. She wanted credit-default swaps (which brought down AIG) and other financial derivatives regulated, which might have limited damage from the home loan bond market freeze-up that sparked today's recession.

But "they were totally opposed to it," Born says.  In one scene, ex-Born aide Michael Greenberger recounts Born's verison of a phone call from "Larry Summers. He says, 'You're going to cause the worst financial crisis since the end of World War II.'... [He says he has] 13 bankers in his office who informed him of this. 'Stop, right away. No more.'"

"Greenspan, Rubin and Summers ultimately prevailed on Congress to stop Born and limit future regulation of derivatives... Now, with many of the same men who shut down Born in key positions in the Obama administration, The Warning reveals the complicated politics that led to this crisis and what it may say about current attempts to prevent the next one."