Gretchen Morgenson

Steve Murphy

Guest: Gretchen Morgenson
"RECKLESS ENDANGERMENT"
Website http://www.nytimes.com/ref/business/bio-morgenson.html

Gretchen Morgenson, The New York Times's Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist & Best Selling Author reveals in her new bestseller, Reckless Endangerment, how the financial meltdown emerged from the toxic interplay of Washington, Wall Street, and corrupt mortgage lenders.

She and her co-author, Joshua Rosner, expose how the watchdogs who were supposed to protect the country from financial harm were actually complicit in the actions that finally blew up the American economy.

Drawing on previously untapped sources and building on original research from Joshua Rosner—who himself raised early warnings with the public and investors, and kept detailed records—Morgenson connects the dots that led to this fiasco.

Morgenson and Rosner draw back the curtain on Fannie Mae, the mortgage-finance giant that grew, with the support of the Clinton administration, through the 1990s, becoming a major opponent of government oversight even as it was benefiting from public subsidies. They expose the role played not only by Fannie Mae executives but also by enablers at Countrywide Financial, Goldman Sachs, the Federal Reserve, HUD, Congress, the FDIC, and the biggest players on Wall Street, to show how greed, aggression, and fear led countless officials to ignore warning signs of an imminent disaster.

As Gretchen shares in this interview…."This is not the first book to be written about the epic financial crisis of 2008 and neither will it be the last. But Josh and I believe that Reckless Endangerment is different from the others in two important ways. It identifies powerful people whose involvement in the debacle has not yet been chronicled and it connects key incidents that have seemed heretofore unrelated……

……But none of the scandals and financial improprieties we experienced before felt nearly as momentous or mystifying as the events that culminated in this most recent economic storm. That's why we felt that this calamity, and the conduct that brought it on, needed to be thoroughly investigated, detailed, and explained. The disaster was so great — its impact so far-reaching — that we knew we were not the only ones who wanted to understand how such a thing could happen in America in the new millennium."

Even now, more than four years after the cracks in the financial foundation could no longer be ignored, people remain bewildered about the causes of the steepest economic downturn since the Great Depression. And they wonder why we are still mired in it.

Then there is the maddening aftermath — watching hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars get funneled to rescue some of the very institutions that drove the country into the ditch.
The American people realize they've been robbed. They're just not sure by whom.

Reckless Endangerment is an economic whodunit, on an international scale. But instead of a dead body as evidence, we have trillions of dollars in investments lost around the world, millions of Americans jettisoned from their homes and fourteen million U.S. workers without jobs. Such is the nature of this particular crime.

America needs to fully understand and appreciate,
1. How and why Wall Street's regulators became "captured by the industry".
2. The naming of names. Who did what to whom? Who are the "self-interested, politically influential, and arrogant people who have not been held accountable for their actions"?
3. What lies in those 'exceedingly dark corners in Washington and on Wall Street'?

Hosted by Steve Murphy.

Brought to you by "The Law Business Insider"

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Guest: Gretchen Morgenson
"RECKLESS ENDANGERMENT"
Website http://www.nytimes.com/ref/business/bio-morgenson.html

EXECUTIVE PRODUCER & HOST:
STEVE MURPHY

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