“Frontline’s new documentary about the financial crisis probably doesn’t say much you didn’t already know, at least if you’ve followed the story. But it’s a story worth telling again anyway, because memories on Wall Street and in Washington are dangerously short.
On Tuesday night PBS will air the first two parts of afour-part documentary on the crisis, called “Money, Power and Wall Street,” with the second two parts to air next Tuesday, May 1.
The first hour tells the history of the credit derivatives at the heart of the crisis, while the second hour tells the blow-by-blow of the crisis itself, culminating with the bank bailouts in the fall of 2008.
Viewers familiar with all of this material — and there’s not much new in the first two hours, which could probably have been condensed to one hour without losing much — might be confused about the point of rehashing what is by now old history. The trailer for the whole series suggests Frontline is slowly building a case, maybe to be hammered home in the final two hours next week, that the financial system is still just as primed for disaster as it was four years ago.
The second part of the documentary, airing in the second hour tonight, is more entertaining than the first, but mainly in the way oft-told horror stories are fun to hear around the campfire. Stop me if you’ve heard any of this before: Bear Stearns goes down because of toxic mortgage debt early in 2008. Policy makers take the summer off. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson decides to let Lehman Brothers die, to teach Wall Street a lesson. Oops! AIG and the rest of Wall Street get hundreds of billions of dollars to keep the financial system from going down the drain…”
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