Harris1
The documentary “Money, Power and Wall Street” takes an appear at the monetary crisis.
Today I will be overlaying phase one of the series. It is educational, and I exceedingly suggest staring at
it, however with a warning: there is a heavy propaganda message in this documentary, and it be
considered with that foreknowledge. The application focuses on the role of the banks in issuing loans to
people who had no commercial enterprise borrowing cash because they had been an excessive credit
score risk. Now the banks have been inclined to take on these dangers due to the fact they could bundle
loans together and sell them off to different banks, and banks that sold up these subprime mortgages
backed securities may want to in flip basically buy “insurance” on those loans through credit score
default swaps, in which still other banks took on the danger through promising for a rate to take on the
debt if it went sour. So, all the banks had been simply enjoying a large shell game, or warm potato,
passing off the threat to one another.
The show informs viewers that the hassle got here when the housing bubble burst, home fees
started falling, and human beings began to no longer can pay off their mortgages. The trouble is the
application focuses on how the sharks had a feeding frenzy driven by way of the housing boom, but it
blames the economic disaster now not on that bubble, but on the banks who tried to profit from it. So, it
is focusing on symptoms as a substitute than causes. What brought about the housing bubble in the first
place? The application absolutely ignores that question.
The reply is that the Federal Reserve, through its inflationary economic policy, and the U.S.
government, via its coverage of encouraging homeownership, triggered the housing bubble. But this
program deflects interest away from the position of the government and essentially flips it on its head,
characterizing government as the “good guy” standing up to the evil, grasping Wall Street bankers. Yes,
the latter phase of that characterization is correct enough, but the former is an entire fraud. That statist
message is the propaganda thing of this film. Coming from PBS, this central theme of how we want the
government to store us shouldn’t be surprising.
The Federal Reserve is only mentioned as soon as in the complete program, and that is where