WL WERE IS My IIII TABLE of CONTENTS Introduction 5 17 Chapter Onel Supply and Demand Pointing Out The Panic of 1907 8 Pointing Out Leading the Federal Reserve 12 Chapter Two Bursting the Bubble Pointing Out Too High a Cost 21 Pointing Out From South Carolina to the Fed 23 Chapter Three Orr the Cliff 26 Pointing Out Strategic Takeovers 30 Pointing Out Down around the World 32 Chapter Fourl Crawling toward Recovery 34 Pointing Out New Rules for Finance 40 Pointing Out Who s Responsible 43 Timeline 44 Endnotes 45 Selected Bibliography 46 Websites 47 Index 48
Dressed as Robin Hood who famously stole from the rich to give to the poor protesters expressed their frustration with government bailouts of large financial
IN T RODU C T I ON n Thursday September 18 2008 the secretary of the United States Treasury and the chairman of the Federal Reserve walked into the U S Capitol They sat down in the Speaker of the House's office Republicans and Democrats from both the House and the Senate were gathered there Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke told the lawmakers that Congress needed to authorize a massive spending bill Treasury secretary Hank Paulson said matter of factly Unless you act the financial system of this country and the world will melt down in a matter of days Bernanke warned If we don't do this tomorrow we won't have an economy on Monday The lawmakers were stunned into silence They knew these were not empty threats by people inclined to exaggeration They had seen the crises tumbling one after another like bowling pins for months The longest downturn since World War II the Great Recession became a defining moment in the early 21st century For 18 months December 2007 June 2009 the American economy stumbled through losses in trade and production increases in unemployment declines in housing values and one crisis after another in the financial sector The aftershocks soon spread around the globe making a complete recovery even harder to
