DOCUMENTARY OF THE WEEK- Frontline: The Warning. After the global financial crisis hit, many of its architects played dumb, telling congressional hearings that no one could have seen it coming. Alan Greenspan himself argued that one of the hallmarks of a bubble is that no one would realize it was happening until the bubble burst. In the first of its series on the global financial crisis and housing market bubble, Frontline: The Warning shines a spotlight on Brooksley Born, the former chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) who was the only regulator in the Clinton administration to warn of impending doom, and like the Cassandra of Greek mythology, was tragically and ruthlessly ignored. It channels her brilliant career from the first female student ever to be named president of the Stanford Law Review to a leading Wall Street attorney who worked extensively on derivatives before being tapped by Bill Clinton to run the CFTC. It also notes her constant fight for women in the workplace — a battle poignantly juxtaposed against the witch hunt to which she was subject when she tried to regulate the derivatives market.

But the film is also centered on the men who led that witch hunt and their motivations. The antagonists of the story include the Wall Street of Larry Summers and Bob Rubin. The ringleader? None other than Fed chairman Greenspan. Frontline takes the view that these men were not only offended by being challenged by this outsider who tried to her job, but felt their reputations as caretakers to the Clinton boom years and their free market ideology attacked. They rallied Wall Street and Congress behind them in a campaign to ridicule and silence Born, who after feeling that her position served no purpose as a result of their campaign resigned in protest in 1999. You can watch it on Youtube here (runtime: 54:40).