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Danny Schechter - ColdType

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119<br />

Congress that this should be seen as “bumps” along the road<br />

of market innovation.<br />

So a quick Google search unearthed a MarketWatch story,<br />

reporting on Senate testimony by Bernanke. Not only did it<br />

have the estimate I so fondly recalled, but it had doozies like<br />

this:<br />

“Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said Thursday<br />

that there will be ‘significant losses’ associated with subprime<br />

mortgages but that these losses should be regarded as<br />

“bumps” along the road of market innovation...”<br />

He was challenged by Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama:<br />

“We have been told the problem is largely isolated and<br />

contained, but I am concerned that it may not be,” Shelby<br />

said…”<br />

It wasn’t. Bernanke had drunk his own Kool-Aid. Like many<br />

officials, he downplayed the seriousness of a crime when it was<br />

unfolding He saw the massive foreclosures coming but did<br />

nothing at the time to stop them.<br />

When I started making my film on the subject, a colleague<br />

warned me that the issue might be too obscure to rate media<br />

coverage. “No one likes to talk about money,” said a producer<br />

friend. “This could be such a downer.”<br />

I wasn’t the only one running into a wall of media refusal to<br />

acknowledge what was going on.<br />

Financier Peter Schiff, a supporter of Congressman Ron<br />

Paul’s libertarian politics focused on government responsibility<br />

not corporate complicity and yet was also treated with<br />

hostility.<br />

He told me “… every time I would find myself in that venue<br />

where I was on television surrounded by other supposed experts<br />

on economics in the market. They would completely dismiss<br />

what I was saying … They would laugh it off; they would snicker,<br />

you know. CNBC would start calling me Dr. Doom.”

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