Frontline: Inside the Meltdown

I just watched Frontline's "Inside the Meltdown."

No, I didn't learn anything new. But it was fun to watch. Frontline does nice job of dramatization. Maybe that's not too hard in this case: it has been a rather dramatic chain of events.

In watching this it did give me a certain amount of sympathy for Hank Paulson. He screwed up by not bailing out Lehman Brothers and I remember thinking that [might be the case] at the time. I think I wrote a comment to Tim Haab over at env-econ about this (Tim Haab was openly gleeful at the non-bailout of Lehman). Anyway, for a full-fledged true-believer like Paulson to take the steps he did take shows a certain amount of commitment, flexibility and open-mindedness that one wouldn't otherwise expect. Given his background and the nature of the administration for which he was working, I think his willingness to adapt to the circumstances was rather remarkable.

It terrifies me to think how bad things would look now if the Treasury and Fed hadn't intervened at all.