Before the Great Recession, “The Warning” (full documentary)

Long before the economic meltdown in the U.S. that led to the Great Recession, one woman tried to raise the alarm about the threat to the financial system. (Aired 2009) This journalism is made possible by viewers like you. Donate to FRONTLINE now: https://bit.ly/47DFzCb And support your local PBS station here: https://www.pbs.org/donate “The Warning” unearthed the hidden history of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression in the United States. Brooksley Born spoke for the first time on television about her failed campaign to regulate the secretive, multitrillion-dollar derivatives market whose crash helped trigger the financial collapse in the fall of 2008. “We didn’t truly know the dangers of the market, because it was a dark market,” said Born, who was the head of an obscure federal regulatory agency — the Commodity Futures Trading Commission [CFTC]. Born not only warned of the potential for economic meltdown in the late 1990s, but also tried to convince the country’s key economic powerbrokers to take actions that could have helped avert the crisis. The documentary also revealed an intense battle among high-ranking members of former President Bill Clinton’s administration and uncovered a concerted effort not to regulate the emerging, highly complex, and lucrative derivatives markets, which became a ticking time-bomb within the American economy. Explore additional reporting on “The Warning” on our website: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/warning/ #Documentary #UnitedStates #FinancialCrisis #GreatRecession #Economy Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/PBSfrontline Sign up for our newsletter: https://frontline.org/newsletter Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/frontlinepbs Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/frontline Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/frontlinepbs.bsky.social FRONTLINE is produced at GBH in Boston and airs nationwide on PBS. The editor-in-chief and executive producer of FRONTLINE is Raney Aronson-Rath. Funding for FRONTLINE is provided through the support of PBS viewers and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, with major support from Ford Foundation. Additional support for FRONTLINE is provided by the Abrams Foundation, Park Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Heising-Simons Foundation, and the FRONTLINE Trust, with major support from Jon and Jo Ann Hagler on behalf of the Jon L. Hagler Foundation, and additional support from Koo and Patricia Yuen. CHAPTERS: 00:00 - Prologue 01:37 - Ayn Rand’s Influence on Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan 06:47 - Economic Leaders Under Former President Bill Clinton’s Administration 10:50 - Who Is Brooksley Born, a Former Head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission? 17:28 - What Are Over-the-Counter Derivatives? 22:46 - Why Some Economic Leaders Opposed Regulating the Derivatives Market 35:34 - Crisis Hits the OTC Derivatives Market 44:48 - Deregulation’s Economic Impact 52:49 - Credits

Added 1 Sept 2026