Meltdown – Final Part: After the Fall
Some responded with denial, others by re-thinking capitalism, but who is preparing for the next crisis?
Watch Part 4 here

Meltdown Part 3: Paying the Price
As the toll of the financial crisis continues to mount, many are looking for its true causes - and finding a crime
Watch Part 3 of Meltdown here
Related: Parts 1 & 2 »

Meltdown Part 2: A Global Financial Tsunami
Meltdown examines how an epidemic of fear caused banks to stop lending, triggered protests and led to industrial action.
Watch video here
Related: Meltown Part 1 »

Meltdown: The Men Who Crashed the World
The first of a four-part investigation into a world of greed and recklessness that led to financial collapse.
Watch video here
Read short article here

9/11: How Osama bin Laden Caused Our Banking Meltdown and Financial Crisis

THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: When historians look back on the financial and economic turbulence of our times, they will date it not from the start of the banking crisis in 2007, but to the bursting of the technology bubble at the turn of the century, or perhaps even earlier to the height of the Asian financial crisis in 1998.

The policies put in place to address these two events – first the dramatic accumulation of foreign exchange reserves by Asian economies to bolster themselves against future crises, and then the monetary easing applied by the Federal Reserve to deal with the aftermath of the dotcom boom – were to lead directly to today's banking meltdown and accompanying, rolling series of debt crises.

Yet these events were only the beginning. What really set the future in stone was the policy response to 9/11, the shocking series of terrorist attacks which have their 10th anniversary this weekend. Not in his wildest dreams could Osama bin Laden have imagined the long-term damage his atrocities would unleash on Western economies.

Before the horrendous events of 10 years ago, the Independent's Robert Fisk, one of the few Western journalists to have interviewed Bin Laden, had managed to elicit the following extraordinary claim from the world's most notorious terrorist – that he would turn America into "a shadow of itself" in much the same way as the insurgency he had helped ferment in Afghanistan had helped destroy the Soviet Union.

At the time, these claims seemed ludicrous – no more than the puffed-up, delusional conceit of the hunted and, frankly at that time, largely insignificant fugitive. Yet there is a sense in which Bin Laden did indeed manage to deliver on his promises.

With all major catastrophes, the long-term damage tends to be inflicted not by the event itself but by the response to it. America's reaction to 9/11 was to rush headlong into two, essentially unaffordable wars. What is more, to keep the economy going during the turbulence of these years, the US and its European counterparts unleashed what was to become perhaps the biggest credit bubble of all time. » | Jeremy Warner | Thursday, September 08, 2011

I have been saying for a very long time that Bin Laden couldn't have wished, dreamed of a better outcome for 9/11 than the one he has brought about. He wanted to bankrupt the USA, and he has done so, with just two planes flying into the Twin Towers.

The money that the USA has spent on security and fighting wars ever since has depleted their resources. Nobody will ever tell me that the 9/11 event and the financial crisis we now find ourselves in are unrelated. Anyone who thinks they are should take a closer look at the events that have unfolded since that fateful day.

Thank you, Mr. Warner, for bringing this to people's attention. – Mark

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Spain Hit as Greek 'Illness' Spreads Over Europe
TIMES ONLINE: The crisis affecting the eurozone worsened yesterday when Spain’s credit rating was downgraded less than 24 hours after Greece was sent into financial meltdown.

Fear of contagion gripped Europe’s financial markets when the debt rating agency Standard & Poor’s cut the rating on Spain’s sovereign bonds. The decision — coming after the agency downgraded Portugal’s rating and cast Greek bonds into the scrapyard, designating them junk — sent the euro plunging against the dollar.

The risk that weak eurozone economies might be infected by a Greek financial virus added pressure to an emergency meeting in Berlin, where the heads of the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank considered a proposal to triple the size of a bailout for Greece. Read on (+ video) >>> Carl Mortished, World Business Editor | Thursday, April 29, 2010

Generation Zero: Official Teaser

Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams: Bankers Have Failed to Repent
TIMES ONLINE: The Archbishop of Canterbury has waded into the debate on bankers' bonuses, warning that financiers feel no "repentance" for the excesses of the boom that led to financial meltdown.

Dr Rowan Williams, the head of the Church of England, said the Government should have acted to cap bonuses and he warned that the gap between rich and poor would lead to an increasingly "dysfunctional" society.

Dr Williams told BBC2's Newsnight programme: "There hasn't been a feeling of closure about what happened last year.

"There hasn't been what I would, as a Christian, call repentance. We haven't heard people saying 'well actually, no, we got it wrong and the whole fundamental principle on which we worked was unreal, empty'."

Asked if the City was returning to business as usual he said: "I worry. I feel that's precisely what I call the 'lack of closure' coming home to roost. It's a failure to name what was wrong. To name that, what I called last year 'idolatry', that projecting of reality and substance onto things that don't have them."

His remarks referred to an article he wrote in The Spectator a year ago in which he warned that society was at risk of turning to idolatry in its worship of wealth. >>> Robert Lindsay | Wednesday, September 16, 2009