Dispatches – Crash – How long Will it Last ?

In the second half of this special two-part Dispatches, economist and author Will Hutton continues the definitive insider’s account of how Britain’s economy went from boom to bust.

Hutton reveals how those who tried to warn of the impending financial disaster were shouted down, ignored or fired. As a result, the repercussions of the collapse of Lehman Brothers hit an unprepared and vulnerable UK, and left the government frantically trying to prevent a banking collapse from turning the UK into an economic wasteland.

Despite the collapse of Northern Rock a year before, the government, the regulators and the banks had largely ignored the warning signals that more collapses would follow. Hutton looks at the weeks that followed Lehman’s collapse: weeks that will go down as some of the most crucial in Britain’s economic history.

Nationalising key banks, and then underwriting the banks’ bad loans, prevented meltdown, but at a terrible cost that will haunt us for years to come. Dispatches reveals the mistakes that lead to the current crisis and asks: what will it take to lift the UK out of the biggest recession in living memory?

Part One here

• Crash – How the Banks Went Bust
  18 September 2009 8:51 PM | View Comments

  Just before he became Prime Minister in 2007, chancellor Gordon Brown congratulated the city on their ingenuity and creativity during his tenure: ‘An era that history will record as the beginning of a new golden age for the city of London’. He couldn’t have been more wrong. Now, thanks to the financial crash, Britain is facing [...]

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• Dispatches – Crash Gordon
  26 September 2009 6:25 AM | View Comments

  In the first account of its kind on television, award-winning journalist Andrew Rawnsley presents the inside political story of the credit crunch. The programme features exclusive interviews with senior figures close to the economic crisis, including cabinet ministers, senior politicians and former treasury insiders. As Prime Minister, Gordon Brown has presided over the biggest recession in [...]

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• Dispatches – Britain’ s Bankers Still Cashing In
  18 September 2009 8:33 PM | View Comments

  Britain’s top bankers helped bring the economy to the brink of ruin; their gambling triggered thousands of job losses and exposed taxpayers to over a trillion pounds of possible risk. In this edition of Dispatches, journalist Jane Moore investigates exactly how much these former bosses have been rewarded for these failings – and how much [...]

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• Dispatches – Britain' s Bankers Still Cashing In
  18 September 2009 8:33 PM | View Comments

  Britain’s top bankers helped bring the economy to the brink of ruin; their gambling triggered thousands of job losses and exposed taxpayers to over a trillion pounds of possible risk. In this edition of Dispatches, journalist Jane Moore investigates exactly how much these former bosses have been rewarded for these failings – and how much [...]

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• PBS Frontline – The Warning
  22 November 2009 9:27 AM | View Comments

  In The Warning, veteran FRONTLINE producer Michael Kirk unearths the hidden history of the nation’s worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. At the center of it all he finds Brooksley Born, who speaks for the first time on television about her failed campaign to regulate the secretive, multitrillion-dollar derivatives market whose crash helped trigger [...]

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