| NYC Rush hour | Music | 00:00 |
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| BOWDEN: It may look like the usual morning rush hour in New York City. But there’s a growing sense of dread among Americans that the financial disaster unfolding just a few blocks away in lower Manhattan will change everything. | 00:15 |
| Man preaching on street | MAN ON STREET: You do not have to be afraid when you stand for Jesus…The only hope we have now is the Jesus. | 00:34 |
| Brusca | BRUSCA: It was biblical; the bible starts out by saying in the beginning there was chaos, and you know where chaos came from? Economists! | 00:56 |
| Traders followed by news crew | TRADER: Greed baby. Yeah! | 01:06 |
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| BOWDEN: Traders and investors alike have fallen prey to the panic which has set in at the epicentre of world finance. | 01:12 |
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| The New York Stock Exchange is reeling after one of its worst weeks in history. | 01:25 |
| Weisberg going to work | WEISBERG: You try to come in with a fresh start every day. | 01:36 |
| Weisberg on subway | BOWDEN: Ted Weisberg is on his way to work on Wall Street -- a journey the veteran trader has been making for 40 years. | 01:46 |
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| WEISBERG: We are in an environment now where the customers are clearly working on adrenalin and everybody’s nerve endings are really frayed. | 01:59 |
| NYSE floor | BOWDEN: The meltdown may be happening here, but its repercussions are spreading globally at an alarming rate. WEISBERG: Things trade almost | 02:19 |
| SUPER: | 24 hours a day, so you don’t know whether it is the chicken or the egg, you don’t know which market is triggering either the good feeling or the bad feeling in the next market. | 02:29 |
| Brusca | BOWDEN: What went wrong? BRUSCA: Everything. Everything went wrong. | 02:41 |
| Brusca at computer | BOWDEN: Economist Robert Brusca says while brokers and money makers ran wild, the government took a hands off approach. | 02:48 |
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| BRUSCA: Essentially no one was watching. | 02:56 |
| SUPER: | It’s like having a castle where you have all your guards up and you think somebody is guarding the back gate, but they’re not, and so the barbarians come in the back door and that’s the end of you. | 03:00 |
| Outside NYSE | BOWDEN: Wall Street’s near collapse began with a flood of cheap money several years ago. Then came unsecured loans and wild risks taken by financial dealers who banked on the belief that the good times would never end. And the people who were meant to be watching the markets failed. BRUSCA: These are regulators who were into minimalism. | 03:14 |
| Brusca | Minimalism works for modern art, it doesn’t work for banking regulation. | 03:38 |
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| WEISBERG: The problem is when you get into a period like this, it’s always worse | 03:45 |
| Weisberg | than you think it’s going to be. And the reason for that is emotion takes over and logic is put on the back bench, and when emotion takes over people start to do crazy things. | 03:53 |
| NYSE | BOWDEN: Did you see this coming? WEISBERG: I don’t know that we saw it coming in the text book sense, but I think that certainly we were not oblivious to the excesses that we saw around us. When it gets euphoric, when it’s too good to be true, when | 04:05 |
| Weisberg | people think the trees are going to continue to grow to the sky and never stop growing, I mean basically there are flags there. | 04:20 |
| Football tale-gating |
| 04:28 |
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| BOWDEN: Today the New York Giants – last year’s Superbowl champions -- are taking on Seattle. | 04:38 |
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| Music | 04:44 |
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| BOWDEN: These fans are passionate about their team, and about winning. But after a shocking week on Wall Street, they know that financially, they’re losing. The government’s rescue package scores no points with this crowd. | 04:59 |
| Vox Pops | MORRIS: Closing on 50, and I had hoped to retire around 60, and things like this may delay that when you see investments not earning what you had hoped they would. So it is going to impact on everybody. | 05:16 |
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| ERRICO: I would love to hear the government help out the average American before they help out these CEOs that are making 30 and 40 million dollars a year. | 05:27 |
| Football/car park | BOWDEN: These fans love the Giants, but loathe the masters of the universe on Wall Street. | 05:39 |
| Vox Pops | JONES: People need to understand that there is repercussions for their actions and we can’t just go ahead and bail out the big boys when they screw up, because if the little guys ever want some type of economic bail out plan, I can guarantee you this -- the government will probably shut their doors on us. | 05:46 |
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| BOWDEN: Is the economy a big issue for you in the way you’ll vote? COSTENBADEN: Yes, it is. It is a big issue. I have a major problem with both parties. However, I am an independent, and I will vote with my conscience, and my conscience tells me, right now, I am going with McCain, because he has his feet on the ground, and I want safety. | 06:04 |
| NYSE | Music | 06:23 |
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| BOWDEN: But there’s no safety on Wall Street. | 06:26 |
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| Music | 06:30 |
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| At the start of the working week, the downward spiral continues. Ted Weisberg is putting a brave face on a dire situation. | 06:40 |
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| WEISBERG: We are clearly not out of the woods yet. I don’t think any | 06:49 |
| SUPER: | reasonable person would expect that. These problems don’t go away overnight, but the bill clearly is a major step in the right direction. | 06:53 |
| Ted and Jason | BOWDEN: Seaport Securities is a family business – Ted Weisberg’s son Jason is also a trader. He believes that while this business is about risks, there are people to blame for what is happening. | 07:05 |
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| JASON WEISBERG: I think people did see it coming, I don’t think they thought it was going to unfold in the fashion it did and at the speed and velocity which did occur. That being said, | 07:18 |
| SUPER: | I don’t blame people for trying to make money, people are opportunistic by nature, but I think greed clouded really sensible judgement. | 07:30 |
| New York streets | BOWDEN: The dramatic events on Wall Street are having an impact right around the world, but also just around the corner. One in five jobs here in New York City is directly related to the finance industry, so the panic on the markets is being reflected in the community, as people realise that this is not going to be a quick fix. | 07:47 |
| Plant in wine store | In the past, third generation wine merchant Michael Platt has had a front row seat to Wall Street’s high life. He’s benefited from the big spending, but he’s not impressed by the government’s move to bail out his former customers. PLATT: I’m angry -- | 08:06 |
| SUPER: | I am very angry that my money is being used for this. I have been listening to republicans for 20 years, the market should regulate everything, government needs to get out of the way, and now when things are bad you are turning to government to save you. | 08:21 |
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| BOWDEN: Is the economy a big issue for you in determining how you’re going to vote? | 08:36 |
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| PLATT: I am going to vote Democrat, for Obama. I feel like if I vote for John McCain then I’m just, I am putting my stamp of approval on the status quo which I certainly cannot do. And voting for Obama is my only chance – it’s a vote for hope. | 08:40 |
| Meals on Wheels kitchen |
| 08:55 |
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| BOWDEN: Far removed from the fine wine on Wall Street, another casualty of the financial collapse is Meals on Wheels, which every day delivers tens of thousands of fresh meals to Manhattan’s needy. | 09:00 |
| SUPER: Michele Rodriguez | RODRIGUEZ: This is their lifeline, sometimes this is the only meal of the day, and we’ve got to make sure that they are nutritionally sound, and at the same time they are economical. | 09:16 |
| Meals on Wheels kitchen | BOWDEN: These services relied heavily on generous donations from cashed-up traders to operate. That source dried up overnight. | 09:30 |
| Delivering meals | As a result, 100 thousand people have already been cut from the program. | 09:43 |
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| Pensioner Harry Baron is house-bound and completely dependent on Meals on Wheels to survive. | 09:54 |
| Harry Baron | BARON: If it is gonna be an impact on Meals on Wheels it is going to be an impact on me, so I hope things turn out for the best because we need these meals. | 10:05 |
| Kessler entering auction | Music | 10:16 |
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| BOWDEN: To understand how America has got itself into this mess you need to go back to where it began – real estate. | 10:22 |
| Auction in progress | Low or no deposit loans to high risk customers forced up housing prices, then the bubble burst. | 10:34 |
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| At auctions like this, banks are getting whatever they can for houses they’ve repossessed. | 10:49 |
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| Music | 10:56 |
| New Jersey residential | BOWDEN: In New Jersey, a short commute from Manhattan, the foreclosure rate has more than doubled in the past few months. | 11:07 |
| Kessler with clients | Dennis Kessler is both a real estate agent and a sheriff’s representative in charge of evicting defaulting home owners. KESSLER: Well, unfortunately the worst thing | 11:21 |
| SUPER: | that’s happened to us in the past couple of years is we have had a couple of suicides, where people faced with the foreclosure have just felt that they would rather end it than face the reality of the foreclosure, so unfortunately one never knows where this goes. | 11:30 |
| New Jersey residential | BOWDEN: Dennis Kessler says with more and more empty homes, the whole neighbourhood is devalued. KESSLER: As they’re selling these | 11:53 |
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| properties one of the things that has happened is values are declining and as they decline it affects all the neighbours in the neighbourhood. | 12:01 |
| Marcia and Larry. SUPER: | MARCIA KLIOZE: I am bitter, I’m bitter, because it is affecting all of us. It is horrible, it is very demeaning, it is embarrassing, it is humiliating and there is not a thing you can do. You have no control… | 12:09 |
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| BOWDEN: Real estate agent Marcia Klioze and her soon to be ex husband Larry have given up trying to escape foreclosure. | 12:24 |
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| BOWDEN: So you’re waiting for that knock on the door? | 12:31 |
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| LARRY KLIOZE: It’s scheduled for the sheriff’s sale already at the end of the month. MARCIA KLIOZE: We are not that young anymore, | 12:34 |
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| and who thought at this age you might be thinking about retiring, working for another 10,12 years then settling down and having everything be okay, and that is not going to happen. So by the time you get to this point, you’ve had it | 12:41 |
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| and you just take what you can get out of your house, you trash the rest and you leave and then the bank has a house that is worth less and they have to sell it again. So they end up losing more money, so it really doesn’t make any sense. | 12:55 |
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| BOWDEN: Is this going to affect the way you vote? LARRY KLIOZE: Definitely. During the | 13:08 |
| SUPER: | the last eight years of the Bush administration, my personal economy has taken a downturn, so you can figure out where I am going with this. | 13:12 |
| Presidential candidates meet for debate |
| 13:25 |
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| BOWDEN: The economy was already a big issue in this presidential campaign, but as a result of the global meltdown, it is now THE issue. MAYER: Nothing matters right now except the economy. When you | 13:30 |
| SUPER: | poll Americans on what they are going to vote on number 1, 2 and 3 is the economy, the economy, the economy. | 13:42 |
| Presidential Debate | MCCAIN: We all know, my friends, until we stabilise home values in America we’re never going to start turning around and creating jobs and fixing our economy. | 13:48 |
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| OBAMA: I think everybody knows now, we are in the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. I believe this is a final verdict on the failed economic policies of the last eight years. | 13:58 |
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| BOWDEN: Astonishingly – but perhaps predictably for politicians – both men are still proposing tax-cuts. | 14:15 |
| Obama speech | OBAMA: You’ve heard a lot about taxes in this campaign. Well, here’s the truth – John McCain and I are both offering tax cuts. The difference is he wants to give the average Fortune 500 CEO a $700,000 tax cut. | 14:22 |
| McCain speech | MCCAIN: I will propose in signing the law reforms to bring tax relief to the middle class and help businesses, so that they can create jobs. | 14:36 |
| SUPER: | MAYER: Neither of these gentlemen have produced a lengthy economic plan in response to the latest crisis. | 14:45 |
| Obama rally | BOWDEN: Barack Obama has one distinct advantage in promoting his economic credentials --his political distance from the eight year reign of Republican President George W Bush. | 14:54 |
| TV political advertisement | MAYER: If you look at every one of Obama’s ads, no matter what they are about you will see a picture of McCain and Bush, | 15:08 |
| Mayer | because Bush right now is about as popular as anthrax. I mean he really could not drop much further unless he loses support from his immediate family members. | 15:14 |
| TV political advertisement | BOWDEN: What do you think is going to happen? MAYER: I am 95 percent certain that Obama will win. The only | 15:28 |
| Mayer | hope for a McCain victory at this point is a foreign policy crisis or a national security crisis that reminds Americans of what they like about John McCain. | 15:33 |
| Street theatre outside Stock Exchange | Music | 15:43 |
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| BOWDEN: There might be pantomime on the street outside the stock exchange, but pandemonium continues on the floor. And the calls for those responsible to be brought to account are gaining momentum. BOWDEN: Do you think there was criminal behaviour by some of the people | 15:54 |
| SUPER: | who got the country into this mess? WEISBERG: I hadn’t really thought about that – that is an interesting question – there are people that work on Wall Street that think all people that work on Wall Street are criminals to begin with anyway, but in a real sense, in a legal sense, gee, I don’t know. | 16:10 |
| Slow motion. NYSE floor | BRUSCA: There will be investigations, there may be criminal trials. There will be things that will be done, | 16:33 |
| SUPER: | but now is not the time to try to prevent the government from saving and stabilising the economy. | 16:42 |
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| BOWDEN: How hard will it be to turn this around? BRUSCA: It’s a little bit like | 16:55 |
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| chemotherapy -- you don’t ask the patient on the first day how he feels and judge from that what the final result will be; you might feel pretty bad at the beginning and it might take a while before you turn the corner and then it still may take a while before we know if it is really successful. | 16:58 |
| NY Streets | BOWDEN: In just weeks Americans will go to the polls to decide who will inherit a broken economy with its far-reaching global impact. But even a brand new commander in chief won’t be able to turn this around quickly. | 17:16 |
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| Music | 17:30 |
| Credits: | Reporter: Tracy Bowden Camera: Andrew Taylor Dan Sweetapple Louie Eroglu Editor: Woody Landay Producer: Ginny Stein Research: Greg Truman Bronwen Reed | 17:45 |