Last Friday, ProPublica senior reporter Jesse Eisinger and blogger Mike Konczal of the Roosevelt Institute taped an episode for BloggingHeads.tv where they discussed the underlying causes of the financial crisis. The pair talked about Eisinger and Jake Bernstein’s recent “The Magnetar Trade” investigation, which showed how a hedge fund helped prolong the bubble by creating risky CDOs and then placing bets against them. (Magnetar denies it was “net” betting against its own CDOs.)
Konczal and Eisinger also covered some of the market failures that allowed these deals to be done, homeowners role in the crisis, and the potential dangers of derivatives.