Frontline on PBS - Inside The Meltdown

This Week: "Inside the Meltdown" (60 minutes),
Feb.17th at 9pm on PBS (Check local listings)
- Live Discussion: Chat with producer Michael Kirk, Feb. 18th, 11am ET

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Watch this week's FRONTLINE episode and you might come away asking some unsettling questions:

How close did the American economy really come to total collapse this past fall? Why were some big banks and financial institutions bailed out, but not others? And what could policymakers have done differently during a historic weekend last September that may have helped slow the speed of the crash?

In "Inside the Meltdown," airing this Tuesday night (check local listings), veteran FRONTLINE producer Michael Kirk goes behind closed doors in Washington and on Wall Street to investigate how the economy went so bad so fast, and why emergency actions--taken by then Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, and others--failed to prevent the worst economic crisis in some 70 years.

"I'm sure that Paulson is sitting there....everybody was sitting there saying, 'My god, we may be presiding over the second Great Depression,'" Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman tells FRONTLINE. "This is the utter nightmare of an economic policy maker. You're sitting there and you may have just made the decision that destroyed the world."

"The politics of the situation on September 15th is, 'Let [the big financial institutions] fail,'" says former federal regulator Michael Greenberger of the critical policy shift made by the Bush economic team this past fall. "Within 24 hours, they had to throw their principles out the door and save the economy."

You can watch excerpts from "Inside the Meltdown" right now at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/meltdown/ , and also take a behind-the-scenes look at the film with producer Michael Kirk at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/story/2009/02/the-making-of.html

We hope you'll join us on air this Tuesday night. Afterward, visit our Web site, where you can watch the program again online, read extended interviews with Wall Street and Washington insiders, and explore a timeline of the end of Wall Street as we know it.