In the first of three documentaries lifting the lid on the crisis in global finance, the BBC's former economics editor and Today presenter, Evan Davis, applies his customary insight and wit to reveal the role the banks played in the biggest financial chaos in living memory. To find out what went so badly wrong, Evan returns to first principles, and explains exactly how a bank is supposed to work and what happened when banks abandoned their traditional role. Evan traces the rise and fall of two banks whose collapse symbolises the wider catastrophe - Northern Rock and Lehman Brothers. Just why did the UK experience its first run on a high street bank since the mid 19th century? And what prompted a giant of Wall Street to collapse in the biggest bankruptcy in history?
In the second of his series of documentaries on modern finance, Evan Davis heads into the world of the City's risk professionals - the derivatives whizzkids, and hedge fund managers. Their toolkit of tricks mean they can and do make billions, yet they're often viewed with suspicion, and labelled the bad boys. In this film, Evan Davis meets the men behind the myths.
In the last of this three-part series on modern finance, Evan Davis looks at the roots of the current crisis: the bubble in property prices and the effect it had on the global financial markets and the people operating within them. The markets lie at the heart of the capitalist system. Every second of every day they set prices that determine how much we pay for our food, and the cost of a foreign holiday. But what are they? Who is running them? And why do the prices run wild so often? Evan Davis reveals some uncomfortable truths about what is really driving our economic system.
