Put on your party hats, it’s the first anniversary of Lehman Brothers’s collapse and the start of a domino effect of failed banks that led to the government’s massive TARP bailout. Mark the occasion by sending an e-card — try here, here, or here — commemorating the financial crisis’s 1st birthday.
President Barack Obama is marking the occasion with a televised address from Federal Hall on Wall Street that clearly declares, for anyone who missed the memo, that the party is over. Annnd . . . party hats, off.
Among other reforms, Obama says he wants to start a Consumer Financial Protection Agency to make sure that consumers don’t sign contracts they don’t understand offered by lenders who don’t always tell the truth.
Over at Al Jazeera English, Danny Schecter, whose film “In Debt We Trust” predicted the crisis, says it’s technically the second anniversary of the Global Financial Crisis and provides a comprehensive timeline of the housing bubble that led to the Lehman implosion and beyond.
Alexandra Fenwick is an assistant editor at CJR.