on thursday september eighteenth u s federal reserve chairman ben bernanke and hank paulson went to ask congressional leaders for more powers and several hundred billion dollars to staunch the bleeding the meeting took place in the office of the most powerful woman on capitol hill house speaker nancy pelosi good evening i'm very pleased to welcome the democratic and republican leadership of the house and senate as well a break he speaks first and you know fed chairman are usually kind of careful about predicting doom and gloom because if they say they're going to be showers everybody so it's going to be a hurricane and he comes in and says it's going to be a hurricane he says that if you don't put some money up taxpayer money to bail out the financial system we'll have another great depression and most of the members of congress there are just completely stunned harry reid the majority leader the senator from nevada says to him well how long we haven't bernanke is a couple of days and harry re senate the united states is not flush a toilet in a couple of days they really thought they were staring at the economic abyss that's what was in front of them and you know we focus so much on lehman brothers and but it was those next dominoes it was morgan stanley cup it was goldman sachs going next and go after that we were talking about general electric an american icon hank paulson's telephone logs shielded he was receiving calls from the head of almost every major corporation in america many of them like jeffrey immelt of general electric worry that bankruptcy was just around the corner office and realized that he had to pump government money into the financial allow banks to resume lending to consumers and to each other he came up with a plan called tarp the troubled asset relief program the government would strengthen us bang using taxpayer money to buy their question see what has been holding up the deal ohio congresswoman marcy kaptur voted against the bill and i saw it as a means for wall street to take a very gun shy congress a few weeks before election and strike the fear of god into them and get anything you wanted out of them and essentially transfer all of the losses that they knew were happening to the public sector no mr paulson we're not going to do what you're asking us to stocks fell off our klefbom largest single point drop in history when they were horrified they thought that they had made the case that we were on the cusp of another great depression and they couldn't believe that congress would approve the money they were stopped and it was and made the crisis worse because it made everybody wonder whether our political system have exactly thank paulson said he never felt worse than when his proposal was voted down and he began to show one of the sort of physical reactions he has as he does a sort of dry heaves it's sort of almost a nervous a motion or tire it's his form of sickness if you will there's a moment when he goes to the hill and he's trying to convince all these congressional members to pass tarp and that evening you know they but they bring him a trash can and then they said to each we get the you know the congressional doctor to come and he says no no this is happens to be a lot colors and seven hundred billion dollars there was a serious chance of another great depression in the end they got the powers and the money but the signs of depression  in the last few months of two thousand and eight signs of economic depression appeared in many parts of the united states there were over one million home foreclosures the greatest share in california two years later the foreclosure rate is still he is haunted by the case of one older man who was not going to listen to rea and he continually called the bank and made threats to them the bank made me aware of this i showed up with another officer we approached the house and made entry into the house and we did the the bank took his house and he probably felt that he had nowhere else to go after being foreclosed many former homeowners have no place to go and fall into despair some have to sleep in their car single mothers nicole o'connor and andre shriver have just found places in the st john's women's shelter in sacramento both have been living in their cars for weeks with their children audrey has also been battling cancer i've been working since i was fifteen so i have a lot of history back physically i'm just not up to it right now and so for the months before i came here man that her kids are living out of my van and that's scary  under government pressure california banks and mortgage companies hold events like this one san diego homeowners facing foreclosure are offered one last cha money they don't care about people they can send them all make them almost put them in the street character and old elderly disabled people who've lost their jobs or read them a health condition or mental health condition they could care less they could care less that it's the actions of banks during the financial crisis raised the ire of many us politicians they don't return your phone call or they put you through so many hoops they each you get so confused that you just give up and that's the whole idea where you out it confusing make it very intimidating and you'll walk away and then someone else ends up owning that property not you so you've lost everything that you've invested in  writes marcy kaptur when u s house of representatives and told americans to fight back against foreclosures even by resisting the sheriff what i'm telling people right now is stay in your homes if the american people anybody out there is being foreclosed don't leave the squatters in your own homes don't you leave in ohio in michigan in indiana in illinois and all these other places where people are being treated like chattel i would venture to say well seventy five percent of the people that get these notices from lending institutions have no clue about how to defend their own interests legally it is just it's a tragedy virtual government takeover of the u s banking system by making direct government investments in all major banks he knew that many bankers would be reluctant to accept paulson as a problem which is basically the government united states can't force the banks to take this taxpayer capital he wants them to take it because he wants to put capital into the weakest banks and he wants the financial system to have more capital because if it doesn't have more careful it's going to shrink and that's going to hurt us all so he has to use his forcefulness to make them feel like they're doesn't have a choice and he does the bankers knew that if they accepted the money they would also have to accept a lot more government interference in the way they ran their businesses right down to the size of their bonuses something they desperately wish to avoid in the end each of the nine c e o s president signed a hastily drafted single sheet of paper much more quickly and easily than he ever imagined literally by four five in the afternoon it was down in the biggest welfare check in history had been paid to wall street hank paulson man had sound financial reasons for doing what he did but he had no idea what the public reaction would be protesters filled the streets denouncing bailouts for billionaire bank well you know i was young on a better deal for the taxpayers you should certainly got a good deal for a lot of your former clients i think if you look at what the taxpayer is going to make on a number of these companies it will have been good but the biggest good thing it is to the taxpayer is work didn't happen the collapse of two thousand acres quickly spread to europe and some of the rage against bankers and politicians meeting in paris all told her fourth two thousand and eight banks in britain and france had already started to collapse but europe's leaders couldn't agree on what to do about france's christine lagarde the proposed the european rescue fund for me each to his own ship and then she ends up and maybe the meeting failed but it was not my field it was marcus she fell into her own trap that the only thing that really unified the european powers was anger at the united states a tug of war played out behind closed doors when world finance ministers descended on washington to front the americans in the first week of october two thousand it was unclear that the markets would even open on the monday and we better deal with this and that's a sobering conversation french finance minister christine legarde admits and here american feelings were running h the reaction the europeans are sort of the most first very aggressive very accusatory of the united states you caused this because if you let lehman brothers fail and in think it was particularly useful i mean and i pointed out to some of my colleagues of this a lot of the european banks were leveraged to thirty don't want to forty to one so they couldn't really be too critical of investment banks on wall street there relievers the same way the g seven finance ministers met president bush the next day at the white house he acknowledged that the united states bore the chief responsibility for causing the crisis and promised that the u s would change its ways to help clean up the mess the finance ministers left the white house with a new plan that was agreed to by all the g twenty finance ministers the world bank and the international monetary fund so by saturday night everybody in the financial world that had anything to say government around the central banks had endorsed the plan i think actually that's quite positive news and in terms of a world government former canadian prime minister paul martin says world leaders were struggling with how the game of international finance had the best example i think in many ways is you know is this person buys a house in california pays twice as much as that he can afford twice as much as the house is worth on the basis of that the value of the house some countries were immediately devastated by the global financial collapse i saw was headed for bankruptcy and ruin during the meltdown the worst international dispute over money came between britain and iceland higher and crashed harder than almost all other countries in the boom years iceland had privatized its banks the new owners embarked on a binge of questionable financial practices many  in the years leading up to the crisis like lending banks opened operations in london and launched major campaigns to convince british citizens to deposit their money in interest icelandic accounts cre everybody thought that they would be living in a famously rich society where everybody was moving money and we have to sort of invent ourselves as a nation the financial meltdown triggered the story begins with the millionaire owner of this textile plant in the shell shocked towns factory employing four thousand workers in an industrial compound that covers the size of some old football cal drove around town every day showing off his latest maceda and he was widely seen here as an advertisement for the new china he had no cash reserves to pay his workers and there was no way under chinese law that he could file for bankruptcy protection from his credit and so late one night in october karl sold his mercedes burned the financial records of his companies and disappeared into the night wasn't the only dozens of chinese factory owners did exactly the same thing there was a wave of bankruptcies in the chinese industrial sector in late two thousand and eight and millions of chinese workers were suddenly thrown onto the street you think these are companies that can turn around a toy design and make it an export before christmas you know sometimes in a matter of weeks and they're exactly the same when all this stuff falling off they close very quickly and there's sort of instant reaction to lack of  police cars overturned millions of angry workers demonstrating streets is about the worst nightmare for china's communist government the interesting thing is of the communist party was extremely worried that that might happen and it's always worried because it legitimacy the dishonesty of the communist party of china depends absolutely on delivering economic growth and if you talk to communist party officials they will admit that they'll say look if we don't deliver economic growth there's nothing else because we're clearly not really communist anymore gentlemen uprisings of nine hundred eighty nine chinese citizens lost their fear of dictatorship and stood up to the communist government even a million people in the streets continue for three days that power is not really reliable while c e o s make do on less enormous salaries ten cities and soup kitchens are still growing it's getting worse and it could get a lot for those who can least afford it are paying the price down some of the crash victims fight back in iceland a protesting singer brings down the government france a union leader oversees the kidnapping of his boss the years since the two thousand eight hundred apps have been marked by demonstrations around the world owing to the loss of an estimated thirty million jobs in many places there were violent street protests but they were easily weathered by governments and large corporations in some countries however the struggle went much further and left a lasting mark the epicenter of this battle was in france where workers have always been quick to the barricades because of the meltdown in march two thousand and nine the continental tire company announced that it would be forced to close its factory in the town of cutting eleven hundred twenty jobs the continent tell employees moved on to occupy the town off the caterpillar heavy equipment company in granada announced that in spite of record profits they would be cutting twenty thousand jobs worldwide over seven hundred here in france the global meltdown would reduce demand for their bulldozers so production would have to slow down three weeks of negotiations lead nowhere serious workers surrounded the management offices and decided to hold the management team captive led the management team that was taken prisoner at first he refused any further discussions with the union bosses held captive the situation became increasingly dangerous the police did not immediately intervene the union leaders were trying to keep control of the situation the media were then told that the bosses would be staying the night overnight as the captive bosses were trying to get some sleep in their offices angry workers did not leave them in pea the caterpillar bosses who were kidnapped decided to keep silent about their ordeal but many bosses in france realize they could soon end up in a similar predicament like one of them was marcus carey you the human resources manager for a u s car parts company called the workers were furious and very quickly their anger focused on carried along with nasty graffiti kerry who says he became the target of e mail threats you know when you read about some extr afterwards because she didn't expect she had been working quite a couple of years was this people to the to react like this the rage against markets carry you only increased to the point that he travels with bodyguards as he conducts final negotiations kerry you complained that he was treated like a monkey in a zoo but union leader rees openly threatens him with finance minister christine legarde has to walk a fine line about union militancy in france she denounces violence and she knows that foreign companies don't like the turbulent atmosphere here on the other hand she points out that the people who have paid the father philip pass says that french workers give an example to the world by defining employment as an essential human right was a microcosm of everything that went wrong during the global financial crisis the sudden collapse of the country's banks in the fall of two thousand and eight wiped out the pensions and savings of most iceland every citizen was now saddled with a debt estimated at three hundred fifty thousand dollars per person at the greed of bankers and government cronyism that contributed to the meltdown in early two thousand and nine some took to the streets to express their dissatisfaction first they surrounded the national parliament and protest leaders appealed to the public to come out and support them i sort of wasn't fair to mystic that we would be able to mobilize the people but every week every day you  on january twenty first the anger focused on the icelandic prime minister gary hart his car was surrounded and pelted with eggs and garbage he was shaken by the incident especially because it came shortly after a difficult visit to his do particularly those who had lost money who had lost their jobs there was a crisis well nobody had really expected of enormous proportion within the nation and to see the joy and experience that joy when we finally got coalition fell apart national elections were called the new government in iceland was left to clean up the incredible mess left by the bankers and politicians who preceded them for you even  every night reykjavik police see the symptoms like an upswing in domestic violence going on here a woman has called for help because her estranged husband has broken into her house and grabbed her baby  since says police here are sympathetic with people who become despondent after they lose their jobs we're just people are governed burials we have mortgages car payments we have to make sure we're in the same situation as a result of the meltdown young people the nice decades of high taxes and reduced social services to help pay off the debts run by icelandic realizes that many of his countrymen are demoralized and that many young people want to leave but he is quite sure that iceland can still have a bright future i think many of the feasts people if you go away they see they look good one and we have the opportunity to build it up and i see signs of this beginning people are really standing together and helping each other in confronting the problems of a failed economy iceland at least has the advantage of a strong social safety  the situation is much more difficult in what is being called the western world's most surprising failed state california in the three months following the meltdown there were an estimated one million foreclosures in the united states sweeping many middle class families into poverty tent cities began springing up across the country as the homeless desperately search for somewhere to spend the night this one suddenly appeared in a field in sacramento california the capital of a state that was long considered america's richest it was reminiscent of the tent cities that appeared in this area during the great depression of the one nine hundred thirty s in those days they were called hoovervilles after then u s president herbert hoover