http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/warning/view/

In the 1990's, a sharp thinking, Brooksley Born was on the shortlist for Attorney General, but Clinton thought she wasn't riveting enough so he instead offered her the head of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission. This obscure commission was the pulpit from which Born would issue a prediction that unregulated markets would eventually implode. Her logic, though basic, almost unassailable, brought her notoriety. As she decided derivatives needed oversight, eventually she would come up against Clinton's "working group," Robert Rubin, Alan Greenspan, Larry Summers, and then in congressional hearings, Phil Gramm. Eventually she would resign, and the first warning of things to come, the collapse of Long Term Market Capital in 1998, would be swept under the rug as an anomaly.

"We didn't truly know the dangers of the market, because it was a dark market," says Brooksley Born, the head of an obscure federal regulatory agency -- the Commodity Futures Trading Commission [CFTC] -- who not only warned of the potential for economic meltdown in the late 1990s, but also tried to convince the country's key economic powerbrokers to take actions that could have helped avert the crisis. "They were totally opposed to it," Born says. "That puzzled me. What was it that was in this market that had to be hidden?"