Rodgin Videos

Sullivan & Cromwell LLP managing partner Rodgin Cohen says that one of the great myths of The Great Recession is that the abolition of Glass-Steagall was responsible for the financial crisis. Cohen says the origin of the financial crisis was actually unregulated mortgage bankers and brokers. See the video below or download it at iTunes

Sullivan & Cromwell LLP managing partner Rodgin Cohen says the steps that had been taken after the failure of Bear Stearns & Cos. may not have been aggressive enough, but the fallout after the failure of Lehman Brothers was, "just unpredictable." "I just assume and don't know that it was thought that with that period of time that the impact of a failure of a major institution could be understood, to me if that was the view, it was a major mistake," Cohen states.

One of our last videos of our Decade of the Deal series pays a visit to Rodgin Cohen, the bank lawyer and Sullivan the tendency of rescue plans to be hatched over weekends; the sheer nervous exhaustion of wrestling with an ever-shifting disaster. Cohen himself dates the crisis to August 2007, when Countrywide, the big subprime mortgage peddler, nearly failed - Bank of America injected $2 billion into it, leading to a takeover -- putting the entire system at risk. That systemic risk would become a hammering theme, month by month, weekend by weekend. Let Cohen take you into the heart of the crisis. - Robert Teitelman