Gretchen Morgenson, New York Times's Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist in conversation with James Flanigan, columnist and author

Gretchen Morgenson, the New York Times's Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist reveals how the financial meltdown emerged from the toxic interplay of Washington, Wall Street, and corrupt mortgage lenders.

See our short interview with Gretchen Morgenson

Thursday, June 9th, 2011

Breakfast: 7:45-8:30am

Forum: 8:30-9:30am (followed by book signing)

 Tickets: $20, $35 (includes the book)

Crawford Family Forum at KPCC

474 South Raymond Avenue

Pasadena, CA 91105

GRETCHEN MORGENSON, the New York Times's Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist reveals how the financial meltdown emerged from the toxic interplay of Washington, Wall Street, and corrupt mortgage lenders.

In Reckless Endangerment, Gretchen Morgenson, exposes how the watchdogs who were supposed to protect the country from financial harm were actually complicit in the actions that finally blew up the American economy. Drawing on previously untapped sources and building on original research from coauthor Joshua Rosner—who himself raised early warnings with the public and investors, and kept detailed records—Morgenson connects the dots that led to this fiasco.

Morgenson and Rosner draw back the curtain on Fannie Mae, the mortgage-finance giant that grew, with the support of the Clinton administration, through the 1990s, becoming a major opponent of government oversight even as it was benefiting from public subsidies. They expose the role played not only by Fannie Mae executives but also by enablers at Countrywide Financial, Goldman Sachs, the Federal Reserve, HUD, Congress, the FDIC, and the biggest players on Wall Street, to show how greed, aggression, and fear led countless officials to ignore warning signs of an imminent disaster.

Gretchen Morgenson is assistant business and financial editor and a columnist at the New York Times. She has covered the world financial markets for the Times since May 1998 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for her coverage of Wall Street. Prior to the New York Times, she was assistant managing editor at Forbes magazine, and was the executive editor at Worth magazine, where she wrote the “Full Disclosure” column, and oversaw all financial coverage. Earlier in her career, she was an investigative business writer and editor at Forbes magazine and she oversaw several Forbes investing sections and their Washington bureau; worked at Money magazine; was a stockbroker for Dean Witter Reynolds ; and began her career at Vogue magazine as an assistant. She is the author The Capitalist's Bible: The Essential Guide to Free Markets--and Why They Matter to You (2009), Forbes Great Minds Of Business (1997) and co-author of "The Woman's Guide to the Stock Market (1981).

JAMES FLANIGAN business columnist for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and other publications, has covered national and international business and economics for 46 years. He has focused on every aspect of business and finance and examined in major articles the economies of countries stretching from Europe to Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa.

The Drucker Business Forum is produced by The Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management at Claremont Graduate University. The series is co-presented by KPCC.