OWL HOOTS
# When I see you alone
# I see what's in your mind
# You want me, yes, you do
# You don't need to tell me
# I know you love me most
# No-one else take my place
# You need me, yes, you do
# Forever and ever
# We are in love, baby love child
# I take you so high groovy love child
# Give me a kiss, baby love child
# Do it again... #
Ayn Rand, 225-1, take two.
BEEPING
Who are you, Ayn Rand? When I say that,
I would like to know just a little bit.
You have an accent which is... Russian. Russian.
You were born in Russia? Yes.
Came here... Oh, about 30 years ago.
And whence did this philosophy of yours come?
Er...out of my own mind.
With the sole acknowledgement of a debt to Aristotle,
who is the only philosopher that ever influenced me.
Uh-huh. I devised the rest of my philosophy myself.
Ayn Rand had left Russia in the 1920s
and gone to live in California.
By chance, she met the film director Cecil B DeMille,
who gave her a job as an extra on his epic films.
All right now, give me everything you've got, you people!
Ready now? Speed, 957. Places, everybody, this is a take!
Clear the set! Camera!
Then DeMille gave her a screenplay to write called The Skyscraper.
Rand hated the characters and the plot,
but the idea was going to make her famous.
She started to write her own stories,
and in 1943 she published a novel called The Fountainhead.
Its hero is an architect called Howard Roark who refuses
to compromise in his vision of how to build a skyscraper in New York.
It was a bestseller, and was made into a film.
Ayn Rand used Roark to express her philosophy,
that she called objectivism.
Human beings, Rand said, were alone in the universe.
They must free themselves of all forms of political and religious control
and live their lives guided only by their selfish desires.
If they did this, they would become heroic figures.
I am primarily the creator of a new code of morality
which has so far been believed impossible,
namely a morality not based on arbitrary edict, mystical or social.
I hold that if man wants to live on earth,
his highest moral purpose is the achievement of his own happiness,
and that he must not force other people
nor accept their right to force him,
that each must man must live as an end in himself,
and follow his own rational self-interest.
May I interrupt now? You may.
In the 1950s, Rand moved to New York.
She lived next to her favourite skyscraper, the Empire State Building.
Rand's ideas were seen as mad and dangerous.
Selfishness and greed had led to the financial chaos
and the Depression of the 1930s.
The job of politics was to manage and control
the selfish desires of the individual.
But Rand continued to write,
and a small group of followers began to form round her
who believed in her vision of another kind of world,
where everyone was free.
I was 19 when I met Ayn.
I was very idealistic,
and she appealed to everything that was idealistic in me.
We are heroic, we can know the world,
we can tame nature, we can achieve our goals.
We can do what we want.
What does it matter that we're alone? Who do we need?
Why do we need anyone?
We have ourselves.
And that was enough? And that was...for sure enough, yes.
Definitely enough.
Even at 19, I knew, "I'm not going to meet anyone else like this.
"This is once in a lifetime."
Rand had died in 1981, but by the start of the 1990s
her novels had become a phenomenon in America.
A Library of Congress survey showed that one of them, Atlas Shrugged,
was now the second most influential book in the country.
The first was the Bible.
And the group most inspired by her
were the new entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley,
including some of the most powerful, like Larry Ellison of Oracle.
Many of them named their companies and even their children after Rand and her novels.
They set up reading groups to spread her ideas.
But above all, they saw themselves as Randian heroes.
I really felt like an Ayn Rand hero!
I really did feel like an Ayn Rand hero.
I was one. I didn't just feel like one, I was one!
I was building the products.
I was thinking independently, I was...being rational.
I was taking pride in what I did.
Those are Ayn Rand heroes' characteristics - I was an Ayn Rand hero.
I wasn't in the book, but I was an Ayn Rand hero.
Just to give you an example, my...
my six-year-old boy, his middle name is Rand,
and I was talking to someone in...a classmate's dad,
and we were talking about Ayn Rand and this interview, and he said,
"Oh, I'm a huge Ayn Rand fan, in fact my girl's middle name is Ayn."
And it's funny when you see people, you see companies all the time
called Fountainhead or the Galt Group, and you see
little evidence that Ayn Rand has heavily influenced people.
Many of the people here in Silicon Valley were greatly inspired by Ayn Rand.
Entrepreneurs who were building computers,
entrepreneurs in biotech, entrepreneurs in software, in internet, networking.
Many here were...were inspired by Ayn Rand. It presented a vision.
It presented a vision of a...morally exciting enterprise,
a morally glorious project.
But the project was about more than just the entrepreneurs being Randian heroes,
because an idea was emerging in California
that said that the new computer technologies
could turn everyone into heroic individuals.
It was a vision of a society where the old forms of political control would be unnecessary
because computer networks could create order in society without central control.
This had never happened before,
because at the heart of of western political thought
had always been a fear that if you allowed individuals too much freedom, you would get anarchy.
But ever since the 1970s, computer utopians in California
believed that if human beings were linked by webs of computers,
then together they could create their own kind of order.
It was a cybernetic dream which said that the feedback of information
between all the individuals connected as nodes in the network
would work to create a self-stabilising system.
The world would be stable, yet everyone would be heroic Randian beings,
completely free to follow their desires.
Now, in the 1990s, the technologies had been built,
and in 1991 a leading computer engineer from California
gave a dramatic demonstration.
He was called Loren Carpenter.
He invited hundreds of people to a large shed.
On each seat was a small paddle,
and in front of them was a giant screen.
We told them nothing for a while. We just left the things on the seats,
and people would pick this up and look at it and say, "What's that?"
And then somebody noticed that there's little red and green dots up there on the screen,
and this is red and green, so maybe that has something to do with that.
It would be that. "OK, there I am."
And when that happened, the room erupted.
Just totally spontaneous, we didn't say anything.
Carpenter then began an experiment.
He projected the early computer game Pong.
Each half of the audience jointly controlled the bat
on their side of the screen.
If an individual held up red on their paddle,
a computer sensor picked it up and the bat on the screen went down.
If they held up green, it went up.
But they had to operate it together.
When the game is being played and the ball is going back and forth,
if it's down here and it's headed that way,
some people are going to have to show red
to keep it from going all the way to the top.
If everybody just showed green, it would slam up to the top and the ball would miss.
So something happened in that group of people,
where some decided to show green and some decided to show red
to cause it to stop in the right place.
And we had no idea what did that.
All right! Red, red, red, red, red!
Oh, baby! Oh, yeah!
Red!
Carpenter believed that what he had created was a model of a society
where there was no hierarchy,
where everyone made their own decisions without guidance.
Yet because they were linked by the machines,
out of it came a stability and an order.
So they're all acting as individuals,
because each one of them can decide what they're going to do.
They have total freedom about what to decide to do, but there's an order.
There's an order that emerges that gives them a kind of
an amoeba-like effect, where they surge and then they play.
It was kind of in the nature of an experiment.
I wanted to see, if no hierarchy existed at all, what would happen.
And what did happen?
They formed a... A kind of a... A subconscious consensus.
Out of these kinds of ideas
came what was called the Californian ideology.
It was an odd fusion of radical individualism
and utopian theories about computer systems,
and an international priesthood rose up to promote it.
What united them was was a vision
that the world was now one interconnected system,
that nation states were irrelevant
and politicians should not try and control the system,
they should let it free to create a new kind of democracy.
All the mechanisms that we are creating
are connecting everything to everything else.
They let the individual do their thing.
The internet, as it spreads, is going to
radically accelerate that process of network formation -
a different kind of global governance.
Really, the fundamental evolution of the global system
in the post-Cold War era.
And people, as consumers, have moved into the 21st century -
new citizens, networkers who'll reshape the world.
You have citizens forming networks, global, you know, the planetary consciousness.
They are absolutely liberating for the individual.
The power has shifted to the citizens,
and the government must be a facilitator.
They should not, in the traditional sense, control and regulate.
But at this very moment, a new President of the United States
was elected who believed the opposite.
He was convinced that he could use political power
in its traditional way, to transform the world for the better.
You have to realise that Alan Greenspan
was and is a brilliant mind, doing brilliant things in the real world,
but in his twenties, he's sitting with me in New York in our apartment,
in my apartment, and telling me that he cannot say for a certainty
that he exists, and he cannot say for a certainty that I, Nathaniel, exist.
And he cannot say for a certainty that this conversation exists.
That aside, he's got lots of opinions about everything, how the economy works, how the world works,
but he denies the possibility of being certain about anything.
Even, and this, of course, is reductio ad absurdum,
even he cannot be certain that he exists.
So my challenge became to persuade him
that he can be certain that he exists.
Alan Greenspan believed in a philosophy called logical positivism.
It was an extreme form of rationality that questioned everything
and used logic to reach absurd conclusions.
To try and save him from this,
Nathaniel Branden introduced Greenspan to Ayn Rand.
Branden and his wife Barbara
were the leaders of the small group that had formed around Ayn Rand.
They jokingly called themselves the Collective,
and they met in Rand's apartment every Saturday night
to read the latest section of the novel that she was writing, called Atlas Shrugged.
Nathaniel liked him, Ayn did not like him at all.
Nathaniel did, and began discussing ideas with him.
And every Saturday night, the Collective gathered to read what Ayn had written,
to read in manuscript what Ayn had written of Atlas Shrugged that week,
and finally Nathaniel persuaded Ayn to include Alan in that.
And he loved the book, and he was...
He became a loyal member of the Collective.
Atlas Shrugged is set in a science-fiction world,
but one which is very similar to 1950s America.
In it, Ayn Rand attacks head-on the idea of altruism,
the care of others, as an organising principle for society.
In the story, the government and the state control everything.
But one by one, the creative individuals in America -
the industrialists, the inventors and the artists -
are all mysteriously disappearing.
They have gone on strike,
and they hide out in a remote mountain valley as America falls apart.
At the end of the book, they reappear,
and set out to build Rand's vision of the world to come,
a world in which politics has disappeared
and is based instead on what she called "the virtues of selfishness."
The critics hated it.
And let me start by quoting from a review
of this novel, Atlas Shrugged, that appeared in Newsweek.
It said that you are out to destroy
almost every edifice in the contemporary American way of life -
our Judeo-Christian religion,
our modified government-regulated capitalism,
our rule by the majority will.
Are these accurate criticisms? Er, yes.
I'm challenging the moral code of altruism,
the precept that man's moral duty is to live for others,
that man must sacrifice himself to others.
I say that man is entitled to his own happiness,
and that he must achieve it himself,
and nor should he wish to sacrifice himself for the happiness of others.
I hold that man should have self-esteem.
'Atlas Shrugged was the great disappointment of her life.'
What hurt her terribly was that when it came out,
not a single person whom she considered a peer
stood up publicly
to say what an achievement that book was.
Not one. Nobody.
Vicious, horrible criticisms.
She felt very alienated,
and this small group around her, the Collective,
were the only people she had admitted to, in effect, her private world,
the world that she wasn't alienated from.
Alan Greenspan remained fiercely loyal to Ayn Rand.
He married another member of the Collective, a painter called Joan Mitchell.
Together, they and the other members of the group saw themselves
as models for a new kind of world that they were convinced was coming.
We thought of ourselves
as being instigators of a revolution that was coming,
and, uh...
we were so enthusiastic about what a difference it was going to make
to the world, and we were there, and we were in on it,
and we hoped we were contributing, even, to it.
And what would that revolution lead to?
Oh, totally free society.
At the end of 1992, Alan Greenspan went to see President Clinton.
It was a few days after Clinton had been elected,
and what Greenspan said in that conversation
was the beginning of a revolution.
By now, Greenspan was the head of the US Federal Reserve,
and what he told Clinton
was that his election promises of social reform were impossible.
The government deficit was so large, Greenspan said,
that if he borrowed any more to pay for his political programme,
then interest rates would go up and damage growth.
But, Greenspan said, there was a radical alternative.
Clinton should do the very opposite. Cut government spending,
then interest rates would go down and the markets would boom.
Greenspan's idea was simple.
Clinton should let the markets transform America, not politics.
He said later that he was surprised that Clinton agreed with him.
I had hoped to invest in your future without asking more of you,
and I worked harder than I've ever worked in my life to meet that goal.
But I can't, because the deficit has increased so much.
There will be many more budget cuts.
This is the beginning, not the end.
The house has already embarked on that course. There will be more.
If our national debt were stacked in thousand dollar bills,
the stack would reach 267 miles into space.
As Greenspan had predicted, a boom began.
And as share prices rose higher and higher, a belief started to grow
that this time, the boom would be different.
It wouldn't run out of control.
And the reason was the computers.
The computers allowed the banks to create complex mathematical models
that could predict the risk of making any loan or investment.
This had enormous implications,
because if a risk could be predicted,
then it could be balanced by hedging against it.
For the banks and the hedge funds, this was like a new world.
For, in the chaos and the volatility of the markets,
the computers had - for the first time ever - created stability.
It allowed banks to lend money to millions of people
they would never have touched in the past.
At the same time, the internet and other computer networks
allowed businesses to respond to each others' needs instantaneously -
and to the consumers' desires.
It was the cybernetic feedback
predicted by the Californian ideologists.
And a belief arose that America had now entered into a new age of stability.
It was called the New Economy.
Whether they came from Silicon Valley or from Washington,
from academia or from Wall Street, there were a number of
leading individuals who basically articulated a body of thought
now known fondly as "the New Economy".
It was based on the premise of a dramatic and permanent increase
in the rate of productivity growth,
sparked by new information technologies that would let this thing go on forever.
'This is manna from heaven -
'this is the candy that politicians only dream of.
'You don't have to do anything - '
you just push a button and presto!
You've got a brand new economy that creates jobs and prosperity.
It's the rising tide that lifts any and all boats,
even if there's no water in the ocean.
But Alan Greenspan was worried.
Every morning in his bath, he read page after page of data
about what was really happening in the factories and businesses of America.
What puzzled him was that the figures showed that, actually,
there was hardly any increase in productivity,
yet reported profits kept on going up.
There was something wrong.
And in 1996, Greenspan made a speech that warned that the market might be overvalued.
That a dangerous speculative bubble was being created.
Early December of 1996, Alan Greenspan warned
that the US stock market
may be in a period of irrational exuberance,
and you would have thought the world had come to an end.
Politicians attacked him from the left, from the right,
mainstream was upset with him, Wall Street was upset with him.
And at that point, there was a very unfortunate turn of events,
because he knuckled under to political pressure.
He changed his mind.
Greenspan decided he was wrong.
That the computers were increasing productivity in ways that were so new his data couldn't see it.
And he went to see President Clinton to tell him the good news.
It really was a New Economy.
Greenspan described it to Clinton as like discovering a new planet.
# There's a monkey on my back
# Makes me talk like that
# There's a monkey on my back
# Makes me talk like that
# There's a monkey on my back
# Makes me act like that
# There's a monkey on my back
# Makes me talk like that... #
(MUSIC DROWNS SPEECH)
The boom continued,
and Time magazine described how a sense of lethargy
and quietness came over the White House.
It was as if the President didn't have anything to do.
# There's a monkey on my back
# Makes me act like that
# There's a monkey on my back
# Makes me act like that
# There's a monkey on my back... #
This was a woman who was very powerful in a great many ways,
who was mentally more powerful than anyone she met,
who was more determined, who was more hardworking
than anyone she met.
What she would have loved
would be to find a man who was stronger than she.
She would have loved to meet someone who was smarter than she,
braver than she, a greater genius. She never met him.
But she longed for him all her life.
And I think this accounts for her sexual psychology.
In the 1940s, Ayn Rand had married an actor called Frank O'Connor.
But now, faced with the hostility to her ideas,
Rand turned to the leading member of the collective, Nathaniel Branden.
She told him that she had fallen in love with him,
and, despite the fact that he was married to Barbara -
another member of the collective -
Rand told him that the only rational course
was for Nathaniel to have an affair with her.
Ov...I don't think...
I must be failing to make a certain point clear to you, sir.
Ayn Rand thought that she was being rational
about anything or everything that she did.
So it would never occur to me to ask,
"Did Ayn Rand think she was being rational about that?"
She would say, if she were here, I can feel her,
she would say, "Why, yes, do you think I would do something
"if I didn't think it was rational?"
In your book, you talk about love
as if it were a business deal of some kind.
Isn't the essence of love that it is above self-interest?
In love, the currency is virtue.
You love people not for what you do to or for them,
or what they do for you.
You love them for their values, their virtues,
which they have achieved in their own character.
You don't love causelessly.
You don't love everybody indiscriminately.
You love only those who deserve it.
And then if a man is weak, or a woman is weak,
then she, he is beyond love?
He certainly does not deserve it.
She was attempting to portray it,
that affair between them,
as totally rationally justified.
She said it was nobody's business,
and we were sworn to absolute secrecy,
but she said since they were such unusual people,
it was inevitable that they feel what they felt -
that there could be no objection to an affair.
I also felt... I was very aware
of how little Ayn Rand had had in her life from the outside,
from other people.
And I thought, OK, if I could press a button,
and make Ayn romantically happy,
would I do it? And I thought, yes, I would.
That's altruism. >
I know. I know.
It was. I'm not proud of saying yes, but I said yes.
Well, this is the second floor.
And this is one of my favourite parts of the house.
This is a beautiful, central corridor up here.
Must be a bear keeping this carpet clean, huh?
Well, the main things that... (VOICE FADES)
LEONARD COHEN: # ..You can spend the night beside her
# And you know that she's half crazy
# But that's why you want to be there
# And she feeds you tea and oranges
# That come all the way from China
# And just when you mean to tell her
# That you have no love to give her
# Then she gets you on her wavelength
# And she lets the river answer
# That you've always been her lover
# And you want to travel with her
# And you want to travel blind
# And you know she will trust you
# For you've touched her perfect body
# With your mind... #
'First time I ever looked into his eyes,
'I saw somebody totally different than I had expected to see.
'And that's the person I fell in love with.'
# And you want to travel with him
# And you want to travel blind
# And you think maybe you'll trust him
# For he's touched your perfect body with his mind. #
By 1997, the American boom was reshaping the whole world.
Economists and bankers who saw the world as one giant economic system
now dominated the American government.
They believed that the way to achieve global economic stability
was for nations to open themselves up
to the free flow of capital.
And the laboratory that they had created for this experiment
was South East Asia.
Under American pressure,
countries like South Korea and Thailand
had given up all restrictions and Western capital flooded in.
It helped fuel what was called "The Asian Miracle".
But a group within the White House were worried that
much of the Western money was going to fund
a giant speculative bubble in property.
And when the boom collapsed, the money would flee,
leaving the countries like Thailand and South Korea decimated.
The group were led by the economist Joseph Stiglitz.
The Council of Economic Advisers was very worried
about these short-term speculative capital flows
because while the countries benefit a little bit when the money comes in,
when the money goes out, the countries are devastated.
So, it was not in the interest of Korea.
And it was not in the interest of the US.
It was in the interest of a very small group of people
who make their money from these short-term capital flows.
Bankers, and hedge funds.
It was a very small group in whose interest it was.
The Council of Economic Advisors decided to warn the President.
They wanted to persuade him to stop some of the more excessive
short-term speculation in the Asian countries.
But they came face to face
with the Secretary of the Treasury, Robert Rubin.
Rubin had previously run Goldman Sachs and under his leadership
the bank had created many of the computer models that underpinned the boom.
Rubin had a revolutionary vision of a world system
completely open to the free flow of capital.
Joseph Stiglitz, who headed the Council of Economic Advisers,
was convinced that the Treasury
was stopping the warnings reaching the President.
He believed that Rubin and the Treasury had effectively become
agents of the financial world embedded in the heart of government.
Treasury had close connections with the financial markets.
The Secretary of the Treasury
had come from the largest investment bank,
and went afterwards into the largest commercial bank.
These are the people with whom the US Treasury naturally interacts.
To Wall Street, we were threatening a bursting of the bubble.
To Wall Street, we were threatening their profits.
The Treasury worked extremely hard
to make sure the President never got to consider the issues.
Making sure that perspectives of the Council of Economic Advisors...
Which was you? Yes. ..Never reached the president.
So they kept your arguments from the President? Effectively, yes.
What some people were beginning to see
was that the computer networks and the global systems
that they had created hadn't distributed power.
They had just shifted it,
and, if anything, concentrated it in new forms.
And some of the computer utopians from Silicon Valley
were also beginning to realise that the World Wide Web
was not a new kind of democracy, but something far more complicated
where power was exercised over the individual in new and surprising ways.
Carmen Hermosillo had been one of the earliest believers
in the new communities of cyberspace.
Her online name was Humdog and she lived on the West Coast.
But then she lost faith, and she posted an attack
which caused a sensation online.
"It is fashionable to suggest", she wrote,
"that cyberspace is some island of the blessed
"where people are free to indulge and express their individuality.
"This is not true. I have seen many people spill out their emotions,
"their guts online, and I did so myself,
"until I began to see that I had commodified myself.
"Commodification means that you turn something into a product
"which has a money value.
"In the 19th century, commodities were made in factories
"by workers who were mostly exploited.
"But I created my interior thoughts as commodities for the corporations
"that owned the board I was posting to, like CompuServe or AOL,
"and that commodity was then sold on
"to other consumer entities as entertainment."
"Cyberspace", she wrote, "is a black hole.
"It absorbs energy and personality
"and then re-presents it as an emotional spectacle.
"It is done by businesses
"that commodify human interaction and emotion.
"And we are getting lost in the spectacle."
# She wore blue velvet
# Bluer than velvet was the night... #
'The navy blue dress. My cousin is a genetic whatchamacallit.
'He said if she has preserved a pinprick size of crusted semen,
'they can match the DNA.'
In 1997, Bill Clinton
made it clear to Monica Lewinsky that their love affair was over.
Hurt and bewildered, Lewinsky poured out her feelings
to her colleague Linda Tripp - who had become her friend.
But in September of that year, Linda Tripp
secretly began to record their phone conversations.
At the very same time, on the other side of the world,
the property bubble in South East Asia finally burst.
Two enormous crises were about to engulf the world.
One would strip the last remnants of power from Bill Clinton.
The other would bring the global economic system to its knees.
The dream of a stable world was about to be assaulted
by the two uncontrollable forces of love and power.
The Asian crisis began in Thailand.
Hundreds of thousands of offices and apartments had been built.
But no-one wanted them.
As the developers went bust and defaulted on their loans,
Western investors panicked
and rushed to take their money out of the country.
The panic began to spread, first to South Korea.
Housewives queued to give their spare dollars
to the government to rescue the country.
But it wasn't enough.
Teams from the IMF flew in
and they offered billions of dollars in loans
to stabilise the economies. But there was a price.
The IMF said that the reason the crisis had happened
was because the Asian economies weren't Western enough.
In return for the loans,
they would have to turn themselves into models of the free market.
This meant cutting government spending
and getting rid of corruption and nepotism in the ruling elites.
CHANTING
Then the crisis got worse. It spread to Indonesia.
Indonesia was ruled by President Suharto.
He was an autocrat surrounded by a corrupt clique of advisers and family members.
He refused to do what the IMF wanted.
So the IMF turned to the US Secretary of the Treasury, Robert Rubin.
Our objective was not to reform the country for the sake of reform.
The problem the international community faced was that both
the international markets
and the domestic holders of capital were very quickly losing confidence
in the Indonesian regime.
By that time, it was our view
that if President Suharto was going to re-establish confidence,
he had to deal with corruption.
That was something he was unwilling to do.
Robert Rubin and the US Treasury
were determined to force Suharto to their will.
In an atmosphere of growing panic in Washington,
Rubin's team began to argue that the overthrow of Suharto
might be the only way to solve the crisis.
President Clinton was now increasingly enmeshed
in the crisis over Monica Lewinsky,
and enormous political power was passing to Rubin
and his Treasury team.
They, and not the State Department,
were now running America's foreign policy.
And everything was judged by whether it was a threat
to the global economic system.
There is no question that the Treasury Secretary,
in this case, me, got involved in sensitive issues
that went way beyond what Treasury Secretaries ordinarily got involved in.
But the reason was that there was real risk
that if Indonesia had chaos, political chaos I'm talking about,
that could spread, threatening the interest of the global economy.
In January 1998, Suharto gave in and signed the IMF agreement,
watched over by the head of the IMF, Michel Camdessus.
Indonesia received a massive loan to stabilise the economy.
For a moment it worked. But then the strangest thing happened.
Indonesian's currency has collapsed, losing 80% of its value
and the economy is in ruins.
With riots and looting breaking out across the country,
there are fears that it's now on the brink of anarchy.
Indonesia's exchange rate crashed disastrously
and the economy went into freefall.
But Indonesia was not alone.
In every country that the IMF bailed out,
like Thailand and South Korea,
for a moment there was stability,
and then the exchange rate collapsed.
Rubin's critics in the White House began to argue
that there was another agenda also at work in the bail-outs -
that part of their real function was to rescue the western investors,
not the countries.
Billions of dollars were paid into the Asian banks by the IMF,
but many of those same dollars were immediately used
to pay off western investors
who wanted to get their money out of the country.
And once that had happened, the economy crashed.
It was another illustration that the interest
of the financial community
dominated over other interests.
By providing mega-billion-dollar loans,
the IMF was bailing out the Western investors
and leaving the taxpayers in the countries further in debt,
because they had to repay the IMF.
The effect of the cuts was devastating throughout the region.
In Indonesia, government subsidies were removed,
as instructed by the Western bankers.
Prices soared, and within months,
in a country of 200 million people,
15% of the male workforce lost their jobs.
Economic output fell by 14%.
As Robert Rubin had wanted, Suharto was forced from power,
but at a very high price.
The economy now lay in ruins
and ethnic and religious strife began.
The same thing happened in Thailand and South Korea.
Millions and millions of people fell back into the poverty
that they thought they had escaped forever.
By the middle of 1998, the Asian economies had collapsed.
It was the most catastrophic economic disaster
suffered by any countries since the depression of the 1930s.
Many people cannot have the money,
don't have the money.
Millions of people are unemployed.
They don't have jobs, education.
Education and hospitals are expensive.
Everything's expensive for the common people.
If Monica Lewinsky says that while you were in the Oval Office area,
you touched her breast, would she be lying?
Bill Clinton had become President with the vision
of using political power to transform America.
But he had been persuaded to give away that power
to the financial markets,
with the promise that this time
they would create a new kind of stability,
a new kind of democracy,
free of the corruption of elite politics.
But it was now becoming clear that in reality,
America's political power had just been transferred to another elite -
the financiers and Wall Street.
And when faced by a crisis,
they had simply used that power to rescue themselves.
In the process, far from creating stability,
their actions were leading to a chaotic
and far more unstable world.
To the leaders of the Asian countries,
this was just as much a corruption of power
as anything their governments were guilty of.
Power corrupts.
As much as government can become corrupt
when invested with absolute power,
markets also can become corrupt
when equally absolutely powerful.
We are seeing the effect of that absolute power today.
The impoverishment and misery of millions of people
and their eventual slavery.
What did you tell your cabinet, Mr President?
Ask him. Are you considering...?
Do you think it went well?
Are you considering resignation, Mr President?
OK, I don't know if you saw that.
Did you see that look on his face? Great, great.
Come in.
I love you, Rourke.
Would it please you to hear that I've lived in torture all these months,
hoping never to find you again
and wishing to give my life just to see once more?
But you knew that, of course.
That's what you wanted me to live through.
Yes.
Why don't you laugh at me now? You won.
I've no pride left to stop me.
I love you without dignity, without regret.
I came to tell you this
and to tell you that you'll never see me again.
By now, I've had a lot of time to think.
I'm four, five years older
and I realise I've made a terrible, terrible mistake.
But the trouble is, I've become very, very important to Ayn.
She tells me, "You are my lifeline to reality.
"I don't know how I would have survived without you.
"You started the Nathanial Brandon Institute."
That's how the philosophical movement of Ayn Rand got launched,
was by this institute I created.
So my idol is telling me every day...
..I'm her lifeline to reality.
I don't know what to do. I didn't know what to do.
And then...
..a young woman comes to my lectures and I meet her
and I fall in love with her.
And now the situation has got even worse.
She then launched into a tirade against him
that was so shocking,
accusing him of utter irrationality,
of betraying objectivism, betraying her.
It went on and on indefinitely.
And it ended with her saying...
.."If he had an ounce of morality left,
"he would be impotent for the next 10 years."
And then slapped him across the face three times
and said "Get out."
He got out.
And that was the end.
And ultimately, it ended an absolute disaster for everybody.
Ayn Rand's anger and despair
destroyed the small, perfect world that she had built around her.
The Collective was torn apart by the revelation of her affair
and by her violent reaction at her betrayal.
And by the early 1970s, Ayn Rand was left almost alone.
She still lived in her apartment by the Empire State Building
and she took up stamp collecting.
One of the few people who remained loyal to her was Alan Greenspan,
who worked in New York as an economic consultant to Wall Street.
It's feasible in the way in which it stays down
and does not merely drop and bounce around
and have within it, in a sense, an unstable future.
In 1974, President Ford made Greenspan the chairman
of his Council of Economic Advisers in Washington.
It was the beginning of Greenspan's rise to power.
Rand was left alone in New York,
but she wasn't lonely, she said.
In her philosophy, all you needed was yourself,
because you were the world.
I kind of think of this whole thing as ongoing,
that there is an eternity,
and that we are going to be a part of that eternity
that we aren't just corpses in graves when we die.
But we aren't corpses in graves, we are not there.
Don't you understand that when this life is finished,
you're not there to say, "Oh, how terrible that I'm a corpse"?
No. Well, this is true. It's finished.
And what I've always thought
was a sentence from some Greek philosopher,
I don't unfortunately remember who it was.
I read it at 16 and it's affected me all my life.
"I will not die. It's the world that will end."
And that's absolutely true.
Oh, my God!
The attack on the World Trade Center
was an assault by political Islamism on American power,
and on what the Islamists believed was the destructive force
that drove that power, radical individualism.
When the World Trade Center towers collapsed,
everyone knew that everything had changed.
But then it didn't.
The system returned to normal.
And the heroic individual who did this,
and who bent history to his will, was Alan Greenspan.
And he became the most powerful man in the world.
As we struggle to make sense of our profound loss
and its immediate consequences for the economy,
we must not lose sight of our longer-run prospects,
which have not been significantly diminished by these terrible events.
But it started badly.
A week after the attacks, the American markets opened again.
Dealers waited to see what would happen.
Our heroes will now open the marketplace.
The green button.
It was a disaster.
Immediately, the market suffered the largest fall ever in its history.
Two weeks later, the Enron scandal was revealed.
And it quickly became clear
that it was only one example of a vast corporate fraud.
Since the early '90s, many major corporations had faked profits
and hidden their debts,
helped by some of the major accounting firms.
It seemed as if the American economy might collapse.
Greenspan took action.
He dramatically cut interest rates again and again.
His aim was simple,
to encourage American consumers to borrow and spend.
They and their desires were going to be the machine
that stabilised the system.
Huw, today's rate cut is the culmination
of an extraordinary few days for central banks.
It's all part of a concerted global effort
to bolster consumer confidence
and make sure those consumers carry on spending money
because that is what's keeping economies afloat at the moment.
It was an enormous risk.
By cutting the rates to almost zero,
Greenspan was unleashing a flood of cheap money into the economy,
and in the past this had always led
to inflation and dangerous instability.
But this time it didn't.
A vast consumer boom began,
bigger than anything ever before in history.
But there was no inflation.
Everything remained stable.
It seemed that the system could manage itself
without direct political control.
But it was an illusion.
The reason for the extraordinary boom was the very opposite.
It happened because of a giant exercise of political power
by an elite thousands of miles away on the other side of the world.
HE SPEAKS IN CHINESE
The Asian countries, led by China,
had decided that never again
would they put themselves at the mercy
of America and its financial elites,
as had happened two years before.
So the Chinese Politburo created a system to manage America.
They deliberately held their currency's exchange rate at a low level.
This meant that their exports were cheap,
and Chinese goods flooded into America.
And to pay for them,
American dollars flooded into China.
But instead of spending the money on their population,
the Chinese leaders immediately lent the money back to America,
by buying government bonds.
It was a perfect system of cheap goods and cheap money
flowing into America, all controlled by the Chinese Politburo.
And it was this that created the stability.
From it came an orgy of lending by the banks to the poorest
and least credit-worthy borrowers in the US.
It was a mirror image of what the West had done
in East Asia in the 1990s,
and just like then,
out of it came a vast property bubble.
"It is as if over a trillion dollars has been recycled"
wrote one economist, "to a third world developing economy
"that exists within America's own borders."
The Chinese money had led America into a dream world,
but the reason that so few bankers and politicians questioned it
was because of their faith in computers.
They were convinced that it was the computers
that had brought the stability to the system.
The machines created mathematical models that parcelled out the loans,
and then hedged and balanced them so that there was no risk.
But then, in 2008, that dream collapsed.
Alan Greenspan's vision of a new planet,
and Gordon Brown's promise of no more boom and bust
were revealed to be fantasies
built on a wave of financial speculation.
That speculation had happened
because those running the financial sectors in America and Britain
had promised that they could create a new kind of market democracy
that would be stable.
But again and again, it had led to the opposite,
chaos and instability around the world.
And now, finally, that had happened in the very heart of the west.
But yet again, just as in south east Asia ten years before,
those running the financial sector now mobilised political power
to rescue themselves and protect their supremacy.
They asked the politicians to bail them out,
and they agreed.
And again, just as in south east Asia,
the price is being paid by the ordinary people of the countries.
And we are now living through a very strange moment.
We know that the idea of market stability has failed,
but we cannot imagine any alternative.
The original promise of the Californian Ideology
was that the computers would liberate us
from all the old forms of political control
and we would become Randian heroes in control of our own destiny.
Instead, today we feel the opposite,
that we are helpless components in a global system,
a system that is controlled by a rigid logic
that we are powerless to challenge or to change.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd
E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk