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ANDY SERWER, MANAGING EDITOR, "FORTUNE": This is Wall Street, where billions of dollars of mortgages were bought and sold. To so many Americans, this was a risky business. Like playing poker on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, or in our case, just around the corner. This is Delmonico's. For nearly 200 years a Wall Street institution, where titans like JPMorgan and Andrew Carnegie used to come and wine and dine and wheel and deal. We're here to wheel and deal with a few modern day movers and shakers. Ladies and Gentlemen, let the game begin. Tonight, we're going to be talking about the nation's housing crisis and all the problems since then affecting the economy. We have a great group of guess tonight to play this game. And let me turn over the first card. Subprime. Janet, why don't you start us off by giving us a definition of what subprime is?
JANET TAVAKOLI, PRESIDENT, TAVAKOLI STRUCTURED FINANCE: Well, subprime is sort of the catchall word that we're using for loans that were made to people with low credit scores, so they had bad credit, and these were risky mortgage products. So no job, no income, no documentation, no down payment, no problem. You can get a loan and maybe get in over your head.
JON SHIBLEY, CEO, LENOX FINANCIAL: To make a correction real quick, just if I might.
SERWER: You want to jump in?
TAVAKOLI: Yes, please.
SHIBLEY: Just in the sense of educating people properly. The subprime was kind of the bottom here. They were the -- that's the group of people that were really desperate and didn't mind taking a risky loan program because they had to compensate for their inability to qualify under normal guidelines.
SERWER: Paul, were these people -- should these people not have been given mortgages?
PAUL KRUGMAN, ECONOMIC PROFESSOR, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY: Many of them shouldn't. Many of them shouldn't have been given mortgages that large. And what's happening now is that so many people borrowed up to the hilt to buy houses based on the assumption that prices would only keep going up.
GERRI WILLIS, CNN PERSONAL FINANCE EDITOR: Well, between lousy people, these weren't lousy loans. You know, at the end of the day, what do we call them? Liar's loans? We call them strangulation loans. There were lots of problems with the loans and the way they were made. And people who -- maybe they shouldn't have had a house. Maybe they should have. They ended up getting terms they simply could not afford. You know, they had high rates of interest. They had high penalties, high fees. And of course a lot of people didn't even understand that those problems were there until it was too late.
WILLIS (voice-over): Atlanta, Georgia. The first Tuesday of any month sounds like this.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Electronic registration system.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Hear ye, hear ye.
WILLIS: Today, 4,000-plus homes are about to foreclose on the courthouse steps.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Are there any further bids?
WILLIS: Georgia is one of only nine states that sells off distressed properties outside the court.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The opening bid for this property is $105,068.44.
WILLIS: Homes are sold to the highest bidder. And if no one bids...
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Sold to Medici Financial.
WILLIS: It's the property of the lender.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Let me know when you buy something.
WILLIS: Victor Warren and his wife, Robin, have spent Tuesdays on the steps for the last 26 years.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: So where I was willing to pay three...
WILLIS: He buys foreclosed homes and tries to sell them for a handsome profit.
(on-camera): How much are you prepared to bid today?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There's over two commas here.
WILLIS: So over a million dollars?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That's correct.
WILLIS (voice-over): Victor has an ear on every cryer.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Seven hundred and sixty-five Coleman Street.
WILLIS: The lawyers representing the lender. What happens to you that you find your house being foreclosed on in this public fashion?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Well, first of all, you would have had to have missed typically one or more payments, sometimes up to six payments.
WILLIS (voice-over): That's right. Here in Georgia miss a few monthly payments and 30 days later your home could end up here. Homeowners have always ended up here after the loss of a job, a divorce, or an unexpected illness. But in the last two years, foreclosures in Metro Atlanta have more than doubled. Why? Because of subprime loans. Loans designed for borrowers who Andy Shuping (ph) describes as...
ANDY SHUPING, BORROWER: People with credit scores that demonstrated an inability to pay their debt were buying houses.
WILLIS: And here we are today.
SHUPING: Right, but the pressure I think in society was to get people in houses. This is a segment of society. But there are a lot of people, they are just one notch above who are struggling and actually making those payments.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Any bidders here on 7365 Old Chapel College Park? Bernita Jones property.
WILLIS: Bernita Jones, I met with her a week earlier at her home southwest of Atlanta.
BERNITA JONES, HOME WAS BID ON: We had about 30 of them on this one block foreclose.
WILLIS: Thirty?
JONES: Thirty.
WILLIS: A minority community suffering under the weight of subprime loans. And now foreclosures. What did this home mean to you?
JONES: It's security. It's security.
WILLIS: Do you feel secure right now? JONES: No, I don't. So I was still cold even though I had the fire guard. Bernita has no heat, no electricity, and now she stands to lose her home. In fact, we had to bring in a generator just to power our lights. Now, you know, we're sitting in your living room here, and it's cold, and we're on your mattress. Why is your mattress in here?
JONES: Because I had to move everything out, and then the heat and the water out. So I had to keep the fireplace to keep me warm. So I was burning wood, paper. I start burning up all my mortgage receipts.
WILLIS: What?
JONES: To stay warm.
WILLIS: A truck driver, Bernita saved up $14,000 to close on a six-bedroom house. Purchase price -- $180 grand. She thought she got a deal on her first loan, a two-year adjustable rate mortgage at 8.375 percent. Her monthly payments -- $1,200. Did you know you were getting an adjustable rate mortgage when you did that the first time?
JONES: I don't know anything about adjustable rates. And the way they made it sound, like OK, just stay in it for two years.
WILLIS: But right before the two years were up, Bernita was injured and couldn't work. She declared bankruptcy and still managed to hold on to the house. She went back to work in pain as her loan reset. Her monthly payments almost doubled to $2,300 a month at an interest rate of 14 percent.
JONES: I was told it would go down, but it never went down. It just kept climbing up, up, up, until it maxed out.
WILLIS: She refinanced with America's top lender, Countrywide. Securing a subprime loan fixed at nine percent. She paid her mortgage faithfully until another injury made the pain unbearable.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Can I get you to lay down for me?
WILLIS: Bernita has been out of work ever since. Diagnosed with sciatica, a shooting pain running from spine to toe.
JONES: Oh, Lord.
WILLIS: A lot of people say that people like you just aren't working hard enough.
JONES: Oh, I work hard. God knows I do. I work 18 hours, sometimes 23 hours just to make it. WILLIS: Four months behind on her mortgage payments and desperate to save her home, Bernita writes bible verses.
JONES: Yes, I am poor and needy. Come quickly to me. Oh, God, you are my help and my deliverance.
WILLIS: So your feeling is that you've got to get back to work?
JONES: Yes. And I've got a feeling I might end up going back to work sick, not well. And I'm just praying that it don't paralyze, because it can.
WILLIS: But Bernita was too late. Her home ended up here, on the courthouse steps.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Going once, going twice, sold to Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, nominee for Countrywide Home Loans Incorporated. Thank you very much.
SERWER: When we come back, did your mortgage company have a subprime addiction?
SERWER: All right. Is the group ready for the next card? Let's turn it over. Reverse redlining.
SERWER (voice-over): It was the dirty little secrets in the 1960s. Home loan lenders literally drew lines around entire minority neighborhoods and refused loans to these residents. It was called redlining. The dirty little secret of the last few years is reverse redlining. Seeking out minorities and setting them up with mortgages. It started in 2002, after President Bush issued a challenge.
GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: By the year 2010, we must increase minority homeowners by at least $5.5 million.
SERWER: Lenders found a way to boost their own bottom lines and increase minority homeownership. They offered subprime mortgages. High interest loans for people with low income or shaky credit. People like Bernita Jones. Remember her? Now she's packing up after losing her home.
JONES: Come here I need your help.
SERWER: Bernita had refinanced her loan through Countrywide Financial. On its Web site, Countrywide calls itself the number one lender to minorities. But what good is that claim when loans like Bernita's land on the courthouse steps.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Property is held by Bernita Jones.
SERWER: Countrywide set the selling price for Bernita's home.
SERWER: Almost $158,000. Bernita owed around $200,000, which means she was in the hole almost $42,000 more than the home's selling price.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: $157,960. Any bids? Going once, going twice.
SERWER: Bernita lost her home. And Countrywide took a loss on the loan. The company did not reply to our call for comment on Bernita's case and turned down our requests for an interview with Countrywide's founder and CEO, Angelo Mozilo.
ANGELO MOZILO, CEO, COUNTRYWIDE: Since 1982 through early 2007 Countrywide's stock appreciated over 23,000 percent.
SERWER: Mozilo founded Countrywide 40 years ago. In 2006, Countrywide was number 91 on the Fortune 500. Half of the company's new mortgages that year were adjustable, meaning rising interest rates would replace a lower teaser rate, yielding big profits for Countrywide down the road. At least that was the plan. But in 2007, when a lot of those adjustable rates reset, the economy cooled down and many customers just couldn't make their payments. In 11 months Countrywide's stock nose-dived 80 percent.
MOZILO: In my 55 years in the industry, this by far is the worst housing crisis I have ever seen.
SERWER: Bank of America bought what was left of Countrywide and offered Mozilo a golden parachute worth $37 million. But shareholders howled. Ultimately, Mozilo turned it down but wound up in front of a congressional hearing on excessive executive pay.
MOZILO: My greatest concern is that the reaction to current events will take us back to the early 1990s, when minorities and lower-income families did not have the opportunity to own a home.
SERWER: That opportunity is over for Bernita Jones. Now she's moving in with her daughter. Her story isn't unique. The largely minority neighborhood she leaves behind is dotted with broken dreams.
SERWER: John, I want to start you off on this one. Reverse redlining is held up as a way of bringing everyone into the American dream. But are you guys really doing that, or are you just looking for profits for your company?
SHIBLEY: Well, the American people somehow or another throughout, you know, the last 25 years just decided to start screwing each other over in the mortgage world. OK? People took advantage. They made millions and millions of dollars, billions and trillions of dollars by basically sucking the blood out of the homeowner. Convincing people, oh, it's good to have a mortgage. Take the tax write-off. You know what's good? Make no mistake about it. Saving is the same as earning. You understand that?
SERWER: Yes.
SHIBLEY: How about paying your mortgage off?
PETER DUNAY, WALL STREET INVESTOR: There are two sides to the responsibility, though, isn't there? There is the borrower as well as the lender. And the borrower says I want to live in this home. And home ownership is a very good idea. You're saving for the future as long as you're buying something you can afford, as long as you're borrowing at rates that are reasonable, and as long as you understand, which requires the lender to turn around and say I need to make sure I'm lending...
SHIBLEY: And he's hit the nail so much on the head. Because what happened was not everybody is qualified.
SERWER: So Paul, what about this buzz phrase reverse redlining?
KRUGMAN: This is a way of getting people who couldn't buy homes before. It's a way of making homeownership available to the people, who, because of status, class, income, color, were not really part of this thing. And this was sold as the great justification for the whole thing. And the fundamental fact that you need to know is home ownership is back down to more or less its levels of 2002 now. Nothing was achieved. This whole thing was just a lot of bad lending.
WILLIS: One of the changes I think that happened that regular consumers didn't understand is that these loans were being packaged and sold as investments. But nobody really told consumers that the people who were giving them the loans were selling them on the back end. So they thought, they thought, they were getting great advice from their mortgage brokers, their bankers, and in fact they weren't.
TAVAKOLI: I think that there were a lot of naive people who were taken advantage of. These loans were presented as gifts. But they were Trojan horses that you could ride to your financial ruin.
SERWER: Up next, how this little mortgage went to market.
SERWER: All right. Is the group ready for the next card? Let's turn it. Wall Street.
Peter, that's your card, isn't it?
DUNAY: Yes, it is.
SERWER: What did Wall Street have to do with the housing crisis? How is it culpable and responsible for what happened?
DUNAY: The market and financial institutions were really looking for ways to make money. So they encouraged lending. They start to say these loans will be great and we'll turn around, package them, sell them to someone else, make our money now.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The Feds slashed interest rates today to an all-time low.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: No income? No job? No problem.
SERWER: It was the medicine for the disease. Low interest rates to prop up an economy reeling from the dotcom bust and 9/11. It seemed like a good time to grab a piece of the American dream.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: How about an interest-only loan, no money down, or an arm, low payments for the first two years?
SERWER: It was that simple. Everybody grabbed their piece of the pie and passed it on. Along with the risk. It's that risk that Wall Street was after. The riskier the debt, the bigger the payoff. So investment banks packaged up these home loans into what are called mortgage-backed securities. These bundles of debt were then resold to investors across the globe. Everybody wins, right? Wrong. It shouldn't have been that easy. It turns out a lot of homeowners couldn't make the monthly payments they signed up for. And those risky bets turned out to be big losers. Now nobody can say for sure just how bad it's going to get.
TAVAKOLI: This is the largest Ponzi scheme in the history of the (INAUDIBLE).
SERWER: A Ponzi scheme? That's a pretty strong phrase, isn't it?
TAVAKOLI: Yes, it's an accurate phrase. Without the money train leaving Wall Street, this couldn't have happened. What was originally a good financial product that was sort of nutritious for investors ended up becoming a financial Meth lab
SERWER: Gerri, did the financial Meth lab of Wall Street really do this much damage to American consumers?
WILLIS: Oh, you bet. Oh, you bet. We're seeing values of homes -- look, you don't have to be somebody who has a subprime loan to be suffering right now. Right? If your next-door neighbor is in foreclosure, the value of your home is now going down. You're going to see this play out for years for folks.
SERWER: So Paul, you could say it caused a ripple effect in the stock market, which of course then hurts everyone's 401(k), too. So there's broad implications.
KRUGMAN: And a lot of people -- a lot of institutions, actually, have got money invested in these securities. You've got the Florida school system suddenly having a cash crisis. You've got small towns in Norway suddenly having taking a lot -- so there's a lot of spill over. And then, almost everybody is suffering from this. Stick around, I smell blood.
SERWER: Players, we ready to go here? We've got some more cards to turn over. Let's see what lurks beneath. Predatory lending. Gerri, you know a thing or two about this. What does that mean? What were these people up to?
WILLIS: Well, I've been in the living rooms and the kitchens of people who have been victims of predatory lending. People who are offered loans that they had no chance of paying back. And the deck, the cards, were exactly stacked against them. I have to tell you, there are a lot of people out there who didn't know until it was too late that they had a loan that they couldn't afford or that was problem.
SHIBLEY: Let me tell you the problem. As I came out of the gate, thinking that you're supposed to have a fiduciary relationship with your customer, look out for their best interest, run the numbers, see what works for them. That's not the case. OK? Somehow in the mortgage industry it got flipped around to where it didn't matter if you were a millionaire or a mailman. The object was squeezed as much out of you, if they can get you to go for. And it wasn't regulated to prevent it.
ANNOUNCER: The Ameriquest Mortgage Super Bowl XIIII halftime show.
PAUL MCCARTNEY, SINGER: Live and let die.
WILLIS (voice-over): In 2005, Ameriquest was the rock star of the mortgage world. The company spent $15 million and got Paul McCartney to perform in a Super Bowl halftime spectacle. The subprime lender with primetime ads --
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That's a lot of money for a deck.
WILLIS: Ameriquest reported a $1.3 billion profit in 2005.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Did you hear me? You're getting robbed.
WILLIS: The ads were unwittingly ironic. By 2006, it was Ameriquest that was taking a beating. It faced fraud charges. It was accused of bogus appraisals.
ANNOUNCER: Ameriquest. An open-minded, equal opportunity lender.
WILLIS: Forty-nine states in the District of Columbia threw the book at the self-described equal opportunity lender. Mark Bomchill knows why.
MARK BOMCHILL, WORKED FOR AMERIQUEST: Greed and money took the best of everybody at Ameriquest.
WILLIS: He peddled loans for Ameriquest in Minneapolis.
BOMCHILL: I saw people alter W-2s and alter pay stubs to make it appear as if people made more money to qualify for loans.
WILLIS: Bomchill says Ameriquest was hiring people with no financial experience whatsoever.
BOMCHILL: Most of the people that worked there didn't have the maturity level to know the real effect that it would have on people.
WILLIS: The case against Ameriquest started in Des Moines, Iowa. State Attorney General Tom Miller led the charge.
TOM MILLER, STATE ATTORNEY GENERAL: A number of things come together here that made fraud so tempting. One is it's so complex. The lender would say here's all you have to do, sign this paper.
WILLIS: If you've ever bought a house, you know the dizzying process to seal the deal. Dozens and dozens of signatures, countless scribbling of initials. It all goes by very fast. How many of us actually read what we signed?
MILLER: So you combine complexity, a vulnerable population, a lot of money to be made, and you have the formula for disaster.
ROLAND ARNALL, FOUNDER OF AMERIQUEST: Some employees did not do the right thing.
WILLIS: The late Roland Arnall founded Ameriquest in 1979. As his fortune grew, he funded museums, community centers and political campaigns. ARNALL: I am honored to appear before you today as President Bush's nominee to be United States ambassador to the kingdom of the Netherlands.
WILLIS: That appointment was held up until Ameriquest settled its issues with Miller and the other plaintiffs.
ARNALL: I have not been involved in day-to-day activities for the last 10 years.
WILLIS: But Mark Bomchill was involved with Ameriquest's day-to- day activities.
BOMCHILL: One of the things we had to do is constantly role-play our cold calling skills.
WILLIS (on-camera): Let's do a couple of those, then. I'll give you the objection, and you tell me what they told you to say.
WILLIS: All right. So, I just refinanced. Why would I refinance again?
BOMCHILL: Well, Ms. Willis, oftentimes people refinance, they're not able to get all their needs met. Were you able to get all your debts consolidated that you need consolidated?
WILLIS: I'm not interested.
BOMCHILL: If I was able to show you how I can save you $60,000, $70,000, would you be interested then?
WILLIS: That's a compelling argument. Is it true?
BOMCHILL: Of course not, it's not true. Those people that fell for it are probably -- a lot of them are probably in foreclosure right now.
WILLIS: Do you ever feel guilty about having been there and having worked there? Did you put some of these people in these loans?
BOMCHILL: I don't think anybody that can seriously look back at their employment at Ameriquest, no matter what level, could honestly say or feel good about what they did to the customers.
WILLIS (voice-over): On behalf of those customers, the states reached a $325 million settlement with Ameriquest, hardly enough to make its victims whole again. Ameriquest never admitted to any wrongdoing. Citigroup bought out Ameriquest's mortgage operations in 2007. As for Roland Arnall? He served two years in Amsterdam as U.S. ambassador.
SERWER: This whole thing about predatory lending, you know, there's always predatory lenders.
KRUGMAN: Right.
SERWER: Were there more of them over the past couple years?
KRUGMAN: Sure, there's always predatory lending but there was an epidemic of it breaking out and the regulatory framework fell apart. As this new kind of stuff like subprime started to come out, a number of states said, you know, maybe there's a problem here. We should do some regulating. And Washington stepped in and said no, you can't do that.
DUNAY: But a lot of people have to learn self-responsibility here.
SHIBLEY: Exactly.
DUNAY: They have to learn to make investments that they are going to own up to.
SHIBLEY: Exactly.
DUNAY: The belief was real estate will always go up, but we learned it doesn't always go up. There are values that it doesn't have.
SERWER: Janet, let me ask you, who do you think is more at fault, the predatory lenders or greedy homeowners?
TAVAKOLI: Well, there is some blame to go around. Certainly, there were homeowners who knew that they were getting in over their heads and were hoping, speculating that housing prices would just keep rising and bail them out of a bad situation. But there are a lot of people who are simply taking advantage of, who are more financially naive, who didn't understand the terms that were being given to them, and who were actually actively misled. Let me give you an example. No cost, no fee mortgages. Jon, I'm sure you're well aware that in the state of Arizona, as an example, even Lenox Financial, I think, agreed to an assurance of discontinuance because under Arizona law it seems that the advertisements for no closing costs, that didn't seem to disclose that there were some restrictions in terms of the creditworthiness of the borrowers...
SHIBLEY: Let me tell you what happened --
TAVAKOLI: ... potentially in violation of Arizona's consumer lending laws.
SHIBLEY: Well, that's a pretty strong accusation. I'd like to take a second --
(CROSSTALK) TAVAKOLI: Well, they allege that. They alleged that and that the statement is $95,000 fine.
SHIBLEY: Well, I'll tell you exactly. Remember earlier, I said everybody doesn't qualify, everybody shouldn't get a mortgage?
SERWER: Yes.
SHIBLEY: This came about because a guy that had three judgments and a 580 credit score couldn't get a no-closing cost mortgage. Everybody doesn't get a driver's license.
WILLIS: Mortgage brokers have to have higher standards. They have to have some standards, any standards. The standards right now are low for education and for what they're required to do. They should have a stake in my loan and making my loan work. Whether I have low income, a subprime loan, or I'm fabulously wealthy, it doesn't matter.
SERWER: When we come back, who's writing the rules to this game, anyway?
ALAN GREENSPAN, FORMER CHAIRMAN, U.S FEDERAL RESERVE: This was an accident waiting to happen.
WESTHOVEN: Good evening. I'm Jennifer Westhoven. "Busted! Mortgage Meltdown" continues in just a moment. Here's what's happening now in the news. Officials in the U.S. and Iraq confirmed that the latest Iraqi offensive against Shiite militias is not going as well as the U.S. had hoped. CNN has learned that U.S. military intelligence analysts believed the Iraqis now control only about a quarter of the southern city of Basra. President Bush is calling the current offensive a defining moment for the Iraqi government. And a short time ago in Nevada, Senator John McCain called the offensive a "tough fight" for the Iraqis, but McCain says it's a sign of the Iraq government's strength. New dirt on New York's former governor, Eliot Spitzer. A criminal prosecutor said despite the former governor's public denials, Spitzer personally ordered the release of records in an attempt to embarrass one of his political rivals, State Senate Republican leader Joe Bruno. And Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is weighing in on the presidential race. She tells the "Washington Times" that Senator Barack Obama's speech on race is "important" for a whole host of reasons. Have a good Friday night. I'm Jennifer Westhoven. "Special Investigations Unit: Busted! Mortgage Meltdown" continues in just a minute. Stay here.
SERWER: All right. I'm counting up my chips here. How are you all doing? Pretty well? Good. We've got one more card to turn over here, gang. Ready?
WILLIS: Yes.
SERWER: The Fed. King Greenspan. Alan Greenspan, who, of course, was the Fed chairman as housing prices rose. Paul, I think you might be the resident expert here.
KRUGMAN: Yes.
SERWER: How much responsibility does Alan Greenspan have at this?
KRUGMAN: A lot.
SERWER (voice-over): For nearly two decades, the throne at the Federal Reserve was occupied by one man, Chairman Alan Greenspan. The so-called maestro fattened America's piggy bank during the dotcom '90s, overseeing the biggest economic boom in modern times.
LARRY SUMMERS, FORMER U.S TREASURY SECRETARY: I wouldn't underestimate luck.
SERWER: Two Clinton administration treasury secretaries shared the cover of "Time" magazine with Greenspan. It was titled "Committee to Save the World." Larry Summers remembers the Clinton White House was itching to take credit for the good times.
SUMMERS: People in the White House were always suggesting that the president and the secretary of the treasury, or other senior officials go to the White House and celebrate how high the stock market prices were. I advised the president and advised others that live by the sword die by the sword, it was a mistake to do photo ops that were based on the level of markets.
SERWER: They took his advice. Neither President Clinton nor Alan Greenspan ever rang the opening bell. But when Greenspan left office in 2006, no one sounded any alarm bells, either. The overheated economy was about to boil over. Suddenly, Greenspan found himself on the defensive.
ALAN GREENSPAN, FORMER CHAIRMAN, U.S. FEDERAL RESERVE: This was an accident waiting to happen. If it weren't subprime, it would have been something else.
SERWER: In Greenspan's bubbles, author and investor Bill Fleckenstein takes a critical look at Greenspan's tenure.
BILL FLECKENSTEIN, AUTHOR AND INVESTOR: In an attempt to fight off the ill effects of the stock bubble, we wound up with a real estate bubble. One of the consequences of Greenspan's reign at the Fed is, we in America have sort of bastardized capitalism and that we don't ever seem to want to have the downside of it anymore. We want the upside and then more upside, and that's not how it works.
SERWER: To be fair, Greenspan did warn us of the dotcom bubble back in 1996, in his trademark Fed speak.
GREENSPAN: But how do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values?
SERWER: Irrational exuberance. Greenspan's subtle warning conceived in a bathtub, now part of Wall Street lexicon. I sat down with Greenspan just as the housing bubble was bursting.
GREENSPAN: We have been through this type of event innumerable times over the centuries. We get to a state of extraordinary exuberance which, when confronted with reality, turns to unrelenting fear.
SERWER: But how could he have not seen this housing bubble coming? After all, his public service spanned six presidencies, four of which he served as Fed chairman.
GREENSPAN: Thank you very much.
SERWER: Greenspan first took the title of Mr. Chairman in 1987. Ten weeks into the job, stocks plunged 508 points, the biggest one-day loss ever. "The New York Times" headline read, "Does 1987 equal 1929?" But within 15 months, the market would recover all of its losses and was roaring again. That's why this real estate bust, according to Greenspan, is just another giant market correction.
GREENSPAN: Bubbles will not run out until they essentially come to an end. You can't stop them prematurely. The fever has got to break by itself.
SERWER: Greenspan's critics say he failed to step in. Or, as a former Fed chairman once said, it's the Fed's role to take away the punch bowl when the party's warming up.
FLECKENSTEIN: The hangover's going to have some correlation to the size of the party. So the sooner you get on it the better. The Fed could have done many things. They could have used their bully pulpit to jawbone about speculation.
SERWER: Instead, in 2004, Greenspan used the bully pulpit to extol the virtues of mortgage innovation.
GREENSPAN: American consumers might benefit if lenders provided greater mortgage product alternatives to the traditional fixed rate mortgage. SERWER (on-camera): Now, of course, people are pointing fingers at you, Chairman Greenspan, in terms of the so-called housing bubble bursting and saying that you're responsible or partly responsible. Look what he said in 2004. Adjustable rate mortgages are prudent. How do you respond to those critics?
GREENSPAN: I think revisionist history is coming on with a rush. I thought that people who had special individual cases ought to be looking at adjustable rate mortgages.
SERWER (voice-over): But adjustable rate mortgages became the loan of choice for subprime America, or those with poor credit histories.
GREENSPAN: I don't know where you draw the line because a lot of the subprime lending has been frankly truly egregious and I think in many cases criminal fraud.
SERWER: In retrospect, some feel a little regulation could have gone a long way.
FLECKENSTEIN: Deregulation up to a point is a good thing. The problem is when those changes went wild, no one ever said hey, wait a minute, this is too much.
SERWER: But can a Fed chairman really save us from ourselves?
GREENSPAN: The crucial issue of regulation is not to determine what people do but create a system, which no matter what they do, it doesn't do significant harm to the economy.
SERWER: And by the way, guess who didn't get an adjustable rate mortgage.
GREENSPAN: I like 30-year mortgages.
KRUGMAN: If Alan Greenspan had listened to the warnings that he was getting from a lot of people, we might -- me included, right? Then we could have avoided a lot of this pain. His belief that the market is always right, that there's never a need to regulate, never a need for oversight is a big factor.
SHIBLEY: He had bad advisement. Make no mistake about it. Adjustable mortgages, they're OK as long as property values are escalating.
KRUGMAN: Yes. Let's not forget that he actually said people should get into arms just at the point when the arms were about to go way up in price. He was giving really bad advice.
SERWER: We thought he was the maestro for all those years, didn't we?
WILLIS: Well, you know, you think about asset bubbles, you go back to what happened at the stock market. He was trying to fix that.
DUNAY: When Greenspan came in '87, the U.S. was in this very strange situation where people were still saving. They remembered the recession periods of the '70s. And debt levels have risen so dramatically since 1987 that it's terrifying.
TAVAKOLI: The Fed has a lot of moral suasion as well, where they can say we have to get back to sound banking practices.
KRUGMAN: There are two attacks on Greenspan. I only agree with one of them. One attack says he took interest rates too low for too long. And I actually think he had no alternative. People were really scared about the aftermath of the tech bubble.
SERWER: Right.
KRUGMAN: And I would have done exactly what he did there. That may have given rise to this bubble, but it was unavoidable. But he didn't do anything precautionary. He was being warned about predatory lending. He was being warned about subprime. He was being warned about the housing bubble, and he brushed it aside.
SERWER: Coming up next -- a dirty word. A dirty, dirty word.
SERWER: I'm going to now talk about a dirty word. Are you ready to play the wild card?
TAVAKOLI: Sure.
SERWER: Recession. Possibly depression. Janet, what do you think?
TAVAKOLI: I think these losses should be pushed back to the sophisticated investment bankers and sophisticated investors who invested in these products and knew or should have known that they were taking a lot of risk.
SERWER: Sounds like you want Peter to pay the piper over here.
DUNAY: Well, one of the things that I do believe you're right is it is going to fall back to the financial institutions. We've already seen over $150 billion in writedowns. So they are paying a great deal. And the question is how much more of the writedowns exist. That's what the market is very concerned about. The second side, it's spread into other areas. And that's where the recession feeling is coming from.
SERWER: Gerri, what's the mood of consumers that you talk to?
WILLIS: They feel like it's a recession for sure. I think people are really worried. And you're seeing it. They're not paying their credit cards on time. Debt is accumulating. People are worried about their biggest asset, their house.
SERWER (voice-over): Recession. The scary monster under the bed. But what is it?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Huh?
ANNOUNCER: A recession is two quarters of negative GDP growth.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Indicative of a cyclical period of decline --
SERWER: Here's the easy explanation. It's six months of dropping values for all the goods and services we produce in the U.S. It starts with fear. When consumers are afraid to spend, businesses suffer. When businesses suffer, they lay people off. When people don't have jobs, they don't spend money. It's one big ugly cycle. Scary, right? Not as scary as recession's nasty big brother, depression. Depression is like recession, but it lasts longer, and it's catastrophic. The last one we had in the 1930s was called the Great Depression. Twenty-five percent unemployment. Falling wages. A run on the banks. So big they wrote books and made movies about it.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Sure do look not too prosperous.
SERWER: But unlike recessions, which come once a decade or so, depressions are rare, showing up perhaps once a century.
SERWER: Jon, is your business in a recession or depression right now?
SHIBLEY: Well, we're still busy ripping people off that mysteriously we were up 36 percent last year.
SERWER: I guess that sarcasm means no? Is the housing market in a depression?
SHIBLEY: Absolutely.
SERWER: It's in a depression?
SHIBLEY: Oh, absolutely.
SERWER: OK. Paul, you were seeing this. The housing market is in a depression, consumers are depressed. Now, we're maybe seeing inflation.
KRUGMAN: Yes. SERWER: How bad is this? You're the economist.
KRUGMAN: Yes, I would say there's a non-negligible chance. I'm talking a little bit like Greenspan --
SERWER: Non-negligible --
KRUGMAN: No. This could be really, really bad. I mean, there's a paper that's making the rounds. How's the U.S. by the numbers compared to countries that have had really bad crises in the last 25 years? And the answer is unfortunately we look like among the worst. We're going to look like Sweden in 1991, where the unemployment rate shot up by seven percentage points of the crisis. We're going to look like Japan which wasn't so bad at the beginning, but it lasted a decade. That doesn't have to happen, but it's pretty bad.
TAVAKOLI: But Paul, let me ask you about the early '70s. Because I seem to remember that our highs were higher and our lows were lower, and that the housing market was actually worse off then. Is it possible that we can weather this, or is this just so much more?
KRUGMAN: This is the worst housing slump since the Great Depression. Look at the likely fall in prices that has to happen. I'm one of those people who's done the numbers, and I think we'd need another 20 percent down average nationally at least. And that means 15, 20 million people underwater on their mortgages. So this is big.
TAVAKOLI: Could I tell you about the long term for our kids? The bigger issue here, and this is a symptom of what's been going on is that we Americans turn the corner and it was a bad corner. Currently, in this country, we now consume more than we make.
SERWER: So does this mean Americans should save more? Does it also mean they can't move?
WILLIS: You've got to look at the long term. A lot of people will be stuck in their houses for longer than they wanted to be. Remember, people only live in their homes for about nine years now. This is a medium-term investment for Americans, not a long-term one. But you may have to bite the bullet here and stay longer than you wanted to.
SHIBLEY: A lot of people would rather just look good and lose. Quit borrowing so much money. It's a great time to rent right now. Go rent a house. That doesn't help my business to say that. But go rent a house for a while, sit back and watch.
SERWER: So there's a couple definitions of a recession, of course. Are we in one? There's the two quarters of negative growth. There's the institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that officially declares, decrees that we have a recession. So are we in a recession already, Gerri? WILLIS: Well, you know the old definition of recession and depression. You have a recession if you lose your house if you're my neighbor, but it's a depression when I lose my house.
SERWER: Right.
WILLIS: And I think consumers out there are saying, you know, this is awful tough and I'm really worried.
SHIBLEY: Right now, we have seven out of 10 people that call our office that are upside down on their mortgages. Let me tell you what. That's a catastrophic pace. If you've got 70 percent of people that are starting to show up upside down, you tell me if we're in a recession.
SERWER: And upside down means what?
SHIBLEY: They owe more than what their houses are worth.
DUNAY: We are in the slow-down period of the economy. We are seeing it slow down dramatically. We're seeing it spread into other areas. So it certainly looks as if we are in a recession.
SERWER: How bad will it get, though, Peter?
DUNAY: What concerns me is it may not be a deep recession, but it may last for a long time. That it will be one of these things where you're actually getting zero growth so they'll go, it wasn't actually a recession but it turns out to last throughout 2008.
KRUGMAN: I think 2008 is wildly optimistic. In fact, we should be expecting to see trouble, you know, well into 2010.
SERWER: So where do we go from here? Will the housing market and the economy recover from this debacle? Of course, they will. But in the meantime, we should all do a little soul searching. There's plenty of blame going around. Predatory lenders, greedy bankers, lax regulators, slick Wall Street operators, and, yes, even plain old homeowners who got in over their heads. The bottom line is this, if all of us treat our houses more like the homes that they are, rather than personal piggy banks, we will all be that much better off in the future.
Originally broadcast, 8.30.08


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Pick Your Pumpkin Hayrides
October 11, 2019 @ 10:00 am - 2:00 pm
An event every week that begins at 10:00am on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, repeating until October 31, 2019
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Come enjoy this seasonal tradition! Enjoy a colorful fall hayride to and from our huge pumpkin patch to select your perfect Jack-O-Lantern. We grow pumpkin and gourds in a variety of popular colors, shapes, and sizes. Pumpkins and gourds are priced according to size and are an additional cost. Wheelchair lift available with advanced notice. Fun for all ages.
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Cost: $3 children (3-12) | $5 adults | $3 seniors (62+) | Free for children 2 and under
Location: Kensington Metropark Farm Center
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A Metroparks vehicle entry permit is required to enter any Metropark and is only $35 annually for regular admission, $24 annually for seniors or $10 daily.

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Sizes range from 1" to 2"These earrings are laser cut and made from a very thin strong wood The coloring is stained into the wood with a non-toxic natural dye All earring findings are silver-plated surgical steel and does not contain nickel for sensitive ears. You can get your earrings as pictured above or you can choose from this list of Colors, Apple Green, Aqua Marine, Black Satin, Brown, Cherry Red, Fuchsia, Kelly Green, Lemon Yellow, Natural wood ( which is plain ), Pink, Purple, Royal Blue, Tan, Tangerine ( Orange ), Teal, Wine, Gray, and Cinnamon
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Minor In Peace and Justice Studies (Fall 2020)
UM supplying 3D printed face masks to local hospital
A group of employees at the University of Montevallo are putting their expertise and resources to work for the local health care industry in an effort to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. A few weeks ago, Michael Price, the Digital Media and Emerging Technologies Librarian at UM's Carmichael Library, heard news reports about hospitals across the […]Read More
Student spotlight – Alyssa Williams
University of Montevallo junior Alyssa Williams' double major of history and communication studies is helping her to put a new perspective on historical events. "I think it's a really cool interplay, because history and communication really go together," Williams said. "Communication helps you to understand why things happened the way they did throughout history." Williams, […]Read More
University of Montevallo celebrates Homegrown Heroines
From being one of the first elementary school students to integrate during Alabama's civil rights era to tackling large-scale renovations to multiple historic properties, four women shared stories of overcoming obstacles in their lives during a March 4 Homegrown Heroines event at the University of Montevallo. During the event, which was held in recognition of […]Read More


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Now more than ever, our youth in our community need the leadership and career-building skills of Scouting. Your investment will help grow the future leaders of our nation!
We hope you will join us on Colorado Gives Day, Tuesday, December 10th, and give where you live. Colorado Gives Day is an initiative to increase philanthropy in Colorado through online giving. Presented by Community First Foundation and FirstBank, Colorado Gives Day will take place during a 24-hour period on Tuesday, December 10, 2018.
You can make a payment on your pledge now or make a new donation by going to coloradogives.org/DenverAreaCouncilBSA and scheduling a payment in advance.
Schedule your donation now to arrive on December 10th.
All gifts of $3,000 or more are eligible for the Child Care Contribution Tax Credit.
If you have additional questions on how to give, please email Lindsay Gerlach or contact her at 720.266.2146.


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Certified 2017 Lexus NX 300h AWD Hybrid near Oak Park, IL
Installed Options
- Internet Price
- $29,750
Vehicle Details
|AWD Hybrid
|Stock #
|Exterior Color
|Eminent White
|Interior Color
|Gas Mileage
|City:33 Hwy:30
|2.5L DOHC 16-valve I4 engine
Currently Viewing
Certified 2017 Lexus NX 300h AWD Hybrid
- Internet Price
- $29,750
This 2017 Lexus NX NX 300h is offered to you for sale by McGrath Lexus of Westmont. This Lexus includes: WIRELESS CHARGER LUXURY PACKAGE Variable Speed Intermittent Wipers Tires - Front All-Season Mirror Memory Cooled Front Seat(s) Aluminum Wheels Heated Steering Wheel Intermittent Wipers Seat Memory Leather Steering Wheel Woodgrain Interior Trim Generic Sun/Moonroof Heated Front Seat(s) Sun/Moonroof Power Liftgate Remote Trunk Release Rain Sensing Wipers Tires - Rear All-Season ELECTROCHROMIC OUTSIDE MIRRORS W/MEMORY Lane Departure Warning Mirror Memory Power Mirror(s) Seat Memory Heated Mirrors Blind Spot Monitor Cross-Traffic Alert TOWING PACKAGE Tow Hitch NAVIGATION SYSTEM PACKAGE WiFi Hotspot Remote Engine Start Smart Device Integration Navigation System INTUITIVE PARKING ASSIST Rear Parking Aid PRE-COLLISION SYSTEM (PCS) Adaptive Cruise Control Cruise Control *Note - For third party subscriptions or services, please contact the dealer for more information.* CARFAX BuyBack Guarantee is reassurance that any major issues with this vehicle will show on CARFAX report. If you're going to purchase a pre-owned vehicle, why wouldn't you purchase one with CARFAX one-owner report. This SUV gives you versatility, style and comfort all in one vehicle. Savor the satisfaction of safety in any condition with this AWD Lexus NX. Superior acceleration, unmatched traction and stability as well as a luxurious interior round out the impressive features of this AWD Lexus NX. This vehicle comes with a navigation system. That doesn't mean you won't get lost. But it does mean you won't stay lost. Feel at ease with your purchase of this Lexus NX NX 300h, The service records are included allowing you to truly know what you're buying. Clean interior? How about flawless. This Lexus NX looks like has never been used. A vehicle as well-maintained as this Lexus NX almost doesn't need a warranty, but you rest easier knowing it comes covered with the Lexus factory warranty. Added comfort with contemporary style is the leather interior to heighten the quality and craftsmanship for the Lexus NX NX 300h.
Additional Vehicle Information
- Features
- Specs
- Safety
- Comfort
- Technology
- Mechanical
- Exterior
- Interior
|Pedestrian safety sound generation
|Rearview monitor
|in dash
|Impact absorbing seats
|dual front
|Child safety door locks
|Child seat anchors
|LATCH system
|Energy absorbing steering column
|Impact sensor
|battery disconnect, door unlock, fuel cut-off
|Safety brake pedal system
|Body side reinforcements
|side impact door beams
|Camera system
|Crumple zones
|front, rear
|Front airbags
|passenger seat cushion, dual
|Airbag deactivation
|occupant sensing passenger
|Side airbags
|Knee airbags
|Side curtain airbags
|front, rear
|Side-curtain airbag rollover sensor
|Rolling code security
|Power door locks
|anti-lockout, auto-locking
|Anti-theft system
|engine immobilizer, alarm with remote
|2-stage unlocking doors
|Side mirrors
|integrated turn signals, heated
|Side mirror adjustments
|power, manual folding
Comfort Features
|Dash trim
|Floor mat material
|Shift knob trim
|leather, alloy
|Center console trim
|Steering wheel trim
|rear folding, rear center with cupholders
|Floor mats
|rear, front
|Floor material
|Door trim
Convenience Features
|front, rear
|Power outlet(s)
|12V cargo area, 12V front
|One-touch windows
|Cargo cover
|Reading lights
|front, rear
|Multi-function remote
|illuminated entry, panic alarm, proximity entry system
|Cargo area light
|Cruise control
|Power steering
|Retained accessory power
|Power windows
|lockout button
|Footwell lights
|Steering wheel mounted controls
|audio, cruise control, phone, multi-function, voice control
|Push-button start
|Vanity mirrors
|dual illuminating
|Assist handle
|rear, front
|Center console
|front console with armrest and storage
|Steering wheel
|power tilt and telescopic
|Rearview mirror
|front seatback, grocery bag holder, cargo tie-down anchors and hooks, sunglasses holder, door pockets, accessory hook
|Touch-sensitive controls
Air Conditioning
|Front air conditioning
|automatic climate control
|Front air conditioning zones
|Rear vents
|second row
|Air filtration
Audio System
|voice operated, AM/FM, HD radio
|Auxiliary audio input
|Bluetooth, jack, USB, iPod/iPhone
|Antenna type
|diversity, mast
|In-Dash CD
|single disc, MP3 Playback
|Total speakers
|Radio data system
|Speed sensitive volume control
|Satellite radio
|Electronic messaging assistance
|with read function, voice operated
|Smart device app function
|vehicle location
|Navigation app
|Scout GPS Link
|Driver assistance app
|roadside assistance
|Wireless data link
|hands free
|Real time traffic
In Car Entertainment
|Connected in-car apps
|Google POIs, weather
|Infotainment screen size
|7 in.
|Instrument cluster screen size
|4.2 in.
|Trip computer
|Driver information system
|Digital odometer
|External temperature display
|Warnings and reminders
|lamp failure, low fuel, engine oil, coolant, maintenance due, tire fill alert
|Multi-function display
|Fuel economy display
|MPG, range
|Trip odometer
|Drive mode selector
|4WD type
|on demand
|Axle ratio
|Auto start/stop
|Hybrid Gas Engine HP
|Hybrid Gas Engine [email protected]
|Hybrid Gas Engine Torque
|Electric motor battery type
|nickel-metal hydride
|Electric Motor Power Output (Kilowatts)
|Hybrid gas Engine [email protected]
|Electric Motor Torque
|Battery saver
|Electric Motor HP
|Rear brake type
|Rear brake diameter
|Front brake diameter
|Front brake type
|ventilated disc
|Regenerative braking system
|Braking assist
|Electronic brakeforce distribution
|Power brakes
|Electronic parking brake
|auto off
|Front suspension classification
|Rear suspension classification
|Front struts
|Rear suspension type
|Rear spring type
|Front stabilizer bar
|Rear stabilizer bar
|Front spring type
|Front suspension type
|lower control arms
|Rear shock type
|Front shock type
Stability and Traction
|Stability control
|Traction control
|Hill holder control
|Starter type
|Daytime running lights
|Front fog lights
|Exterior entry lights
|puddle lamps
|LED, auto delay off, auto on/off
|Roof rails color
|Roof rails
Exterior Features
|Front bumper color
|Mirror color
|Door handle color
|Rear spoiler
|Rear spoiler color
|Grille color
|chrome surround, black
|Rear bumper color
|Fender lip moldings
|Window trim
|Rocker panel color
Tires and Rims
|Spare tire size
|Tire type
|all season
|Spare tire mount location
|Spare wheel type
|Tire Pressure Monitoring System
|Wheel spokes
|Rear wiper
|intermittent, with washer
|Window defogger
|Front wipers
|variable intermittent
|Power windows
|safety reverse
|Rear privacy glass
|Solar-tinted glass
|Laminated glass
|Liftgate window
|Rear door type
|Driver seat power adjustments
|height, 10, lumbar, reclining
|Passenger seat power adjustments
|height, 8, reclining
|Rear headrests
|3, adjustable
|Rear seat folding
|Front headrests
|2, adjustable
|Front seat type
|Rear seat type
|60-40 split bench
|Rear seat manual adjustments
|Seatbelt pretensioners
|front, rear
|Seatbelt force limiters
|Emergency locking retractors
|rear, front
|Seatbelt warning sensor
|Rear seatbelts
|Front seatbelts
|Turns lock-to-lock
Drive Type
|Drive Type
|Standard Seating
|Max Seating
|Head Room (front)
|38.2 in
|Head Room (rear)
|38.1 in
|Hip Room (front)
|55.1 in
|Hip Room (rear)
|53.9 in
|Shoulder Room (front)
|57.3 in
|Shoulder Room (rear)
|55.3 in
|Leg Room (front)
|42.8 in
|Leg Room (rear)
|36.1 in
|Seating Rows
Measurements of Size & Shape
|182.3 in
|83.9 in
|Width (without mirrors)
|73.6 in
|64.8 in
|104.7 in
|Ground Clearance
|6.7 in
|Angle of Approach
|28.7 degrees
|Angle of Departure
|24.5 degrees
|Track Width (front)
|62.2 in
|Track Width (rear)
|62.2 in
Measurements of Weight
|Gross Vehicle Weight Rating
|5335 lbs
|Gross Vehicle Weight Range
|5001-6000 lbs
|Curb Weight
|4180 lbs
|Gross Combined Weight Rating
|6835 lbs
|Max Towing Capacity
|1500 lbs
Truck Specifications
|Max Payload
|895 lbs
Interior Dimensions
|Cargo Volume
|16.8 cu ft
|Cargo Volume (rear seats down)
|53.7 cu ft
Performance Specifications
|Aerodynamic Drag
|0.34 Cd
|Turning Circle
|39.8 ft
|Acceleration (0-60MPH)
|9.1 seconds
Fuel Tanks
|Fuel Capacity
|14.8 Gallons
Wheels and Tires
|Front Tire Type
|Front Wheel Diameter
|17.0 x 7.0 in
|Rear Tire Type
|Rear Wheel Diameter
|17.0 x 7.0 in
Other Vehicles Customers Viewed
Contact Dealer
Dealership Information
" Joe Scala and Greg both got back to me promptly. I'm not sure what direction to take but my experience with McGrath has been positive. Tom "
" Positive and quick follow-up. "
" The salesman was very helpful - but the price was to high for me.. "
" Very good customer service. "
" Great dealership, awesome customer service environment super clean. Thanks to Joseph and Micheal you guys were a great help very professional and friendly. (Micheal makes car buying fun lolz). Both myself and my fiance were able to walk away with two cars. Highly recommend. "
" Good experience. Thought that the overall price for the vehicle was high based on the year of the vehicle. "
" This was one of the best car buying experiences I have ever had! Paul Stewart was so personable, upfront, and knowledgeable. He was very tenacious about securing me the absolute best possible deal!...and he did! "
"Certified used car purchase"
" Everyone worked hard to make sure our needs were met. We will be recommending McGrath of Westmont to our friends and family in the future. "
"Beautiful place! Very comfortable and accommodating...."
" Beautiful place! Very comfortable and accommodating. Everyone was helpful and friendly. Paul Stewart got me a great deal on a beautiful Volkswagen Passat, too! I highly recommend this dealership. "
" I found the car I wanted through Carfax and they assigned me to Rita Barkstrom - she was absolutely fantastic with customer service and ensuring I got the information I needed! Financing was also a great process, they have an excellent team here. I had to have the vehicle shipped to me because I live several states away. So for never being able to see or ride the actual vehicle, I am so grateful and happy that I went with McGrath Lexus of Westmont and more so that I got Rita. She had the vehicle in tip top shape, super clean, and communicated clearly during the whole process, even after I got the car. I would easily purchase another vehicle from here and would say that the only disappointment I had was not being able to meet Rita in person. And if you're even thinking about this car or a Lexus... definitely do it! Mine is pre-owned, certified, and they put brand new tires on there to get the certification! They rock, all smiles here! "
" My experience at this dealership was awsome.Every one I encountered on the staff was very helpful. No stress ! Fair price for a vehicle. Sales person Paul Stewart very nice and professonal. These guys are first class all the way. Thx. "
" I've purchased 2 vehicles from McGrath and my recent experience with Sr. Sales Consultant Joe Scala was phenomenal. He was knowledgeable, personable, and went above-and-beyond to help me find the amenities I wanted in my car. If you're in the market for a car, you absolutely can't go wrong with Joe Scala and the great people at McGrath Lexus. "
" Fantastic experience!! Casey Baca in sales was excellent to work with and went to bat for us to ensure we got the certified pre-owned car we wanted at the price we were comfortable with This is the second Lexus we have purchased from this dealership and I would recommend them without hesitation! "
" Great customer service and care "
" Great Service. I bought a pre-owned car here. Found it online and then called to talk to a sales representative. Rita was the person that I worked with. She was super helpful and professional. Great experience. "
" Great dealership ,awesome service ! "
" What beautiful cars they have, wish I had one "
" Excellent service and reasonable price! Bought from them!!! "
" My wife just leased a Lexus here. Amazing car, staff, overrall awesome experience. There are a ton of perks to owning a Lexus, especially at this dealership. "
" It the best place to get a great deal on a car "
" Ruben Pesante in service is a great representative of a quality company; McGrath Lexus ... "
" Top notch service from beginning to end. Joe Scala was exceptional, answered my phone calls from 8am in the morning to 10pm at night. No pressure to buy something I wasn't going to be happy with. I let him know what I wanted, he gave me the estimated price point and was able to rush delivery before Christmas. Michael Agnello in finance was also exceptional. He laid out several different finance options and advised the pros and cons to each, which option he would do, and which option previous customers found most beneficial long term. You cannot find this type of service from Carvana/True Car or other buying alternatives. I couldn't of had a better experience "
" Received the call from the dealer answered any questions I had about vehicle willing to work with my time schedule friendly. "
" Had to take our older Lexus in for a recall, they treated us like new customers and their facility is state of the art, got a loaner and they finished when they said they would. "
" Very professional. "
" We had the pleasure of dealing with Paul Stewart for our recent car purchase. He is very knowledgeable, friendly and transparent. He took great care of us, got us a car that was not on their website that was better than what we were looking for, and was VERY fair in pricing! We have taken all of our cars to this dealer for service and their team is always professional, courteous and willing to help. The relationship we have with McGrath Lexus is just as important to us as the cars themselves, and we could not be more pleased with both! "
" It was the easiest car purchase of my life - the process was seamless and professional. I got to McGrath Lexus because my brother has purchased 4 cars from Joe Scala and was extremely happy, I was very pleased as well. I would highly recommend Joe and the McGrath team. "
" Great Experience, so happy with service they provide. They're very friendly. I was out with my new lexus NX 300 within 45 minutes. Jon Delatorre, Kristal Cortez & Jimmy Padilla Thank you so much for such a pleasant experience. I would recommend everyone this place for buying lexus. "
" The Service & Sales Department in the industry. "
" Great dealership, sales to service. Love my RX 350. I'm sold on Lexus... "
" I was told the car I wanted was in stock and made an appointment to come in that evening to see it so they had my info and was expecting me... well once I got there, "the car was sold" an hour ago, then it was sold yesterday... now I'm feeling a little salty.. however they were able to locate the same car at a different location we came to an agreement that night and car was delivered the next business day.. I left a happy customer, our salesperson Larry was very personable and friendly and so was his boss and tech person left feeling as my business was appreciated.. much better service than Orland Park. "
" Awesome customer service "
" Excellent "
"Wonderful experience, as usual!"
" This was my second experience with McGrath Lexus and it was even better than the first (previously accompanied my dad for his lease). GM Greg Luzinski and his team are top notch and extremely knowledgeable while always providing the BEST customer service. Alisa Dunlap was my sales associate and I couldn't have asked for anything more. She currently drives the same model I ended up leasing so she knew everything about it and answered all of my questions with clarity. She also gave me a tour of the expansive dealership so I know exactly what to do when I come back for service or just to take advantage of the free car washes. Now I just need to convince my mom and sister to get a Lexus too. "
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In the 1980s and even into the 1990s, it was hard to imagine that women living with HIV/AIDS would live long enough to see their children grow up. Dreams of getting pregnant and raising a family were dashed. Then scientists started looking into mother-to-child HIV transmission. The news was good – an HIV+ woman could have a healthy pregnancy and deliver a healthy, HIV-negative baby as long as she took certain meds and was carefully monitored during prenatal care. While she couldn't breastfeed because the virus could be transmitted via breast milk, she could finally envision her kids becoming young adults. Years later, it even got better. Given increased life expectancy after many new therapies emerged, an HIV+ mother could look forward to seeing several generations of her family – children, grandchildren and maybe even great-grandchildren.
Sounds amazing, right? Not so for all HIV+ women. Homeless HIV+ women have nothing to cheer about. Homelessness is one of the major barriers to all those things one needs to have a healthy baby – a place to nest and eat well, access to prenatal care, and peace of mind. A stable home is crucial – imagine being pregnant without it. That's why this Mother's Day we ask you to donate to Bailey House in honor of your mother. Your support could be just the thing that an HIV+ mom-to-be needs to celebrate this special day.
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Icy Treats in Queens: Homemade Pistachio Ice at DiCosmo's
Editor's note: It's still August, height of the season for frozen treats. We asked our Queens expert Sara Markel-Gonzalez to track down one great frozen sweet for every day this week.
The boardwalk on Rockaway Beach is a little different then when I visited last summer. There are more dining options closer to the beach, so now you can actually see the water as you bite into a tostada, an arepa, or some fried shrimp. But the most exciting advance in boardwalk eatery is that now DiCosmo's Italian Ices are sold not just from their stand on 96th Street, but also from a cart on the beach. The flavors change daily, but I was lucky enough to go on a pistachio day. I tried other flavors too—lemon and pineapplem&mdashand they were great. But the pistachio blew me away.
The biggest problem with pistachio-flavored things is that they almost never taste like pistachios. Understandably, as they are an expensive nut; many pistachio desserts use almond paste as a base and then add green food coloring. So I wasn't expecting much when I ordered the ice—but when I got the scoop, it was a gorgeous, natural-looking pale green, just full of chopped pistachios, the ice smooth and almost creamy. I should have known better from a place that makes all of their ices by hand, and for nearly a century.
The pineapple ice, below the pistachio in the cup ($4.00 for two flavors), was just as simple and very refreshing. I uncovered a few pineapple pieces in my ice excavations.
The small ($2.00) lemon ice was bright, tart, and fresh-tasting. And there's no better proof that they use real lemon juice than finding lemon seeds in the cup. Lemon, an Italian ice classic, and the only flavor that DiCosmo's sold when they first opened, seldom tastes like real lemons, but they do things the old-fashioned way and I hope they never change.
(Read about the original Elizabeth, NJ location here.)
The cart, closed for the day.
DiCosmo's Homemade Italian Ices
95-19 Rockaway Beach Boulevard, Far Rockaway, Queens NY 11693 (map)
All products linked here have been independently selected by our editors. We may earn a commission on purchases, as described in our affiliate policy.


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Solid hardwoods are carved and then finished with a layered process to give a regal, antiqued look inspired by European heirloom furnishings.
The piece is signed and dated by the artisans who craft it.
Headboard height 60", footboard height 36", height to top of footboard finial 84", frame height 11", overall length 91".
Available in Twin, Full, Queen, King, Cal King.
Variations in woodgrain and application of color on both wood and metal is to be expected and adds to inherent uniqueness of each item.
Would you like us to help you find a similar item? Talk with our Design Consultants toll-free at1-800-927-5164.
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Most of us are passive spectators in our life. We plan careers, retirement nest eggs, and vacations, but we do not plan our life. As a result, we don't live our life on purpose.
Is it any wonder that many of us feel unfulfilled and not following our higher calling?
We are not empowered and are no longer active participants in the direction our life is going.
Anchoring Your Goals
Research has shown that people who regularly write down their goals earn as much as nine times more than their counterparts who do not write down goals.
- Over 80% of Americans do not have goals
- 16% say they do have goals but don't write them down
- Less than 4% actually write them down
Guess who they are? They are the ones making nine times more than the rest of us.
Without goals to anchor us, we find ourselves adrift in life. We may think we know what our goals are, but if we aren't living our life around them, then we're not living our life on purpose.
A goal is a dream set to paper. If you don't have a dream, how can you have a dream come true?
Finding Your True North
In a previous post, I shared the story of Oleg, a KGB officer that I met while working as an FBI undercover agent a few years ago. Neither Oleg nor the Russians knew that the FBI had identified him as a Russian Intelligence Officer.
If they had, he would have been sent back to Moscow immediately.
Oleg's cover was a Russian businessman involved with the joint venture. I represented myself as an individual working for an international public relations company.
We met at a seminar, but the one thing we never talked about was his work.
It wasn't that Oleg couldn't talk about some aspects of his overt job; it was that he didn't want to talk about them. He couldn't drum up enough enthusiasm about the job to even keep up a good conversation. His lack of engagement in what he was doing was a clue that he was not doing something he felt passionate about.
Oleg was not following his True North. Somewhere along the line, he had compromised and had settled for less than his dream.
Here are 4 ways I encouraged Oleg to empower himself and start following his true north:
1. Explore Lifetime Goals
I encouraged Oleg to look deeper into the goals he set for himself in each of the areas listed below. It helped for him to look at each aspect of his life as a spoke in a wheel, with each leading to the hub, which is the heart. To have a balanced life, each spoke needs attention.
- Career
- Spirituality
- Education
- Recreation
- Travel
- Relationships
- Family
- Health
- Financial
As I got to know Oleg better, I'd probe about the important aspects of each spoke—not all in one day, but over time—and ask how much attention he gave to each of them, and what his goals were in each area.
2. Be Specific
"If you aim at nothing, you will hit it every time." B.J. Marshall
I encouraged Oleg to be specific with his answers. How many of us go into a restaurant and say, "Bring me food?" Instead, we're very specific, picking what we want from the menu, and sometimes asking for substitutions to what is offered.
Do not just say, "My goal is to be more spiritual."
- Be specific.
- Articulate ways in which you will be more spiritual in the 6 months, in the next year, in the next 5 years.
- Write down your goal in clear and vivid terms.
- List the steps needed to get there.
3. Own It
As I talked to Oleg about his goals, I learned that, besides relationships with his family, his goals were to travel and write. He had fallen into a rut in his career at an early age and was now afraid to move away from a secure job and retirement.
At some point, Oleg needed to learn that he was either living his own life or someone else's dream for him. He was not setting his own course, and it left him empty and unfulfilled in his work and life.
- Review your list of goals.
- Write down reasons why your idea or goal will work.
- Acknowledge issues that will need to be overcome.
4. Start a Life Plan
Never ask, Can I do this? Instead ask, How can I do this?
Living your life on purpose is an intentional act. It requires a simple plan to set your goals in action. Start by answering these questions:
- Envisioned future – when and how is the goal functioning at it's best
- Inspiration – identify scripture, books, poems, speakers and authors from which to draw inspiration
- Current reality – be honest; where are you in relation to the envisioned future
- Specific actions needed – list what you will need to do to accomplish your goal
Writing down his goals helped Oleg to gain clarity on what he really wanted to do in life. Once he took ownership of his future, he was able to break it down and follow his True North. As it turned out, Oleg's higher calling turned out to not be the KGB, and he resigned to begin a new career in writing.
How did you find your True North? What tips can you share about how to live your True North with intention? What can you share about your implementation of a life plan?
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LaRae Quy is former FBI Agent and Founder at Your Best Adventure
She helps clients explore the unknown and discover the hidden truth in self & others
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Flex has revolutionized the development of Rich Internet Applications, giving developers the framework necessary to easily create ever more powerful applications. Components form an essential part of this framework, and once you understand how to fully use them, your productivity and creativity will be taken to a whole new level. Flex 3 Component Solutions will show just what you can achieve with components and exactly how to achieve it.
You'll see just how simple it is to use components to create amazing interfaces for your applications be they media players, data visualizations, 3D graphics—the list is long. This book contains all you need to know to get the Finally, there'll be times when you'll want to or have no alternative but to create your own components. This book will show you how to do this for your own ends, or so you can contribute to the Flex component community by distributing them.
Flex 3 Component Solutions is a tour de force of components, and all of these components are demonstrated using real-world Flex code that you can use as starting points for your own applications. Take what you learn for this book, and then go out and create your own amazing interfaces quickly and easily: reuse, repurpose, redesign, and do it all faster and with greater quality control than you ever thought possible.


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Matilde Cereal Bowl - Sale 40%
Teal reactive glaze and natural speckles. Mix and match the Matilde collection for guaranteed daily joy!
Dimensions: 16cm
- Microwave safe
- Dishwasher safe
- Oven safe
- Irregularities in colour and glaze are typical due to the handcrafted nature of our stoneware products
Important Covid-19 information
The unprecedented Covid-19 situation is significantly impacting small business in the UK and we are now having to temporarily pause deliveries until the situation stabilises. The health and safety of our tiny team comes first and we are also having to temporarily shut our warehouse whilst facing lots of uncertainty and restrictions with courier companies.
But we do need your help...
Our bills are continuing to run and our stock of beautiful ceramics is going nowhere so if you feel like buying some new pieces but waiting a bit longer to receive them please do so, it would be lifeblood for us. We will reward every order that comes in over the next period of time with an EXTRA GIFT (a plate, bowl, platter, cup, we'll choose something for you!) with lots of love and a MASSIVE THANK YOU from a tiny business that is trying to survive this crisis.
With Love, Cerami
We will be honest. Courier services are not that great. They mistreat your parcels all the time and this means that lots of beautifully handcrafted crockery have broken over the past years. We therefore need to use a lot of materials to tightly package everything so that when someone throws the box on the ground, the ceramics that someone has created with so much love won't go into pieces. Couriers are also expensive and we are just a small business so we have no power over them. This means that we cannot offer free shipping as we hoped we could and we do not want to trick our customers by inflating our prices in order to cover for shipping.
We offer multiple shipping options:
- Orders >£200 (typically more than 20kgs): Only £6.99 fast & secure shipping (3-5 working days) or £12.99 for ultra fast expedited shipping (1-2 working days, cutoff for placing order is 17:00)
- Orders £100-£200 (typically more than 10kgs): Only £4.99 fast & secure shipping (3-5 working days) or £9.99 for ultra fast expedited shipping (1-2 working days, cutoff for placing order is 17:00)
- Orders <£100 (typically less than 10kgs): Only £3.99 for fast & secure shipping (3-5 working days) or £6.99 for expedited shipping (1-2 working days, cutoff for placing order is 17:00)
Also, we are very conscious for how important shipping is so:
- If anything EVER BREAKS WE WILL REPLACE IT no questions asked, we have always done and will always do, you have no responsibility, it's a risk we take
Europe (Zone 1) orders: Flat £29.99
Europe (Zone 2) and Rest of the World: Please get in touch and we'll provide you with a quote
Returns & Refunds
To obtain a refund you must take reasonable care of the goods. If you fail to do so we reserve the right to refuse the refund or deduct a charge based on the condition of the goods.
Until the goods are returned to us, you are responsible if the goods are lost, damaged or destroyed. Shipping of the goods back to us is also under your responsibility, so please make sure that you package goods with a great care. You have a legal obligation to take care of the goods while they are in your possession. If you fail to comply with this obligation, we may have a right of action against you for compensation.
If you wish to return your item, please contact us on at email@example.com, message us on webchat or instagram (@cerami.co.uk) or call on 07900405475.
Under your rights under the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations, you can cancel the order and return the goods back to us within 14 days after the receipt of your order. The full refund will be given back to you once we receive them safely back. If you have paid for delivery originally then we will refund the original delivery charge for unwanted goods if all the goods purchased on the order are returned. Part returns do not qualify for a delivery refund.
If your item was delivered to a home address, we will make arrangements for the goods to be collected from you. Please note this will incur a lead-time. The collection charge will apply at our Standard Rates: a) UK mainland: £9.99 for orders below <£100 including shipping and £19.99 for orders >£100 including shipping; b). EU countries: £35 for all orders; c). International: subject to courier charges.
Your refund will be processed as soon as possible and in any event within no more than 28 days of the day you have given us notice of cancellation. We will deduct the collection fee from the refund amount.
We will only make a refund using the same method of payment originally used by you to pay for your purchase.
Where the goods were delivered to a third party and you are unable to return them to us, you may not be entitled to a refund.
You won't be able to return the goods after 14 days of the receipt of your order.
- We aim to always ship within a day of receiving your order
- We will keep you in the loop for progress of shipping
- We typically ship using next day delivery courier
- We protect the environment by re-using as much of packaging material as possible!
- Please see Returns page for full T&C's; in summary we will replace any item damaged in transit and we will try to help you resolve any potential issue you may have with your order. We are a customer first business and try to do everything in our power to make sure we only have happy customers!
- Don't believe us, see what our customers are saying!
- "Fabulous, personal service" - Rebecca
- "Such wonderful ceramics" - Matthew
- "I love my plates and pasta bowls so much I've had to come back for more" - Charlotte
- And many more, please check Trustpilot reviews on https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/www.cerami.co.uk


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国产偷拍视频Learn about the opportunities and benefits available
Social and Behavioral Sciences Master's Degree Programs
国产偷拍视频National Louis University's graduate Social and Behavioral Sciences programs offer students master's degrees in Psychology or Public Policy and Administration. You'll discover that our Social and Behavioral Sciences programs are designed for students who are passionate about using their skills to enhance the lives of others, whether through understanding human behavior or advocating change.
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Learn more about NLU graduate programs in the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences:
- M.A. in Psychology
- M.A. in Psychology: Teaching of Psychology
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- M.A. in Clinical Psychology (Florida)
How to Apply to Our Graduate Social and Behavioral Sciences Programs
Start your journey today. Visit NLU Admissions and learn how to apply as a graduate student.


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The views of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) on religion are well known. He proclaimed to his friend Oscar Pfister, a Lutheran pastor, that he was a "godless Jew" and that only such a one would have discovered the secrets of psychoanalysis. He prided himself on being an intrepid man of science, a conquistador of the mind, who cherished his Enlightenment attitude toward religion and clung to his avowed agnosticism until the end of his life. He admired Baruch Spinoza, the seventeenth‐century thinker, who in the spirit of the philosophes proclaimed that one had to read the Bible just as critically as any other book. For all that, Freud's attitudes toward religion were not so simple—the superficial view does not take into account his own ambivalent conflicts about religion and the degree of his own obsessional superstition and even credulity. His view of the Bible reflects this ambiguity and ambivalence. We can discuss the problem in terms of Freud's early exposure to the Bible, his ambivalence toward it, his use of the Bible, and finally the special problem of his treatment of Moses.
Early Familiarity with the Bible.
Freud's frequent denials of any meaningful religious training were long accepted as authentic testimony and consistent with his staunch atheism and agnosticism. But recently material has come to light that casts this supposition in doubt, suggesting that Freud's exposure to traditional Judaism may have been more extensive than he implied. In fact, Freud's early religious formation was considerable. His parents both came from traditional Orthodox families and remained Orthodox believers, but they did not follow all the prescribed practices. According to Ernest Jones (1957), they tended to be freethinking, but only after their move from Freiberg in Moravia to Vienna did they dispense with dietary observances and rituals of their Hasidic life‐style—presumably in the service of accommodation. The Seder on the eve of Passover continued to be observed, along with Christmas and Easter.
Freud's father Jacob was a devoted student of the Torah and was well versed in Jewish lore and tradition, and he had attained a position of considerable respect for his scholarly knowledge of scripture. His familiarity and mastery of biblical texts in the original Hebrew was exceptional. The picture of the family religious atmosphere remains unclear, with conflicting accounts from involved observers—the divergences probably relating to what phase of the family experience was being described. There seems little doubt, in the light of recent research, that little Sigmund had considerable exposure to religious practices and traditions and particularly that he was exposed to extensive and intensive study of the Bible. He was a pupil of Samuel Hammerschlag, a Hebrew scholar of moderate Reform views, and studied the Hebrew language and the Bible from age seven through thirteen. Study of Hebrew was featured in every class, and special emphasis was given to the Torah. Freud was not only Hammerschlag's prize pupil during those years, but he also enjoyed a close and affectionate relationship with his old mentor. Freud's later denials of any knowledge of Hebrew might have been due to a lapse of memory or even a retrospective distortion.
One of the prize possessions of the Freud family was the remarkable edition of the Bible by Ludwig Philippson—the biblical texts were accompanied by numerous discussions of biblical history and comparative religion. Freud would have been quite familiar with this work. He commented in his Autobiographical Study (1925) that he had been deeply engrossed in the Bible from as soon as he was able to read and that this experience had had a lasting effect on him.
But Freud took pains to minimize his early religious background and may thereby have promoted a shibboleth that has persisted through the subsequent years of Freud scholarship. Peter Gay, for example, in A Godless Jew (1987) dismisses the years of study with Hammerschlag as merely reinforcing the religious indifference of Freud's home—"Hammerschlag was far more interested in ethics than in theology, let alone the Hebrew language." This would support Freud's repeated claim that he knew no Hebrew and that his religious upbringing was negligible. He wrote in 1930, "My father spoke the sacred language as well as German or better. He let me grow up in complete ignorance of everything that concerned Judaism." It seems that this declaration cannot be taken at face value and must be reassessed in the light of new evidence to the contrary.
Attitude toward the Bible.
Freud's attitude toward the Bible was mixed, reflecting his underlying ambivalence toward his father. When Freud turned thirty‐five, his father sent him the family Bible with the following inscription:
"My dear Son,It was in the seventh year of your age that the spirit of God began to move you to learning. I would say that the spirit of God speaks to you: "Read in My book; there will be opened to you sources of knowledge and of the intellect." It is the Book of Books; it is the well that wise men have dug and from which lawgivers have drawn the waters of their knowledge.You have seen in this Book the vision of the Almighty, you have heard willingly, you have done and have tried to fly high upon the wings of the Holy Spirit. Since then I have preserved the same Bible. Now, on your thirty‐fifth birthday, I have brought it out from its retirement and I send it to you as a token of love from your old father."
Curiously, this inscription, so redolent with biblical allusions, was written in Hebrew. The puzzle remains why Jacob would have addressed such a poignant sentiment to his son who professed to have no knowledge of the language. Certainly one supposition is that Jacob would have known that his son could well understand his inscription. Study of Jacob's language has concluded that he was neither a devout nor nationalistic Jew, but one of the Haskalah who envisioned Judaism as the epitome of Enlightenment rationalism—a characteristic view of Freud himself. Moreover, among the books discovered in Freud's library after his death was just such a Bible in Hebrew and German, with copious marginal notes in Freud's hand. Clearly Freud was more of a student of the Bible than he admitted.
Freud could not reconcile his staunch scientific outlook with any credibility of the Bible. He wrote in a letter in 1939, "The way you are able to reconcile esteem for scientific research with belief in the reliability of the biblical report calls forth my fullest admiration. I could not manage the feat.… But whence do you take the right to monopolize the truth for the Bible? I suppose it simply means: I believe because I believe." Whether he was at ease with his disbelief is open to question. If he could bring no belief to the biblical texts, they continued to exercise a fascination over and attraction for him.
Use of the Bible.
Freud tended to regard the Bible as a great book of the Western literary tradition, but he did not credit it with any validity or inspiration beyond that. The Bible took its place in his mind along with other great literary works of Western culture, and his use of it was much like his references to other literary sources. His knowledge of European literature in general, both ancient and modern, was extensive—he must have been a voracious reader throughout his life. But in this regard the Bible held no special place. He even quipped at one point that the writings of Karl Marx seemed to have replaced the Bible and the Qurʾān as sources of revelation, even though they were no more free of contradictions than the sacred books.
Consequently, although scriptural references are scattered through Freud's writings, they are used in the same vein as his references to other literary sources—as allusions or images utilized to make a point, draw a comparison, or illustrate a conclusion. The references span both Testaments, suggesting that Freud had a ready familiarity with the biblical material. References to the Pentateuch predominate, but occasional allusions to the historical books or the Psalms are also found. Use of other books of the Hebrew Bible, such as the Song of Solomon, is incidental. The New Testament seems to have taken a back seat. The outstanding exception to this pattern is in Freud's treatment of the Moses theme.
Freud and Moses.
Freud's first mention of Moses was in a letter to Carl Jung in 1908 in which he refers to Jung as Joshua, who would lead the chosen people into the Promised Land, while Freud, like Moses, would only be able to view it from a distance. The metaphor of the Promised Land was one of Freud's favorites and was a frequent reference in his letters to Wilhelm Fliess, his longtime friend and correspondent. The meaning shifts in various contexts—at one point it is Rome, the center of Christianity; at another it becomes the meaning of dreams; and toward the end of his life it was the riddle of Moses and the birth of monotheism.
Freud's closest engagement with the biblical texts came at the end of his life in his attempt to rewrite the Moses legend in Moses and Monotheism (1939). It is flawed by faulty data selection and lacks appropriate methodology and verification; its conceptual structure is built on the sand of unverifiable hypotheses. It was in fact a kind of family romance, which Freud dubbed his "historical novel." Freud had been fascinated with the figure of Moses and probably strongly identified with the great prophet who led his people into the Promised Land—a metaphor for Freud himself, who led the way into the undiscovered continent of the unconscious. In 1901, he saw Michelangelo's powerful statue of Moses and became absorbed in it; he would spend weeks studying, sketching, and analyzing the statue and finally write his essay that transformed the traditional view of Moses into Freud's own vision of restrained power—a concrete expression of Freud's own ideal of the intellectual restraint of passion. He wrote of it: "Michelangelo has placed a different Moses on the tomb of the Pope, one superior to the historical or traditional Moses. He had modified the theme of the broken tablets; he does not let Moses break them in his wrath, but makes him be influenced by the danger that they will be broken and makes him calm that wrath, or at any rate prevent it from becoming an act. In this way he has added something new and more than human to the figure of Moses; so that the giant frame with its tremendous physical power becomes only a concrete expression of the highest mental achievement that is possible in man, that of struggling successfully against an inward passion for the sake of a cause to which he has devoted himself."
Clearly his identification with the figure of Moses was a powerful theme in Freud's thinking about himself and his religious views. The writing of Moses and Monotheism became a final effort to resolve his ambivalent identification with the figure of Moses and through him of his deep‐seated conflict and ambivalence regarding his father. It became an act of rebellion, rising up against the religion of his father and toppling its hero. He wrote, "A hero is a man who stands up manfully against his father and in the end victoriously overcomes him." Moses was the leader of his people, the prophet who brought a new revelation and founded a new religion. The image of the prophet who was without honor in his own country, yet would finally prevail and be universally accepted, was part of Freud's vision.
Freud's writing of the Moses book reflected his deep study of the Pentateuch and the critical scholarship of his day. He was strongly influenced by the higher biblical criticism of his day—Julius Wellhausen was an important influence, along with William Robertson Smith, whom Freud quotes often. In Freud's rendering, Moses became an Egyptian and the chosen people were thus deprived of one of their great cultural heroes. Freud reviewed the story of Amenhotep IV (Ahknaton), who rebelled against the gods of his father and established the monotheistic cult of Aten. Moses would have brought the monotheistic cult with him as a new revelation to the chosen people. This rendering of the origins of monotheism has been countered by subsequent biblical research.
Moreover, following the rather flimsy thesis of Ernst Sellin, who claimed to have discovered evidence of the murder of Moses, Freud advanced the hypothesis that Moses was prevented from entering the Promised Land because the Jews had rebelled against his imposition of the worship of the Egyptian god Aten and killed the prophet. Freud's Moses does not reach the Promised Land because he was murdered by his sons—the idea recapitulates Freud's fantasy of the murder of the father of the primal horde as the origin of religion in Totem and Taboo (1912–1913). Only later, in the reunification at Kadesh, under the leadership of a second Moses, did they take up a new religion based on the worship of the volcano god Yahweh. The result was the preservation of elements of Egyptian monotheism in the worship of Yahweh, including the practice of circumcision.
Psychoanalysts have speculated that, in addition to his identification with Moses, this argument reflects Freud's underlying guilt for his own hostile wishes against his father. Freud would have been struggling to overcome his guilt and ambivalence by his wish to become another messiah, another Moses, who would lead his people out of psychological bondage by the new revelation of psychoanalysis. But this required the destruction of the religion of the fathers. He wrote: "There was no place in the framework of the religion of Moses for a direct expression of the murderous hatred of the father. All that could come to light was a mighty reaction against it—a sense of guilt on account of that hostility, a bad conscience for having sinned against God and for not ceasing to sin. This sense of guilt … had yet another superficial motivation, which nearly disguised its true origin. Things were going badly for the people; the hopes resting on the favour of God failed in fulfillment; it was not easy to maintain an illusion … of being God's Chosen People. If they wished to avoid renouncing the happiness, a sense of guilt on account of their own sinfulness offered a welcome means of exculpating God: … they deserved no better than to be punished by him since they had not obeyed his commandments."
Acceptance of Sellin's fabricated account suggests a strong need to believe on Freud's part, deriving from his identification of Moses with his father and his own unconscious hostility. The murder of Moses thus expresses a fitting punishment for Freud's own parricidal wishes. The identification with the slain Moses‐father would have been intensified by Freud's advanced age and the progressive deterioration caused by his painful cancer.
Freud could never resolve his ambivalence toward things religious; his attitudes toward the Bible bear eloquent testimony to this conflict. He refused to acknowledge holy writ as bearing any significance beyond its status as an ancient and traditional literary masterpiece. Yet despite his skeptical and agnostic stance, he could not leave the Bible alone. He returned at the end of his life to immerse himself in the figure of Moses and the mystery of the religion he brought to God's chosen people. He created a psychoanalytic myth of the origins of monotheistic belief in the primal murder of the father in the person of Moses. If this imaginative fiction cannot bear the weight of critical appraisal as a contribution to biblical studies, the question still remains whether Freud was touching on something more profound and meaningful about the human religious condition. Certainly, the Freudian encounter with scripture carries its own lesson—that the reading and interpretation of the biblical texts may not be divorced from the motives, sometimes hidden, of the reader.
William W. Meissner, S.J.


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Blogging about Northrop Frye's magisterial Anatomy of Criticism, which I just finished last evening on the Q train, feels a little like writing limericks about "The Waste Land." (Which someone did.) You're transferring a massive, carefully wrought art object into a parallel genre, one which is tiny and vaguely parodic. Still, since I've invested an embarrassing number of q-train rides into Frye, and I understood the book only in flashes, I feel like the least I can get out of it is a blogpost.
Frye's self-declared goal is to arrive at a "synoptic" view of literature, that is, an overall structure of criticism which traces the central recurrent literary phenomena. The book consists, in essence, of a number of categorizations. Genres, for instance, are fourfold: comedy, tragedy, irony and romance. Or there are five "phases," which describe the relation of the protagonist to the audience, ranging from mythic, in which the protagonists are gods; through romance—confusingly used to mean something related to but different from the above—which features superheros or demigods; high mimetic, featuring aristocrats; low mimetic, featuring commoners; and ironic, featuring anti-heros and the like.
There are several more systems like this: each is developed cleverly, and a dizzying selection of literary works—both high art and low—is employed in tracing the many archetypes. So, for instance, Freud's master narrative is a comedy (!), just like those of Aristophanes and Shakespeare—and indeed, like Hollywood movies—and more interestingly, when Frye does the work of making smaller, more controversial divisions and evaluations, the groups and narrative affinities he described do not strictly correspond to historical periods: You may find that His Girl Friday has more in common with, say, A Midsummer's Night Dream, than do The Merry Wives of Windsor and Dr. Strangelove (in fact, you would—the first two comedies are closer to romance, the latter two to irony).
So here's the question. If I don't think literature has a synoptic structure, what use is Anatomy of Criticism? I've been struggling to articulate where this skepticism comes from. Yesterday, it was clarified by a professor I met to talk about graduate school.