Financial Fraud

Pressure is building to hold corporate executives accountable for the current fiscal crisis. And now, the FBI is expanding its investigation of corporate fraud to include American International Group, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and Lehman Brothers. We speak with Evan Perez, legal reporter for the Wall Street Journal.

Race and the Presidential Campaign

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A new AP/Yahoo News poll conducted with Stanford University found that 2.5 percent of voters could turn away from Barack Obama on election day because of his race.

Alternative Solutions for Wall Street

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Economists Laurence Kotlikoff and Perry Mehrling pose a provocative question: What about turning the federal government into a kind of insurance agency? Instead of buying bad debt from Wall Street, why not sell insurance to back that debt, and let someone else buy it and deal with it? They argue that’s essentially what the government did with federal deposit insurance in the Depression. We’ll speak with Laurence Kotlikoff, professor of economics at Boston University and author of “Spend Till The End.”

Sounds Like Silence

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Hybrid cars curb carbon emissions and get better mileage, but they also run so quietly that safety concerns are being raised by some pedestrians and especially the blind. We speak with Lawrence Rosenblum, a perceptual psychologist at the University of California at Riverside about his research into how people react to the sound of oncoming hybrid cars and what can be done to make them more detectable.

Dennis Lehane

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Best selling author Dennis Lehane’s new book “The Given Day” is set in Boston in the tumultuous year leading up to 1919 police strike. The entire force walked off the job and three days of rioting, looting, and mayhem followed. We catch up with Lehane outside of Boston’s State House, which is a pivotal location in the book, to talk about the strike, and the world in which the novel is set.