Lectures curated around FRONTLINE: Inside the Meltdown, which examines how the global economic crisis happened.

On Thursday, Sept. 18, 2008, the astonished leadership of the U.S. Congress was told in a private session by the chairman of the Federal Reserve that the American economy was in grave danger of a complete meltdown within a matter of days. As the housing bubble burst and trillions of dollars' worth of toxic mortgages began to go bad in 2007, fear spread through the massive firms that form the heart of Wall Street. By the spring of 2008, burdened by billions of dollars of bad mortgages, the investment bank Bear Stearns was the subject of rumors that it would soon fail.

FRONTLINE: Inside the Meltdown chronicles the disaster that followed - the stock market crashed and credit markets around the world froze. In response, Henry Paulson, a former Wall Street executive with Goldman Sachs, and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke proposed a $700 billion bailout plan. FRONTLINE goes inside the deliberations surrounding the passage of the legislation and examines its unsuccessful implementation.