Tenth Anniversary of the Orange County Bankruptcy

A decade ago Orange County was forced to declare bankruptcy after suffering staggering losses in the financial markets. The county’s investment pool suffered a loss of $1.6 billion, the largest ever recorded by a local government. Larry Mantle speaks with Chris Reed, op-ed column editor for the Orange County Register, and Mark Baldassare, Senior Fellow and Program Director at the Public Policy Institute of California and author of When Government Fails: The Orange County Bankruptcy (University of California Press, 1998). They discuss how a financial disaster of this magnitude could happen to a municipality and how the county has dealt with the economic and political ramifications of the its fiscal crisis.