Nobody knew it at the time, but a routine meeting in early 2008 about Wisconsin’s state budget offered a hint at the massive recession that was already starting to unfold.
It was almost a decade after Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson first proposed the high-speed rail link between Milwaukee and Madison. Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle was running the state, and Dan Schoof was one of his top aides.
Schoof, who was Doyle’s deputy secretary at the Wisconsin Department of Administration at the time, regularly turned to financial firms for advice. One of those firms, Bear Stearns, gave Schoof a series of slides to get ready for the budget meeting.
That was on a Friday. By Monday, Bear Stearns, once a giant of Wall Street, had been bought out for a couple of dollars per share.
“They were one of the early canaries in the coal mines,” Schoof said. “They are gone.”
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