Monday, September 22, 2008

A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money


It's a few months old, but the This American Life episode "The Giant Pool of Money" is still well worth listening to. It explains how the housing/mortgage crisis came about, and how that caused the turbulence on Wall Street we're now weathering. And puts it all in understandable, if mind-boggling, terms. The free podcast download is long gone, but you can either stream it or read a transcript for free, or download it for around a buck.

4 comments:

Grammarian@mindspring.com said...

Is it going to depress the hell out of me?

Jim Donahue said...

Yes. But you'll better understand what happened.

Grammarian@mindspring.com said...

Is that going to help me in the time between the window and the pavement?

Anonymous said...

I don't have time to read it but I'd like to take a guess anyway - you loan lots of people lots of money just because they say they can pay it back, and then when they can't, you're in deep shit.