Understanding the Financial Crisis
Oct 7th, 2008 by brianschettler
I’ll try to post some interesting things around the web I’ve found that do a good job of explaining what’s been going on recently.
- This American Life, The Giant Pool of Money. Very interesting, a few months old. Describes why the banks started to make so many loans to people that probably wouldn’t pay them back.
- Financial Crisis Simplified (a whiteboard presentation). How these mortgages got marketed as a great deal, when really they were not.
- The Subprime Primer. A little old too, but pretty funny. (Some bad language)
- Newt Gingrich is against the bailout. This was before the bailout passed, but he has a great point which looks to be true now that the markets have continued to fall: “Well, after we throw away $300 billion on housing this summer, we’re now going to throw away $700 billion on Wall Street. If this fails after a trillion dollars, what’s the next request?”
- Money as Debt. A 45-minute video describing how the basic role of money and what it represents has changed over the past several hundred years.