The scariest (and most important) hour of radio you'll hear this year
Oct 06, 2008 in Media
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan dvd Because of work I thought I actually had a pretty good handle on the chaos that’s happening on Wall St. At its most simple, the current financial crisis is some terrible example of economic chickens coming home to roost. A lot (probably virtually all) of bankers and financiers decided to give a whole bunch of property-speculating Americans (and probably a few people who just really wanted a house and couldn’t afford them) really, really scary mortgages. The bankers then packaged all these mortgages like Happy Meals and passed them amongst each other to make money but ooops, that doesn’t really work when people stop making their mortgage payments or they can’t flip those houses. That’s what’s happening, right?
Well sort of. A couple of months back This American Life did an episode of their show that explained the subprime mortgage crisis
. It’s still the clearest explanation of the whole financial boondoggle that I’ve seen. Because of all the chaos in the last few weeks Ira Glass and his team did a follow up to that show.
It tries to lay out what’s really going on (the part about credit default swaps is SOOO mind bogglingly scary that it almost made me sick) and also tries to figure out whether this massive 700 gajillion dollar bailout was a good thing (their answer… throw $700-billion at any problem and it’ll make it better)
Listen to it. If you’re easily scared, may I suggest a security blanket, a stuffed toy or a cute boy/girl to hold on to tight.
Man, whoever thought economics could be so frightening. Shit. Pass me another drink.