Thursday, October 16, 2008

The Giant Pool of Money

It behooves you as a citizen --

-- stop giggling, I'm goddam serious. Citizenship comes with responsibilities. One of those responsibilities is to take time and learn about complicated Very Bad Things we need to deal with as a nation. The financial complicated Bad Thing is the current financial crisis. In an entertaining and marvelously clarifying podcast, Alex Blumberg and Adam Davidson explain how this all came to be with the NPR show "The Giant Pool of Money."

Stream it over lunch, or go buy it for a buck on iTunes, dump it in the mp3 player. Get some knowledge while you're commuting to work, or instead of zoning out and surfing for Russian gun girl porn. You'll understand what happened, and even more importantly a.) be able to communicate what happened to your friends and b.) understand when a politician is full of crap when he talks about this particular Very Bad Thing.*


The same guys did a podcast about the recent stock market crash and Credit Default Swaps -- Another Frightening Show About the Economy. It's not up for purchase yet, but you can stream it.

Good citizenship in under an hour. How can you beat that?

Links:

The Giant Pool of Money

Another Frightening Show About the Economy

Their weekly podcast.









* One candidate is, indeed, full of crap, by the way. Blaming Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for the financial meltdown is like blaming the dead canary for the mine explosion. They were leading symptoms, not causes.

46 comments:

  1. I warned that goddamn canary over and over again to NOT BRING GRENADES INTO THE MINE.

    Fucking bird deserved what he got.

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  2. The only caveat I'd add to this endorsement is that you might want to be prepared to be a lot more nervous than you already are after listening to both of these.

    Then again, my experience might be related to the fact that I'm a complete idiot when it comes to large economic matters, so learning this much at once made me freak out a bit. :)

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  3. Anonymous11:41 AM

    From the McClatchy piece:

    "These private non-bank lenders enjoyed a regulatory gap, allowing them to be regulated by 50 different state banking supervisors instead of the federal government. And mortgage brokers, who also weren't subject to federal regulation or the CRA, originated most of the subprime loans."

    This dovetails rather nicely with Eliot Spitzer WaPo op-ed piece about the feds preventing states from regulating national banks.

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/13/AR2008021302783.html

    ReplyDelete
  4. Of course, I looked up Russian Gun Girl Porn before going to the NPR link...

    ReplyDelete
  5. Anonymous12:22 PM

    There's "Russian gun girl porn" ?!!

    I CAN HAS?

    ReplyDelete
  6. Agreed, John...citizenship IS serious stuff, and we spend too much time avoiding the hard work of learning what we need to know to make educated decisions.

    I happened to bump into and blog about another good mp3 today, and I thought I'd toss that link in as well: http://kenzoid.com/blog/archive/864/ (I link to my blog instead of C-SPAN b/c it's hard to get straight to the mp3 at the C-SPAN site, but I include that link).

    That's an hour-long interview with a journalist that specializes in the Supreme Court, discussing the differences in the candidates re: the court. These nominations are hugely important, and there are significant differences between Obama and McCain.

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  7. call the office about THE FORGOTTEN you are too elusive

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  8. Anonymous10:38 AM

    Rogers,

    I thought of you when they started talking about the concept of "leverage" in the second podcast.

    Heh.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Anonymous8:13 AM

    http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2008/10/matt_taibbi_and_byron_york_but.html

    the above link is a very funny discussion between rolling stone's matt taibbi and some conservative douche named byron york.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Anonymous6:53 PM

    Lover of Jazz @8:13

    Yeah, that NY Magazine discussion between Taibbi and York is a riot. I can never get enough of York being put in his place, especially when he is pushing such classist(?)/racist garbage.

    The one criticism I saw of Taibbi that seemed* like it might be legit was that, instead of beating York over the head exclusively with the scandal of credit default swaps, Taibbi should have also been beating him over the head with the scandal of collateralized debt obligations (CDOs).

    *I say 'seemed' because I'm too ignert of these things myself to really know if Taibbi's critic knew what he was talking about. I still have a lot of self-education to do in this area myself.

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  11. Anonymous9:35 PM

    http://www.treas.gov/press/releases/reports/custodiancontract.pdf

    Go to page 25. Read how much they're being paid. Try not to punch the screen in anger.

    ReplyDelete
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