My first draft of this turned into a paen to This American Life. But we’ll just have to save that for another time. Instead, I’m just going to recommend that you listen to this episode.  It was something that I thought I should post about the day it was aired, and has since been recommended by readers at either end of the traditional political spectrum (thank you Tyler and Sasha).  What’s so special about it? Well it:
lays out how the finance guys and the people facing foreclosure are connected by a chain of middlemen, and that together, they all brought about the current housing and credit crisis.
And it does it in a very personal way – a few minutes talking with each person in the chain, from borrower to the final Wall Street guy that sells the resulting securities to global moneymen. If you’ve ever found yourself glazing over when you hear news stories about Fannie Mae, subprime loans, Countrywide Finance, etc., you owe it to yourself to spend 50 minutes on this radio show.  You can stream it for free from the linked site, but I highly recommend setting This American Life up as a regular (free) podcast subscription via iTunes.
Special request: if you actually end up listening to it, would you mind posting back here with a couple of lines on what you thought about it? Even if it’s “Eh, just couldn’t hold my interest”, I’m quite interested in what you think about it.
Peej
I read the transcript. I don’t know how it comes off in audio, but on [e-]paper? It sort of read like a 30s or 40s fast paced, hard-boiled PI thriller, with the main conversation taking place in a dim light, run down office, interspersed with flashbacks to the supporting character actors and bit players (all in black and white, of course). Maybe it’s because I just re-read a bunch of Graham Greene’s thrillers, and watched a couple of related movies, but there was also something very Third Man about the transcript and its flow.
It was almost hard to remember at certain points that this *was* fact and *not* fiction. Almost.
Great recommendation from everyone.
(P.S. I pointed my 15 year old niece to it and she is reading it right now. From the last exchanges we made over chat, I think I am going get an earful from her parents tomorrow [read: she’s bugging them to come read it with her. Which usually means it got her attention.)
MB
It really was a great means of boiling down the global to the personal. Would that we could do the same with so many other issues.