My favorite personal finance blog Get Rich Slowly gave me a heads up earlier this week about an excellent radio piece that you should make the time to listen to.
It’s titled The Giant Pool of Money, and you can download the mp3 for free through the 18th of this month. They interview a handful of people from up and down the chain of mortgage lending over the last few years, and lay out the nature and source of today’s mess in plain language.
You’ll hear from a borrower that took on far more mortgage than they could afford, a lender that wrote and immediately sold the loans (while making obscene amounts of money), and a CDO manager that owns pieces of millions of loans that he literally looks at as lines in a spreadsheet.
It’s an excellent piece, and although many of you may have already seen mention of it elsewhere, I felt I should link to it here as well.