jwz: mortgage doom

mortgage doom

Here's a "This American Life" transcript that is the most comprehensible explanation of the mortgage mess that I've seen so far. (Why it's PDF instead of HTML, I couldn't tell you.)

Tags: big brother, doomed

8 Responses:

endquote says:

14 years ago at 9:31 pm

This week's is the sequel to that one. Not sure about a transcript though.

However I would argue that this is more comprehensible than either, though somewhat less comprehensive.
- rivetpepsquad says:
  
  14 years ago at 9:39 pm
  
  And much more heee-larious.
lafinjack says:

14 years ago at 9:33 pm

There's a Googleized HTML version here.
cyeh says:

14 years ago at 10:35 pm

Adam Davidson: You might not believe me, but that little statement: that is Central Banker speak for "Hey, global pool of money - screw you."

It's a good starter point but it doesn't go into the complete accounting of greed that went on. If you ever get interested in reading about it, I can recommend 'Chain of Blame'

http://www.amazon.com/Chain-Blame-Street-Caused-Mortgage/dp/047029277

It's a bit thick in spots, but the entire idea is that it was one giant scheme that encouraged irresponsible lending from the top to the bottom with a lot of fees and commissions in between. The closest analogy I can think of was a stock broker in the dot-com boom sucking up fees for every trade sold, even if the underlying stock was a complete piece of shit.

One thing that I am having a complaint about is how poorly the media does of actually describing the actual economic problem underlying the current crisis. Yeah, the mortgage lending industry and a housing bubble started it. But that's not the problem that is worrying everyone right now.
- eddie_vedderx says:
  
  14 years ago at 1:57 am
  
  \
  http://www.city-journal.org/html/10_1_the_trillion_dollar.html
  - dmlaenker says:
    
    14 years ago at 11:07 pm
    
    http://www.slate.com/id/2201641/
    
    And, concurrently
    
    http://zompist.wordpress.com/2008/10/07/dont-blame-the-poor/
keimel says:

14 years ago at 6:39 am

As others have indicated, they're back on TAL this current week. The mp3 is here: http://podcast.thisamericanlife.org/podcast/365.mp3 . Can't find the transcript yet, but I bet that part is farmed out elsewhere and gets posted a week or so later.
mayoff says:

14 years ago at 9:00 am

That PDF is a transcript. Here's the audio version:

http://audio.thisamericanlife.org/jomamashouse/ismymamashouse/355.mp3