A friend of mine forwarded this awesome video link that explains the whole credit crisis visually! I now understand so much better of what went wrong and where we all fall. Greed begets greed… and eventually world-wide disaster!
The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.
It does a pretty good job of explaining some of the terms we are hearing. I still do not understand all of the stuff happening in the financial world – heck, there is a reason why that these banks and financial institutions are made up of over-educated applied mathematicians and not just some dude that got a finance major from some college.
The one big issue I have with the clip is that it gives a good explanation from the bank’s perspective but makes it almost seem that the bankers forced unqualified borrowers to buy houses. It mentions government (and it is not just Greenspan – the bubble was building before the .com bust and Sept 11th), the big one: the people themselves and foreign sources of credit just in passing.