Subprime Housing Coverage
This American Life tackles the sub-prime housing market. I’ve read economists writing about this crisis… and it’s rather difficult to understand. I mean, all this talk of AAA overrated paper, etc. — I got a vague idea of the topic, but I wanted something more. Soo, I read a glowing recommendation of This American Life’s coverage of the topic. A quick summary:
What does the housing crisis have to do with the collapse of the investment bank Bear Stearns? Why did banks make half-million dollar loans to people without jobs or income? And why is everyone talking so much about the 1930s? It all comes back to the Giant Pool of Money.
I hope to give this one a listen soon.
Comments
Peter
Hi Alexander - I just wanted to let you know I tried a hand at this in a couple place, here and here . Obviously not as complete or intrinsically cool as TAL, but also not a 1hr listen…
Plus, I’m a sociologist, not an economist…but an economic sociologist at least.
Alexander Micek
Hi Peter — thanks for the feedback! It looks like the HTML was taken out of your comment, which is why I think the links are missing. But, I’d love to take a look at the pages to which you referred… you should be able to just paste in the URLs, and they will be automatically linked.
Looking forward to reading those.