These look like pretty great programs... I've picked up enough knowledge from reading economics blogs since the Bear Stearns thing so that even the jargon is starting to make sense, but hearing it broken down will definitely be good. Thanks for linking to these!

I wouldn't have thought "This American Life" would end up being the best financial system primer I'd ever found. I love the show for its depth and intelligence but I don't think of it as a finance-oriented show.

Do you have any favorite economics blogs to recommend? I'm especially interested in any that are good discussions of policy. I prefer that they be relatively agenda-neutral -- or that they clearly state they have an agenda.

I love Nouriel Roubini's Economonitor most -- you have to sign up to see the full posts but it's totally worth it. He's the current darling of the crisis because he's been predicting this for years, and the MSM started watching him around the Bear Stearns incident and I think all his predictions have come true. He clearly has his shit together. But his posts are often seriously tl;dr.

I've also picked up a lot from the economics category at The American Scene. I think it's a right-leaning blog but they're not overtly partisan (that I can recall). They've had some good overviews and also some good links out to other places.

I honestly get to most of them by clicking through from political blogs... some that have had good links are TPM (and they've got a collection of quotes which links to their sources on their bailout burnout page, and it links to a bunch of people I've read and found interesting) and hilzoy, who has also had some good overviews. Both are liberal, in case you're not familiar with them, but they try to pull economic analyses from all over.

Also of course stuff from The Economist just because, uh, it's what pops to mind when I think of economics. They've got some blog sections and stuff. It's pretty interesting. Also interesting was this article, where like 80% of economists polled say Obama would be better for the economy. McCain: pwned.

Thank you for the links! I'm already registered at and checking out the first one (yay for free trials!) and following up the others shortly. I don't mind reading conservative or liberal opinions, I just like to know the person's operating philosophy so I can know the context.

A lot of the economic analysis I've seen of Republican vs. Democratic Admin -- and I'll be the first to admit I've been a surface skimmer -- indicates that Democrats in general are better for the economy. Luckily, this year's really easy to judge as McCain likes our current model so much he'd like to put it on steroids. Short of shutting down the Treasury and reverting to a barter system, I'm hard pressed to think what a government could do worse in handling the economy.

Not that I think huge tax cuts for anyone is a good idea at this time. After effectively doubling this year's deficit, I'm really antsy about any plan that promises to cut revenue and raise expenditures.

I sat and had a very interesting conversation over lunch last week with the banker who used to be my boss, and who now just shares office space with my current boss. He explained the whole thing to me from an investment banker perspective, which was very interesting, but which certainly felt at least slightly slanted. I look forward to listening to these and seeing what the differences in perspective are.

I'd love to hear how what he said differs from the above presentations. Those are the clearest explanations I've found so far. Actually, I'd be interested in your boss's take, regardless of whether the hope is to slough blame onto someone else. I really don't know enough about the pieces of the system work to have a financial philosophy and in these times, I'm finding that isn't good enough.

being someone who used to be in the banking industry (the retail banking, personal checking/savings/CD's, etc not the real money making banking) I know I've had a better grasp than most on what has been going on... but these are great! I'm definitely going to link this from my blog for others to listen to!

I'm glad you found them useful! Scary though the economics are, just understanding takes a bit of the panic out for me.

You started out way ahead of me. Both of my parents are CPAs so I have a reasonably good grounding in basic personal finance but the larger finance system? I knew *nothing*. Never took any courses in it, never found it in the least bit interesting. When the Bush Admin proposed the bailout, my knee-jerk reaction was, "no way I want to hand that kind of money over to a single person's discretion -- and I really don't want the government purchasing an unbelievable pile of crappy securities!"

But I had no knowledge of what the root problems were and thus no tools to evaluate whether I thought the idea of buying "troubled assets" was a good way to fix whatever it was that had gone wrong with the economy. I couldn't form an opinion on the bailout's approach so I've been playing catch-up. :)

Thanks for the links! I feel like I have a gut level understanding of what's happening (as in, my gut's been going "HUH?" for years about various and sundry things that are now crashing down around us), but I look forward to moving it from my gut to my cerebral cortex. :-)

You're welcome. :) I have seen lots of sturm und drang over the financial crisis, the bailout, the housing market but I hadn't seen any real understanding or attempt to explain the crisis so that someone who is intelligent but never gave a thought to global or national financial systems can wrap their brains around why solving the problem is so crucial. As Biden rightly pointed out (gotta get my daily political shot in), you can't solve a problem if you don't understand the causes.

I've had a similar gut reaction, particularly watching house values and the amount of consumerism around me. I couldn't figure out where all of this money was coming from but it was obvious that I'd missed out on some secret in life. That is, until I started shopping for a house; the deals people pitched were insane -- and virtually every one of the formerly modest houses in my own neighborhood had been refinanced to renovate it with granite counters, luxurious bathrooms, exotic woods, custom lighting, top of the line appliances...money was everywhere.

I wasn't surprised by the mortgage meltdown -- but I had no idea that a whole new financial system had grown up to provide these mortgages and how that was destined to bring down Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, AIG, and on and on.

I feel as if I now understand Katie Couric's question to Palin about why not funnel the $700 billion to the troubled mortgage industry to help "the people" rather than helping Wall Street banks.

When the stock market started shooting up to 10,000, I started going "HUH?".

When I was a kid, my dad took the WSJ. His company started offering stock options to the blue collar guys and my dad decided he needed to understand this new benefit. As a result, I had not only the Chronicle and Time, but now the WSJ to absorb (I was a word sponge at 9). I learned how to read the stock pages and how to follow the ups and downs and what all that crap meant. As I also read some of the articles, if I understood them or not, I started connecting what the articles said with what the numbers did. It was like a game. It was fun.

Jump forward a few decades.

I don't read the financial pages any more, but some of what I learned then, seems to have stuck at a very deep level. *Nothing* about the 10,000 level in the market made sense. I couldn't figure out where the *stuff* was coming from to generate that kind of rise, especially since it didn't just peak weirdly and then settle. (This is where I should also say that I never did understand economics when I took it. The whole discipline seems completely counter-intuitive and I'm leery of things that are counter-intuitive.)

What I'm hoping I'll learn when I watch those shows is something to explain that. What I *fear* is that it's *all* been manipulation and fraud.

I have nothing in the market and I'm so very happy for that. The stock market isn't an "investment", it's a gamble and I never gamble what I can't afford to lose.

Edited 2008-10-07 03:36 pm (UTC)

I haven't understood how any economy can work without some form of manufacturing. I don't see how agriculture and service alone make for a strong economy.

I never got into reading business news and I have no foundational knowledge of the larger financial systems.

What I'm hoping I'll learn when I watch those shows is something to explain that. What I *fear* is that it's *all* been manipulation and fraud.

They don't address the DJIA so they might not be what you're looking for. They're about the conditions that gave rise to the sub-prime mortgage market (the first link) and the mechanics of the system that caused the Fed & Treasury to suddenly panic (the second link).

I have nothing in the market and I'm so very happy for that. The stock market isn't an "investment", it's a gamble and I never gamble what I can't afford to lose.

How are you saving for retirement? Are you buying bonds and T-bills? Is there something else out there?

I have an old-fashioned pension.

And I agree, you really can't sustain a viable economy without manufacturing of some kind. One of the Obama's ideas that I really like is heading into the rust belt and setting up plants to manufacture the necessary technology for renewable fuel *there*.

Thanks, darlin'!

You're welcome. I hope they prove helpful! :)

Fantastic! Thank you so much! I've been so confused by the whole thing and I really appreciate an in-depth look that is also easy to understand (which I wish they had for most things). Also good, I'm going to be heavily dog-walking for the next week and a half, so I was on the look-out for good things to listen to on my iPod.

You're quite welcome. :) The iTunes podcasts are available for free for only one week so if you haven't downloaded the 2nd one, you might want to do that before Sunday.

Happy Birthday!