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. :)