The global pool of money
May 27, 2008
I try to listen to NPR podcasts regularly. I admit, it’s partly because I feel obligated as a Web-based journalist - but it’s also because the content is top-notch.
I’m a fan of This American Life, a weekly radio program (and cable TV show, now) out of Chicago. (It airs locally on WYPR, Sundays at 4 p.m.) The show excels at what the radio medium is best suited for: storytelling.
But this blog post isn’t about how great TAL is, it’s about a podcast I listened to last weekend (on the treadmill, no less) that knocked my socks off.
A couple weeks ago, TAL did a show entitled “The giant pool of money.” It was in collaboration with NPR news, and it explains the mortgage crisis by talking to the actual people who got everyone into this mess. Or, as they put it, “the human beings who accidentally created the international financial crisis.” You can listen to a promo here.
Now, most - if not all - of the readers of this blog probably understand what a NINA loan or a mortgage-backed security is better than I do, but there’s more to be reaped from the 60-minute episode than a global understanding of how the foreclosure crisis came about.
The show asserts that the subprime crisis has connected the people facing foreclosure and the higher-up finance guys. Along the chain there were bankers, brokers and homeowners, all of whom deluded themselves. During the program, the NPR producers ask (and answer) “How did it even work?” and “What were they thinking?”
This is how you would find out what it felt like to be Mike Gardner, a former bartender-turned-mortgage broker, during the so-called “Valentine’s Day massacre” at Silver State Mortgage, when the Nevada employer defaulted on its loans and, without warning, laid everyone off.
Give it a listen and tell me what you think.
JACKIE SAUTER, Web Editor
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