The current housing market/credit crunch is certainly no secret. But getting a grasp on what happened and is now happening is a real trick.
Driving back from Florida on Sunday I caught NPR’s “This American Life.” I am not always the biggest fan of the show, but this Sunday they laid the whole thing out in very real and understandable terms, and did it with very human interviews of people involved on both ends, those making obscene amounts of money on a housing market they knew was overheating, to those who are losing their homes because a bank was willing to loan a half million dollars to a man with three part-time jobs, no assets and who was so undependable that a loan shark would not even loan him money.
This was one of the most engaging programs I have heard in a long time. Well worth an hour investment to understand just why our economy is in the state it is in. Here is an mp3 of the entire hour program. Download it to your ipod or other mp3 player, or burn it to a CD and take the hour to check it out. You won’t regret it.
Thanks for the link – I missed the download by a day from their website and I’ve been dying to hear it as many friends have recommended it. Anxious to give it a listen as I’ve made it an informal hobby of mine to follow the housing industry ever since my wife and I discovered we would never be able to afford a starter home in our area.
We couldn’t figure out how people younger than us with 1 working adult could get brand new cars, big houses and take expensive vacations… then we discovered it was all only temporary for them.
[...] stuff in my ever student like bedroom. And there’s $70 trillion in the giant pool of money [mp3 here] in the world so we’re building the future ever [...]