Fiscal Whazzat?

The current economic mess is comprehensible, as long as the folks explaining are clever enough.

The 60-minute radio show "The Big Pool of Money" explains why subprime mortgages got popular with bankers and borrowers, with the amusing style This American Life is famous for. Many factors are involved, but the biggest was "the triumph of data over common sense" and peer pressure: 1000s of bankers knowing they were doing the wrong thing, but they couldn't resist the profit. It also explains how investment banks are different than "real" banks, and why they're probably going to disappear R.S.N.

For ongoing coverage, I've been following National Public Radio's Planet Money blog. It's updated many times a day by NPR's economic correspondents. You can listen to all the reports that have aired on NPR's programs; they also have an audio Q&A section where they field listeners' questions.

Of course, NPR is not a neutral source of information, but their coverage has, so far, assumes the audience are not earning more than US$150,000 annually. Tell me about other helpful info sources!

Three things make a post

The last few days have been lovely.

1. Lovely weather.

2. Lovely company: my house has been graced by were_duck (bearing CSA shares, nummy) and sasha_feather (bearing SGA disks, goody).

3. Lovely art. Duck turned me on to Banksy, a brilliant grafitti artist. Since I use mass transit, I have a very low tolerance for grafitti in general and tagging in particular. But Banksy's stuff really makes me think. Check out the heart-breaking New Orleans series on his site.