Inside The Meltdown

This week, PBS aired a new episode of Frontline entitled "Inside The Meltdown", chronicling the financial and economic events of this past Fall, and the events that lead up to the meltdown.

A lot of people, myself included, had started to feel pretty concerned about the housing, credit, and stock market booms a couple of years ago, and figured something bad was going to come of all this at some point.

But I doubt that many of us who were concerned understood just how extremely over leveraged the global financial system had become, based on financial instruments such as Mortgage Backed Securities, Credit Default Swaps, and other mathematical derivatives that not even their creators fully understood. I know I didn't; I had heard of those things, and that they were potentially dangerous, but... bring down the whole world economy? I did a few blog posts on the subject last Fall as things were unfolding and I was trying to make some sense out of it.

If you missed the broadcast, it's available online. I recommend it highly, since the meltdown and the ongoing attempts to stabilize things (and the future consequences of these steps) will reverberate through the rest of our lives.

(Sorry to drag the economy into my blog again, but there's just not much happening in local weather, and I had to write something that was longer than one or two sentences, just for practice! Plus, it's a great Frontline show)