NPR did this radio documentary called "The Giant Pool of Money" about a year and a half ago.
If you are not familiar with it, they did an hour long piece on the recession, and several people along the process, from quants that did the risk analysis, to the mortgage guys, to everyday people who bought too much house....
The show was so popular that NPR spawned a separate program called "Planet Money", and they decided to do a follow-up documentary following up on the original Giant Pool of Money.
If you haven't heard of this yet, here's a link, and you can listen to the Quicktime podcast, located right below the newspaper image.
From what I understand, they will only have this link up for a week, so hurry! If you have any remote interest in this recession, tune in because the original and this follow-up are both really good!
October 3rd, 2009 at 12:29 am 1254529751
October 3rd, 2009 at 01:19 am 1254532796
Another thing that I found rather shocking is that the pull is at $83 trillion, but the global government's combined annual budget is "only" $15. Therefore, subsidies will only do so much (despite allowing the Dow to climb from 6800 to our current level of nearly 10k).
Anyways, there is one good upside to this: BOY OH BOY when the money starts to be invested back into the market again, it could cascade into a massive bull run!
October 11th, 2009 at 01:50 am 1255225809
"The increased demand for houses caused the price to increase. The rising prices created even more demand, as people started to look at homes as
investments -- investments that never went down in value."