My parents were visiting over Columbus Day weekend when the inevitable question arose. “So, Nell, have you been following the crisis on Wall Street?” my father asked. “I’ve been trying. I’ve been reading the paper but…” “But what?” “But that doesn’t mean I understand it!” My father then proceeded to summarize what I already knew from the paper but still did not understand.
I have no doubt my dad understands the crisis better than I do, but understanding is not something that can be explained. You have to do that legwork yourself. And so I asked my economist friend, whose job it is to understand these things called “global financial markets,” for help. I asked him what I should read online that would take my basic “knowing” and elevate it to at least a rudimentary level of understanding; he pointed me in the direction of The New York Times blog of the newly minted Nobel Prize winner in economics, Paul Krugman, as well as in the direction of the blog for the Times’ chief financial correspondent Floyd Norris.
But he also suggested a pretty readable blog called Calculated Risk, the writer of which is a former senior executive at a public company and who predicted the mortgage crisis and its fallout as far back as 2006, when the housing market still hadn’t begun to crumble. Lately, the guy has been posting six or seven times a day trying to keep up with the latest news of our doom, and those posts include everything from JP Morgan conference calls to clips from “The Daily Show” to Census Bureau reports to press conferences with Henry Paulson. It’s an overwhelming amount of information, especially if your basic vocabulary for the stuff is as unimpressive as mine is, but I’ve got to start somewhere and it’s going to be here.