Are HN-ers still largely in the dark about what happened inside of a CDO^2? What happened to all of those mortgages the treasury bought?<p>What still doesn't make sense to you about the financial crisis?
A lot, but the This American Life series on it was incredibly well done. Definitely better reporting than any other news agency out there.<p><a href="http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/355/the-giant-pool-of-money" rel="nofollow">http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/355/t...</a><p><a href="http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/375/bad-bank" rel="nofollow">http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/375/b...</a><p><a href="http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/365/Another-Frightening-Show-About-the-Economy" rel="nofollow">http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/365/A...</a><p>*My personal favorite -<a href="http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/405/inside-job" rel="nofollow">http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/405/i...</a>
If mortgage paper was trading for much less than face value why not allow people to buy their debt back? Thereby creating increased demand for the "worthless assets"; at the very least it would have created a pretty solid floor for the value of these types of investments.<p>It also would've helped the freefalling house values because it would have given underwater homeowners a chance to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem.<p>We all ended up buying the debt back anyway, we just used the federal government to do it.
One thing that bothers me is why job creation hasn't started up again. Only reason I could come up with is that companies don't need more employees, they manage with what they have. I'm guessing that productivity is increasing.
Why does the period of economical growth is inevitably followed by recession/depression?
Why is it not possible to, maybe, regulate the economy so that economical growth would be slightly slower during the growth period, but use that artificial slowness to cushion the potential recessions?
(Probably sounds very amateurish, but I have no economics background further than reading "Marketing" by Kotler)