This American Life: The Giant Pool of Money (May 9, 2008) w/ transcript

Using the fusion of radio storytelling and radio journalism that marks Ira Glass' 'This American Life', producer Alex Blumberg and NPR News correspondent Adam Davidson made what holds up years later as one of the most lucid explanations of the financial instruments behind the subprime mortgage crisis, the harbinger of the Great Recession.
People all along the market chain, from Wall St. financiers to home borrowers, are interviewed to reveal the very human drives and irrationalities that allowed the housing bubble to grow.
The exact transcript is from www.thisameric... along with other This American Life episodes. This synchronised transcript has been uploaded in light of the episode's recent addition to the Library of Congress National Recording Registry, the list's first 21st century radio piece and first ever podcast. The episode was also more contemporaneously acknowledged with a Peabody and 4th place in NYU's best American journalism of the decade.

[@AnthonyAvery]

Thanks for this! It won a Peabody Award!

[@ampjr9594]

Oops, updated now

[@Big_Bag_of_Pus]

The series of four stories from _This American Life_ , of which this is the first story, is quite simply the best thing I've ever heard on public radio.

[@Big_Bag_of_Pus]

@@jp1170 1. The Giant Pool of Money - May 9, 2008 (this one) - covers the subprime mortgage crisis and how it happened
2. Another Frightening Show about the Economy - October 3, 2008 - covers what the commercial paper market is, why it's so important, and how the subprime mortgage crisis almost locked it up; also covers how credit default swaps (the subject of the movie _The Big Short_ ) work and how they made everything much worse and more fragile
3. Bad Bank - February 27, 2009 - covers how all the above caused the banking system to be on the edge of collapse
4. The Watchmen - June 5, 2009 - covers why governmental regulators and private bond/credit rating organizations (Moody's, Standard & Poor's, Fitch, etc.) failed to pick up on what was happening and gave good ratings to investments that were crap and so on.
One sign of how good these shows were is that they made me very interested in a topic that I would have told you I didn't care about at all: economics.

[@zephyrus001]

I try to listen again every year of so. I can't believe it's been more than 13 years...

[@gaguy1967]

Amazing story from May 2008. The worst was yet to come.