The title will make perfect sense when you take the most important 20 minutes of your week and read this article immediately. The only way out of an economic slump is to understand how it happened in the first place, and this transcript from a show called This American Life will shed more light on what happened, what's happening, and what's going to happen with the sub prime financial meltdown, than any dinner party or episode of Mad Money ever will. Just an awesome piece of reporting.
When you read the article and see how it was all just people lending other people's money to people who couldn't afford to borrow it, then selling those loans up the chain to people further and further away from the poor people borrowing them - it just feels like it was one giant game of musical chairs, or hot potato. Whoever was left without a chair when the music stopped is just out of luck.
It just goes to show that money literally isn't real until someone says you don't have any.
I'm still an eternal optimist though, and feel after reading this transcript that I just simply see the world more a little more clearly now. And my relationship to money is just plain different now at 30 than it was at 20. Not that I have a ton of it, but I think I finally get how much of a theory money really is now.
And I've got plans for what to do with that know how...
Do you?
