The "Planet Money" team has done some terrific stories on understanding the whole financial mess, going back to their first one where they explained the spaghetti of knots that tied CDOs (collateral debt obligations) together. Their latest story is the summary of their idea to buy a toxic asset and hope for the best. The reporters put down $1000 dollars of their own money to buy "Toxie", the toxic asset, a mortgage backed security. It was pretty much a roulette style bet for them. Actually, they had a better chance on red/black, because that is close to a 50-50 chance of success. The way that they tell their story makes the whole thing a lot more real. They discovered that their toxic asset was a microcosm of the mortgage crisis as a whole.
p.s. This American Life is great radio. The current week's show is available as a free mp3 download directly from their site. Here is the episode about "toxie," the Toxic asset. Also, I am not on iTunes, but it appears you can get back episodes there.
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