From the Real-World Economics Review Blog, a timeline of warnings and events going back to 1995 and leading up to the financial crisis of the last few years. Some early warnings from various economists: Sept, 2001 “the new housing boom is another rapidly inflating asset bubble financed by the same loose money practices that fuelled [...]

“Where’s the part in this bill where anyone who takes down the entire financial system has to live on the street in a box over a steam vent?” Wow surprise. Seems we have all 59 Democrats supporting a sprawling piece of reform legislation, and all 41 Republicans opposing it. And of course, those 41 votes [...]

Time magazine describes the SEC fraud case against Goldman Sachs this way: On Friday, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed civil securities-fraud charges against Goldman Sachs, alleging the investment bank and its partners created mortgage bonds that were set up to go bust. Goldman then sold these bonds, which are called collateralized debt obligations [...]

Simon Johnson is a professor of entrepeneurship at MIT. Below he speaks about The Doom Cycle , described by the web site New Deal 2.0 as “the current boom-bust-bailout structure of the financial sector that leads to economic crises.”

According to this chart from Visual Economics, there are 1.65 trillion pennies in circulation. That’s messed up.

One of the sticking points in enacting the financial reform bill stuck in the Senate is the creation of a new consumer financial protection agency, which Republicans have ardently opposed.

This post from the financial sector policy blog Finance: Facts and Follies summarizes the dismantling of consumer protections in the mortgage and credit card industries in the 2000s.

Many of the steps violating unsophisticated consumers’ protections against predatory lending came from a cascade of federal, not state, regulatory actions and legislation.

From the UK artist Shardcore, a currency-defacing project called Money, that’s what I want. For those of us living in a capitalist society, there is an inexorable link between our lives, our perceived happiness, and the bits of paper we exchange for goods and services. A banknote has no inherent value, it is merely a [...]

We first found this on The Awl. It’s a photo of what’s described on the blog I ought to be working as a pile of manure left in the entrance of a Chase Manhattan bank ATM at 10th street and 2nd Avenue in Manhattan, with this explanation: This happened across the street from my apartment. [...]

Tip o’ the hat to Laura at EconomyStory for sending us Sub-prime the Musical. The site consists of a series of podcasts by a college student named Madison Koshy, who created them from research she did on the causes of the credit crisis. Naturally, she then wrote song parodies to illustrate the concepts she had [...]

“…there is every reason to believe the biggest banks are hiding huge losses on second liens….Another financial crisis is nearly certain to hit in coming months. The belief that together Geithner and Bernanke have resolved the crisis and that they have put the economy on a path to recovery will be exposed as wishful thinking.” [...]