2008 Financial Crisis: E117 The Great Recession Part I

The fundamentals of our economy are… present. Welcome to Remember Shuffle’s ongoing multi-part series on the financial crisis of 2008 and the ensuing Great Recession. The Shuffle Bois begin with some table setting to explain the complex financial instruments and deregulation that led to the crisis - mortgage backed securities, collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, and synthetic collateralized debt obligations - and introducing the rogues gallery of characters for this story. They then go beat-by-beat through the collapsing economy of 2008 and trace the decisions that were made by those running the banks as well as by those in power. They close, as always, with some themes and big ideas - including the separation of risk from incentive and the failures of neoliberal deregulation - before turning to the echoes in the culture, which are profound for this topic.

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Bibliography:

Andrew Ross Sorking, Too Big to Fail (New York: Viking), 2009

Bethany McLean and Joseph Nocera, All the Devils are Here (New York: Penguin), 2011

George W Bush, Decision Points (New York: Crown Publishers), 2010

Michael Lewis, The Big Short (San Francisco: Hyperink), 2012

Adam Tooze , Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, 2018

Here is the chart Ben describes in the episode:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subprime_mortgage_crisis#/media/File:Subprime_crisis_-_Foreclosures_&_Bank_Instability.png