This American Life on the Bad Banks
This American Life has put together another one of their excellent shows on the current economic problems. This time they explain what wrong with the banks — it’s worth a listen. From the show’s description page:
The collapse of the banking system explained, in just 59 minutes. Our crack economics team—the guys who explained the mortgage crisis, Alex Blumberg and NPR’s Adam Davidson—are back to help all of us understand the news. For instance, when we talk about an insolvent bank, what does it actually mean, and why are we giving hundreds of billions of dollars to rich bankers who screwed up their own businesses? Also, two guys go to New Jersey to look at a toxic asset.
[Click here for ‘This American Life: Bad Bank]
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Header photograph by tanakawho
Filed in Uncategorized One Response so far
Danielle on 05 May 2009 at 1:51 pm #
My husband and I have used this system for the last 4 years. Early on, my husband was making around three times more than I was (I was a graduate student, he was working full time). The difficulty in our marriage and our finances came when dealing with my tuition fees- we did not initially claim that as a joint expenditure so I was paying for my fees out of what I was able to save in my discretionary funds. The problem is that this was equal to nearly every dollar I could save, which left us some stress as my husband was buying clothing, toys, etc, and I was unable to even update my wardrobe with necessities! The usual resentment and arguments can be assumed to have occurred.
We worked it out, eventually, where we made the joint decision to make my student fees a part of our bills. The cautionary tale, here, is to make sure you’ve fully thought out all of your bills, and can come to an agreement when there is something special one partner is doing that the other isn’t (charity, school, and children from a previous marriage all come to mind).