This American Life Explaining Wall Street crumblings in narrative form

If you don't know Chicago Public Radio's This American Life and you want to learn about our American economy, then hey, this podcast episode is a one a two a one to three for you!

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1263

I got to learn about Credit Default Swaps and Netting and Commercial Paper and how it affects you ( um excuse me I mean 'me', heh. well you too, okay ).

My own 2 cents on a comparison of 'money' in our economies with the Internets and their linking inklings
So one thing I learned from this podcast is that because Credit Default Swaps weren't regulated ( I can't cite the law, but they referred to 1998 or 2000 legislation ), financiers were NOT required to hold reserves on them. So several hedgies ( affectionately speaking ) formed a non-transparent chain ( its members could only see one lender deep along this chain ), in which each bough Credit Default Swaps from one and sold off the risk to another. So the This American Life people made it sound dramatic, but talk about transfer of fluff and making money off of thin air!

Okay, now here's the comparison to the 'world wide web': So the gosh darn truth is that not all content on the 'net' is original. Many many blogs and even newspapers basically link off to sources and write their 2 cents about it, without really adding what they think ( yes I do that too sometimes but I try not to ). There are even some websites which are created purely to add page rank to target websites. ( Yes, when a search engine crawls/trawls the web, those sites with more 'in-links' pointing to them have 'relatively' higher Page Rank scores, hence google bombs

And there was this really complex plagiarism reported on On The Media, where Jody Rosen, a music critic at slate.com 's work was almost completely copied by a newspaper in Texas that had been copying for a while. Listen to a snippet if ye likes:



So on to my point! Isn't news aggregation so similar to the transfer of money between our banking institutions ? It's all fluff. Real estate deals re-packaging homes for other buyers to make a quick coupl'a thou? Fluff dunk. So, Goldman Sachs is supposed to become a 'non-financial' bank now right? So, yea, what exactly happens to all the asset shufflers ( selling things they don't own ) ( pardon the half-reference to Fight Club's 'buying things we don't need' but it applies t00 ). We need to get back to an economy based on stuff. And interestingly enough 'stuff' is actually a word which doesn't mean anything, contradicting the meaning here. So, we need an economy that 's based on manufactured goods, real services and advice and arts and crafts.

Gambling? Yep that's fluff too.