John Naughton was the first to bring this gem to my attention. This is a hilarious explanation of how modern investment works (or doesn’t).
My one rub is their decision to characterize the debt risk as an “unemployed black man sitting on a crumbling porch somewhere in Alabama in a string vest”. It perpetuates the idea both that blacks are poor and that the poor are black, neither of which is universally true, and neither of which are useful or desirable ideas to propagate. A lot of the people that got these loans were (regardless of their skin color) well meaning, if often desperate folk, and we hardly need to blame our economic woes on the fact that the financial world will loan pretty much any of us far more money than makes any good sense.
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