Edmund L. Andrews, an economics reporter for the New York Times, has recorded his tale of financial woe in the soon-to-be-published Busted: Life Inside the Great Mortgage Meltdown. An excerpt was published in the Times magazine a couple of weeks ago and, since I am still having trouble getting my head around the financial mess, I curled up with my laptop for a read.
If there was anybody who should have avoided the mortgage catastrophe, it was I. As an economics reporter for The New York Times, I have been the paper’s chief eyes and ears on the Federal Reserve for the past six years. I watched Alan Greenspan and his successor, Ben S. Bernanke, at close range. I wrote several early-warning articles in 2004 about the spike in go-go mortgages. Before that, I had a hand in covering the Asian financial crisis of 1997, the Russia meltdown in 1998 and the dot-com collapse in 2000. I know a lot about the curveballs that the economy can throw at us.
So far, so good. This seemed like the kind of person who might be able to put the crisis in terms I can understand and an anecdote is always a fine way to illuminate difficult concepts. Even now when I see the initials “GFC” my first thought is a that perhaps Mary Mac’s in Atlanta is franchising their yummy chicken; “perhaps after reading this,” I thought optimistically, “I’ll understand how so many economies lost so much money so quickly”.
Continue reading "My Personal Credit Crisis", or "WTF, charge it!"
