If you listen to podcasts, I think you should you check out a post Get Rich Slowly wrote today, The Giant Pool of Money: Anatomy of the Subprime Mortgage Mess.

J.D. talks about this week’s episode of “This American Life“, perhaps my favorite NPR show. I usually end up downloading it through a podcast, but I happened to catch this week’s episode on my way to pick up T on Friday. It was an excellent sort of friendly view of how this whole mortgage mess came to be.

The show starts out talking to a guy with several part time jobs who was loaned half a million by the bank, though he himself admits he has friends who are essentially loan sharks, and they wouldn’t have even lent him it. It goes on to talk to a young guy who was just out of college making $75,000 a month, and when that dropped to “just $25,000″ it didn’t even cover his current expenses. It talks about how the financial industry is handing out awards for creating product that almost brought down the entire economy. It talks about NINA loans, or “No Income, No Assets” where banks didn’t ask how much you made or how much you had in the bank before writing you a loan. It explains how many people knew that what they were doing wasn’t sustainable, but figured it was the problem of someone higher up on the chain.

J.D. took a lot more time than I could and wrote a great summary, so please read his post and consider listening to the episode!