Mad Money

I have a confession to make. I've been trying to grasp the national global economic situation. I even constructed a (popular and recently updated) timeline. But I didn't feel I could make any sense of it, Because, no matter how many times I've had it explained to me, it sounded like a bunch of people playing games with Monopoly Money; or some "worthless" paper (a phrase I've heard a lot in the past week. That is, until I saw this handy video from The Guardian confirmed my worse fears.

During these last several months I've had to learn phrases like "debt securities " and wrap my brain around concepts like "credit swaps." Just when I think I've got a handle on it, I find myself thinking , "No, it can't' be that. Surely not everyone would fail to see what was wrong with what going on. Someone must have known that it couldn't go on; that it was unsustainable, because nothing in the system had any real value." )

It all sounds like a pyramid scheme or a ponzi scheme — one with the top 1.5% or so of the population at the top and the rest of us closer the bottom

Views expressed on this page are those of the authors and not necessarily those of Campaign for America's Future or Institute for America's Future