Trouble Understanding the Recession?

Join the club....

I work for a consulting firm, I invest my money in the stock market, and I like to think that I kinda know what's happening on Wall Street, but the reality is....I don't know jack squat!

In an attempt to protect my dwindling investable assets and actually do something useful with my google-search skills (can i put this on my resume?  "able to search the google better than 95% of the general population"), I embarked on a journey to learn more.

I trolled through the Wall Street Journal, but found the information either too basic (i.e. Obama is going to tax us, we are f'd) or too technical (i.e. "LIBOR is down 0.000045%", but not really explaining why I care about the London Interbank Offered Rate).  The Economist was decent, but still not really what I was looking for.  And articles in Forbes and Fortune proved fruitless as well.

After almost giving up hope, I chanced upon a site that I now consider my holy grail for understanding the financial crisis.

http://baselinescenario.com/


Written by a combo of MIT Sloan Prof, London School of Economics Prof, and former McKinsey consultant, the Baseline Scenario gets really technical, but also does a great job of explaining the logic behind the numbers.


I'm slowly going through their "Financial Crisis for Beginners" series of posts, and its been very educational.

check it out if you've got the time and interest....and are sick of checking wikipedia for arcane definitions.....