#355 — The Giant Pool of Money

Alex Blumberg and Adam Davidson trace the 2008 global financial crisis back to a single underlying cause: a giant pool of money, roughly seventy trillion dollars in global savings, that was desperately searching for a return. That pool of money found the American housing market, and the results were catastrophic. The episode follows the chain of cause and effect from Wall Street investors to mortgage brokers to homebuyers, putting a human face on each link in a chain that nearly broke the global economy. It remains the definitive explanation of the subprime mortgage crisis and directly led to the creation of NPR's Planet Money.