Newsweek’s Daniel Gross explains the Consumer Price Index (here’s the official BLS site) in a very simple video. I could do without the goofy sound effects, but it’s a good, 2 minute explanation of how the government tracks inflation.
Per David Simon’s Berkeley talk, though, the video doesn’t go into why this matters. Perhaps they’ll cover that in the next installment of the Economics 101 series.
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Please just stop talking Shays… you’re making yourself look stupid.
October 29th, 2007 at 9:18 pm
I really wish there was some type of study that was able to determine the percentage of people that were victims of predatory lending vs. those that were just financially irresponsible (ie- misstating income, no doc loans, etc.). I can’t tell you how many people I have seen that irresponsibly used their homes as ATMs during the past few years to fund cars, vacations, etc. and are now hurting financially on their mortgage payments.
October 29th, 2007 at 11:15 pm
I agree that it would be better to have hard numbers, but I wonder if you’re talking about a different phenomenon? It sounds like you’re talking about people taking out HELOCs after they already purchased their home.
The subprime issue, as far as I understand it (I could be wrong) is about people with less than prime credit getting 2/28 ARMs or other interest only loans.
Those lenders knew what they were getting into, and the business plan, such as it was, involved trying to sell the loans before the ARMs reset…. that seems wrong on multiple levels.