Anatomy of a Meltdown: The Credit Crisis (washingtonpost.com)
by Neil Irwin • This interactive mapping tool from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which sorts foreclosure and other data by county and zip code, will help you find out how the subprime crisis is affecting your neighborhood.
• Two economists from the New York Fed explain in remarkable detail how mortgages get bundled and resold, along with some of the friction points in that process that led to the current crisis.
• "The Compleat UberNerd" provides more detail on how the mortgage industry works. It is contained in the archive of the finance blog Calculated Risk, which also gives routine news and analysis about the housing and credit crisis.
• Ned Gramlich, a former Federal Reserve governor who died late last year, warned of the mounting subprime crisis early and often, but his warnings many times fell on deaf ears among his colleagues at the Fed. His book "Subprime Mortgages: America's Latest Boom and Bust" explains the problem well. You can read the first chapter online.
• Portfolio magazine's Web site has an elegant animated illustration of how a collateralized debt obligation -- one of the bogeymen of the financial crisis -- actually works.
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