The current financial and economic crisis has been with us since 2007, but very few people are able to give a sensible explanation of what's going on here.
The Short and Simple Story of the Credit Crisis, by Jonathan Jarvis analysizes in some detail the causes of this crisis in an eleven-minute video. It does so in an easy way, and with so many visual prompts that even the layman will manage to undersand our current economic plights in the end.
There is some specialist vocabulary, though, which I have listed below. I don't think you need to look it up beforehand, because Jarvis's presentation is so pedagogical that most of these terms will make sense to us as we watch the video along.
mortgages
investors
investments
sub-prime mortgages
collateralized debt obligations
frozen credit markets
credit default swaps
pension funds
insurance companies
sovereign funds
mutual funds
brokers
interest rate
dot.com bust
return of investments
surpluses
leverage
make a deal
commission
lender
default on one's mortgage
foreclose
You can read a transcript of the video here.
