The Mortgage Crisis...in Plain English

I found an excellent (and pretty entertaining) tutorial on the mortgage crisis that I thought I would recommend to those of you that are interested.

Even for those of you that are not struggling with one of these loans, the spillover effects seem increasingly likely to impact us all. This was made clear this week with the collapse of the nation's fifth largest securities firm, Bear Stearns. Bear's demise was directly tied to their over-investment in these loans.

The tutorial was prepared by Harvard professor and former George W. Bush Chief Economic Advisor Greg Mankiw.

Be warned, there is some bad language in the tutorial (I mentioned it was entertaining, right?). You can access it here. It may take a second to load, but once it does you can flip pages by clicking the arrows on the bottom left of the page.

You can also access Mankiw's blog here.