You’d have had to have been on the moon for the last few months or dead not to have noticed that the world seemed to go into economic melt down.
Personally I find the whole mess that the financial institutions have managed to get themselves into rather disturbing. These are people that are supposed to be responsible for managing massive amounts of money and yet it seems that they cant quite grasp the concept of not borrowing more than you can afford, or equally as likely they didn’t care so long as they made money personally.
The whole works of the financially markets can get a little tricky to understand for the uninitiated (or maybe it’s just that there’s too many questionable tactics like short selling. I think I’ll stick to engineering and software, at least software makes sense.
For those of you looking for a simple explantion of what has actually may I suggest this slightly watered down example that covers the basics.