Everybody I knew, practically, was a journalist when I was a kid - my father, all of his friends. I never wanted to be like those people.

In the old days, when you took out a mortgage, it was probably through a local bank or a credit union, and whoever gave you your loan held on to it for life. If you lost your job or got too sick to work and suddenly had trouble making your payments, you could call a human being and work things out.

Greenspan's eventual explanation for the growing gap between stock prices and actual productivity was that, fortuitously, the laws of nature had changed -- humanity had reached a happy stage of history where bullshit could be used as rocket fuel.

Private equity firms aren't necessarily evil by definition. There are many stories of successful turnarounds fueled by private equity, often involving multiple floundering businesses that are rolled into a single entity, eliminating duplicative overhead.

Ratings agencies are the glue that ostensibly holds the entire financial industry together.

'Prop trading' is just a fancy term for banks gambling in the market for their own profit.

Obviously the commercial news media tries to get you worked up and terrified so you'll buy products that they're advertising.