Mohamed Nanabhay's Blog

Having witnessed the demise of Anderson up close when Enron collapsed (Anderson South Africa "merged" with KPMG when I was working there), I was intrigued at how a business that was so embedded in our financial system can just dissapear overnight.

With the current financial crisis, I've been trying to understand what has been going on in the markets and why it seems that the whole financial system is on the verge of collapse.

Some of the most helpful resources for me so far have been:

• A collobaration between This American Life and NPR News produced The Giant Pool of Money. It's an hour long radio show that tells the story of the morgage crisis from the guy taking a loan all the way up the chain to the Chinese bankers. This is one of the best pieces of economics reporting that I've ever come across. The folks at NPR managed to make a subject as complex as this both understandable and entertaining - no easy feat.
• The F.A.Q.’s of Lehman and A.I.G. posted on the Freakonomics Blog. The post answers some of the most important questions on what impact the events of this month have on the market and why the Fed has done what it has done.
• I picked up a copy of M.I.T. Technology Review last December when I was leaving L.A. for the lead article on The Blow-Up (warning : need to register to read the article). The article focuses on the mathematically trained financial engineers known as "quants" and how they had built such complex financial models that no one really knew what was underlying what. This article was actually my first foray into the subprime credit market.
• The Financial Times has a good interactive feature that explains how money market funds work and looks at the implications of the recent problems for the wider market.

I'm growing this list as I go along so if you've got any other suggested reading please let me know.

• @adamcobb suggested this France24 piece : How a subprime apple contaminated global finance