So you would really like to understand just what the hell happened to the global economy?

Just thought I would take a moment to line up the two most helpful resources I have found on the topic of the Great Depression II.

The first is an award winning radio documentary by PRI {Public Radio International} called "Giant Pools of Money". You can download the MP3 file or you can listen to it on the web here. This one is just tremendous. I hardly have a critical word to say about it. This is the critical foundation of your understanding of the financial market that was prior to the collapse, and how it came to be.

To understand how the house of cards collapse, you need to have a look at a video documentary by PBS Frontline called Inside the Meltdown. You can view the entire documentary here. The quality of the video stream is very good. This one is very dramatic and powerful, but not as expository and educational as the first. The great difficulty is the bias of the authors. They scarcely deal with the nationalization of Fannie and Freddy. Why? A sharp focus on quasi-public agencies established by a famed Democrat for progressive purposes might be damaging to the authors interests. The focus is sharply on Bear Sterns and Lehman Brothers. This is generally good. These two malefactors are close to the core of the meltdown. In truth, this documentary should have been 3 or 4 hours long. They just didn't have enough time to document this incredible sequence of events that comprised the Meltdown.

Nevertheless, Inside the Meltdown is a powerful history of just what happened in 2008. I strongly recommend it.