The 7 Deadly Sins of the Financial Crisis

I taught a Sunday school class about the financial crisis last weekend. My presentation was packed with charts and included a crash course on mortgage-backed securities and credit default swaps (not our typical Sunday school fare, in case you were wondering.)

In retrospect, this cartoon which I found on Digg, pretty much sums it all up without the financial mumbo-jumbo:

Sustainable sushi

It's hard to imagine a world without sushi -- how crushing would that be? But a combination of the growing global appetite for sushi and unsustainable fishing practices are putting certain species of fish at big risk.

What to do, what do do? Given that swearing off sushi forever would make life not worth living (well, ok, that's an exaggeration -- but only a tiny one), the next best thing is to order sushi that is either sustainable caught or sustainably farmed (some fish farming techniques may actually hurt more than help).

The Monterey Bay Aquarium has published an online guide to sustainably harvested fish on their Seafood Watch Website (you can learn more about all kinds of seafood, not just the raw variety). If you want something to bring to your next sushi eating expediation, you can also order a handy printed pocket guide.

(Dave Hewlett of HP fame had a big hand in getting the Monterey Bay Aquarium going, so I have to give a shout out to my current employer.)

So study up before you hit the next sushi bar. Besides, you need something to take your mind off the financial crisis. :-)

Visualizing our national debt

I am a big fan of the well-designed visualization. The good folks who publish the Mint.com blog just published one I particularly like. It visualizes our national debt as a series of credit card balances drawn against the financiers of our runaway government spending -- the Bank of Japan, the Bank of China, the OPEC nations, etc.

The amounts are normalized to the median income of a typical American family ($50,233). Very illuminating.

By the way, if you haven't tried the Mint service, it's definitely worth a whirl. I think they are probably within 6-9 months away from enabling to kick my Quicken habit of over 10 years.

The way they visually show you:

• How you're spending
• How your portfolio compares to the major indexes (even though no one wants to see that these days), and
• How your spending compares with people in your own or other cities is astounding.
  

Intuit ought to buy these guys and put the (now free) Quicken.com out of its misery.

Defender of the, uh, playground slide

There is tiny playground near my mom's house that we haven't been to in ages. (Usually the kids are too tired or it's too late as we're leaving my parents' house.) But timing worked out last weekend, and God blessed us with a beautiful warm, sunny afternoon.

Here, Cameron is posing as the All Powerful Guardian of the Playground Slide. Or something like that.

HP's printer and PC bailout plan

OK, if you are feeling left out of the government's historic bailout plan, HP is here to help with $40 off printers and $50 of desktops and notebooks. You can get the product wherever you want (good), but you will have to fill out a rebate form (oh well).

This is for friends & family of employees, which by virtue of reading this blog, you are.

Enjoy.

• Save $40 on any HP Printer over $199 
• Save $50 on any HP Desktop PC or Notebook

A bouncy house with a built-in slide

For the technological breakthrough of the weekend, we proudly feature a bouncy house with a slide. Cameron and Katye must have gone down this slide 100 times. It was all we could do to tear them away and go home.

Happy birthday to Cali and Morgan. Thanks for having us! The full set of pics are on Smugmug.

Tim and Sumin's local reception

Tim and Sumin held a local reception for friends & family who couldn't make it out to Korea. With the prospect of good food to be eaten, we of course went to both.

Click here for pictures of the good eats at ABC Seafood.

Colin loves biking

We're proud of Colin, who picked up two-wheeled biking over a few days. He loves biking around now and wants to go all the time. The streets around our house aren't the best place for a beginning biker, so we usually trot him over to one of the nearby schools. He especially enjoys it when Erin and Ryan come along too.

Katye is enjoying her bike with training wheels as well, though often gets stuck when the bike's wheel finds a spot of ground which lifts the wheel off the ground relative to the two training wheels.

Cameron and I just run around pretending to be go-karts from Mario Kart Wii while his two sibs are biking. Or sometime, he just sits.

 

The mortgage meltdown via cartoons

OK, if the slide presentation stuffed with graphs was a little too much information, try this stick-figure cartoon. Here's the first panel from the very instructive set:

Warning: it's got profanity in it, though I have to say that in this case, the profanity underscores the narrative. You've been warned.

The numbers behind the mortgage meltdown

If you want to understand and see the trends behind the mortgage meltdown, check out this presentation. It's dense, but probably the single best presentation I've seen explaining the mess. Stay tuned for my next post, which takes a very different approach to teaching you about what happened.

Making Sense of the Mortgage Meltdown

From: pkedrosky, 1 day ago

Making Sense of the Mortgage Meltdown

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: kedrosky milken)

Great slide deck untangling the mortgage meltdown from a seminar today at the Milken Institute in Los Angeles.


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