

NPR bought a toxic asset to watch it die.  They call her "Toxie" - iamelgringo
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124578382

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jerf
I feel a little obligated-by-honor to post this, as I frequently rag on news
media for not being very good, but I think this is pretty good journalism.
They put a bit of elbow grease and actual resources into this, it's a great
way to get a bit of concrete perspective in what is one of the most abstract
(yet real) crises we've ever seen, it's pretty much everything journalism is
_supposed_ to be. So my compliments, from a frequent critic.

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DanielN
I agree. Planet Money is a great example of what financial news should be. And
it is a completely replicable phenomena. Its strength largely comes from a few
personalities who are engaging, intelligent and intellectually curious and
asking them to report on a subject they know little about. It gives a really
strong mix of high end analysis and laymen explanations for the financial and
economic mechanisms at work.

Whats interesting about this style of reporting is that it seems to actually
produce more in depth and nuanced analysis than what you typically see in,
say, the wall street journal. I suspect this is because the laymen
explanations lea to side analysis of issue that would otherwise be washed
over. Where most financial news sources would report on the current state of
toxic assets and how they are effecting broader markets, planet money in this
series has spent an entire year reporting on what a toxic asset actually is,
how it progresses through a market, its role in the market crash and what is
being done to correct it. And all of this in about 3 minutes once a week.

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gruseom
This idea was a good one but I want to make a grumpy comment anyway. That
"Planet Money" series is on the whole _terrible_. It's supposed to be in-depth
but there's nothing deep about the pieces I've heard, just painfully bad
dialogue issued by pseudo-hipsters all imitating Ira Glass to varying degrees
of cringitude. I admire Ira Glass too, but this is analogous to folk singers
imitating Bob Dylan's nasal whine instead of, you know, writing good songs. As
for content, nearly all of what I've heard has been them asking obvious
questions of economists who repeat the same obvious half dozen bromides such
economists invariably repeat, which the Glassbots then ploddingly translate
into even dumber terms, presumably so they can hear the sound of their own
voices some more on national radio. That and painfully staged little sketches
for idiots, like the one where they go to different supermarkets to play
walkie-talkies and conclude that some of them sometimes price things
differently.

It's so awful I can't listen to it any more: I find it traumatic to be exposed
to people making asses of themselves. That's probably why I'm writing this, to
expunge the trauma. Have I just heard the wrong 10 episodes or something?

Some of the economic reporting produced by This American Life, on the other
hand, has been superb and genuinely in-depth. Since the intersection of the
two sets is non-empty, perhaps the producers are to blame.

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jakarta
I disagree.

Take the reporting on Toxie, their toxic asset. I think what they did was a
good idea, I have followed their reporting on it for a while now. First they
presented how one actually acquires these assets (they started with a trader
and walked through that process) then they actually dug deeper beyond just
monitoring the prices. They followed the individual mortgages within the
security and found how one was tied to a mortgage fraud scheme and the other
was tied to a guy who borrowed beyond his means.

I saw similar research put together by a well respected bank's equity research
arm that decided to start visiting the homes which corresponded to certain
distressed bank loans in Ohio. So overall, I thought the Planet Money team
took a really good approach to their story.

Is it true that they have to sometimes dumb things down for the masses? Yes.
No ordinary person is going to sit there and read through a CDO prospectus.
But if I wanted something more in depth I would just listen to my Bloomberg
podcasts.

Also, your criticism about Planet Money versus TAM seems a bit off base. I
have found that Planet Money is the group that most often contributes the
economic reporting/segments to TAM. Although there have been times when
ProPublica contributes to both.

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dingle_thunk
They call _her_ "Toxie" (Planet Money Podcast -
<http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast.php?id=510289> )

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iamelgringo
Good call. Fixed.

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djb_hackernews
Bizarre that there are so few REOs. Lots of housing reporting involves the
mention of homes owned by banks that aren't on the market, because the banks
know if they put them on the market it will just depress prices further. So
are the busted properties immediately being bought by investors/homebuyers and
avoiding going to the bank?

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mahmud
Heh,

I have been watching (listening) Toxie since the day she was born. It's, by
far, my favorite anthropomorphized menace since the Woodland Christmas
Critters:

<http://www.southpark.nl/clips/sp_vid_154748/>

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gregpilling
Wow. Step through the months from '96 and watch the number of current
mortgages decline steadily.

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qq66
Well, ANY mortgage-backed security will decline in number of current
mortagages -- as people pay off their mortgages or refinance. The alarming
thing is not the decrease in "current" but the increase in delinquencies.

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kbatten
If you want to buy a toxic asset that won't die, buy some BP stock.

