WTF, Economy
Americans get too freestyle with the mortgage lending, and suddenly our banking system gets nationalized and Iceland goes bankrupt.
People are already dying.
A little unclear on what the hell happened, exactly? So was I. Here are some things that have really helped me out:
NPR's This American Life teamed up with their newspeople, and created two stellar shows that follow the chain reaction from beginning to end:
Part 1: The Giant Pool of Money
Part 2: Another Frightening Show About the Economy
They're keeping everyone updated on the daily on the Planet Money podcast.
The Economist provides a short history of modern finance, detailing how the system that caused the crisis was built slowly, out of solutions created piecemeal to deal with other problems.
Two good timelines of the events, the first a very thorough one by the BBC. The second, Reuters, includes a more succinct timeline.
They also have a map of all the countries worldwide affected by the crisis:
Joshua Keating at Slate's Foreign Policy blog describes it as, "the third world's official schadenfreude map."