Come on, be honest: you never re-ally understood most of this stuff. Not just the more complex terms, like credit swaps or derivatives, but the basic material. Compound interest. Balloon payments. You pretended. We all did. You would read about a hedge fund, and nod. You had no idea what a hedge fund did.The great unspoken issue behind the tanking of the market, the mess in subprime mortgages and the bailout bill is that Americans don't understand the basics of the economy. Faced with financial instruments increasingly arcane and complex and financial institutions increasingly faceless and vast, most outsourced knowledge and responsibility to those they assumed were ethical and responsible. The banker, the broker, the rating agencies: they would look out for us.
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