Hi. It’s Brady. We’re back.
In the mid-2000s, it was easy to qualify for a mortgage in the United States. Many households took out loans and, without knowing it, overextended themselves. That seeded a catastrophe.
You may know what happened next: the housing bubble collapsed, there were defaults, people lost their homes, and securities backed by mortgages—which were held by many financial institutions around the world—lost most of their value.
It wouldn’t be fair to assign blame to a single entity. The subprime mortgage crisis was the result of a confluence of many factors, many of which were systemic, too pervasive for all but a few people to spot in advance.
As someone who has been fortunate enough to carry no debt throughout my life, and who was a graduate student about to seek employment when the subprime mortgage crisis was unfolding, it became clear that I had to learn about how money worked—quickly. And I did not have Anthony Bourdain or Margot Robbie to explain this to me, as they did years later in The Big Short.
That same attitude should be a prerequisite for people who are wading into crypto for the first time, but it isn’t. Too often we see anomalies of 10x, 100x, 1,000x wealth viewed as the norm, with users subsequently slinging money into financial contraptions that they don’t fully understand with prayer in place of research.
This is a realm where exciting developments are taking place, where a blank slate is offering the opportunity to create new systems from scratch. But speculation is rife, which means there’s a lot of noise to tune out.
Khamila looked at the absence of digital and financial literacy among Indonesia’s new breed of retail crypto investors who are hoping for overnight fortunes. You can read her report here.
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