What Were the Tipping Points That Set Off the Great Recession?

Wall Street has infamously had its share of ugly Octobers, so Alison Southwick and Robert Brokamp chose this month to offer their listeners a special treat: a four-part series on the history of market crashes in the United States.

In this segment of the Motley Fool Answers podcast, guest and former Fool Morgan Housel helps them wrap things up with a post-mortem on the downturn we all think we know best, because it's so recently behind us: the Great Recession. People often want to blame homeowners who had overextended themselves, but Housel lays more of the fault at the feet of the overleveraged banks and hedge funds that had been buying and selling mortgage-backed securities. Of course, that was just the beginning.

A full transcript follows the video.

Source: Fool.com