To understand how the recent meltdown and bailout came about, you have to know what brought them on. According to some, there are PhDs who have problems grasping what happened. I don't know if that's true, but I don't think it has to be made that difficult.

If you're unfamiliar with some of the terms and the entities that are spoken of when discussing the issue, let's start here:

subprime — This refers to borrowers with income levels that are too low, or who made extremely small down payments when buying a home (or no down payments at all), or have poor credit histories, or shaky employment (or none at all). They're the kind of borrowers traditional bankers do not want. Hence, they're less than prime.

Read more here.