390: Return To The Giant Pool of Money

Ira Glass

And we'll get to that later in today's program. This month is the one-year anniversary of Wall Street's biggest crisis since 1929. Lots of news outlets are looking back in various ways, and we thought that we would do it here on our show by going back to one of the most popular programs that we have ever put on the air, a show that tells the story of how the crisis started, step by step. We called that show "The Giant Pool of Money."

And today on our program, in the first half of the show, we're going to play you a lot of that original report, where we hear from the bankers and the mortgage dealers and the investment managers and the homeowners, who together, without meaning to, created the economic disaster we're in today. And in the report, they explained what the hell they were thinking when they did all the things that brought down the global economy.

And so from WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Today's show is a co-production that we're doing with NPR News.

And let me just turn things over to the two of you, Alex Blumberg and Adam Davidson. Alex is going to kick things off. This investigation began when Alex heard about something. It was a home loan that just didn't make any sense to him.

Alex Blumberg

The thing that got me interested in all this was something called a NINA loan. Back when the housing crisis was still a housing bubble, a guy on the phone told me that a NINA loan stands for "no income, no asset," as in, someone will lend you a bunch of money without first checking to see if you have any income or any assets.

And it was an official loan product, like you could walk into a mortgage broker's office, and they would say, well, we can give you a 30-year fixed rate, or we can put you in a NINA. He said there were lots of loans like this, where the bank didn't actually check your income, which I found confusing. And it turns out even the people who got them found them confusing.

For example, a guy I met named Clarence Nathan, he worked three part-time, not very steady jobs, and made a total of $45,000 a year, roughly. He got himself into trouble and needed money, so he took out a loan against his house, a big one.

Alex Blumberg

As it turns out, Clarence's friends, acquaintances, and shadowy criminal contacts would have been right not to lend him the money. At the time I talked to him, Clarence hadn't made a payment in almost a year, and his house was in the process of foreclosure.

But stories like this have been in the news for months, and they often feature an innocent homeowner who's duped by a lying, greedy mortgage banker. Or if you're more of a Wall Street Journal editorial page type, an innocent mortgage banker who was duped by a lying, greedy homeowner. And no doubt both categories exist. But Clarence's case is more nuanced and much more common.

Alex Blumberg

This imprudent partnership is new, and it's at the heart of the current housing crisis. For most of the history of banking, bankers wouldn't have loaned Clarence their money, either. They didn't let people like Clarence near their money, in fact, people with part-time employment and unpaid debts in their past.

And then suddenly, in the early 2000s, everything changed. Banking turned on its head and went out looking for partnerships with people like Clarence, loaning him half a million dollars without even checking to see if he had a job. What happened?

Well, to help explain what happened, here's my partner for the hour, Adam Davidson. Hey, Adam.

Adam Davidson

Hey, Alex.

Alex Blumberg

How's it going?

Adam Davidson

Good.

Alex Blumberg

Good. So I guess the first thing we have to do is talk about the global pool of money, right?

Adam Davidson

Right. The global pool of money, that's where our story begins. Most people don't think about it, but there's this huge pool of money out there which is basically all the money the world is saving now: insurance companies saving for a catastrophe, pension funds saving money for retirement, the Central Bank of England saving for whatever central banks save for, all the world savings.

Adam Davidson

That's the head of capital market research at the International Monetary Fund, the place to go if you want to figure out how much money is in the world.

Adam Davidson

And by the way, before you finance enthusiasts start writing any letters, we do know that that $70 trillion technically refers to that subset of global savings called fixed income securities. Everyone else can just ignore what I just said.

Let's put $70 trillion in perspective. Do this: Think about all the money that people spend everywhere in the world, everything you bought in the last year, all of it. Then add everything Bill Gates bought and all the rice sold in China and that fleet of planes Boeing just sold to South Korea. All the money spent in every country on earth in a year, that is less than 70 trillion, less than the global pool of money.

Alex Blumberg

Wow.

Adam Davidson

We're talking about a lot of money.

Alex Blumberg

That is a lot of money.

Adam Davidson

And that money comes along with armies of very nervous men and women watching over the pool of money. Investment managers, they don't want to lose a penny of that. They don't want to lose any of that money, and even more so, they want to make it grow bigger.

But to make it grow, they have to find something to invest in. So most of modern history, what they did was they bought really safe, and frankly really boring, investments, like treasuries and municipal bonds, boring things. But then, right before our story starts, something changed. Something happened to that global pool of money.

Adam Davidson

How does the world get twice as much money to invest? There are lots of things that happen, but the main headline is that all sorts of poor countries became rich, making things like TVs and selling us oil. China, India, Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia made a lot of money and banked it. China, for example, has over a trillion dollars in its central bank, and there are office buildings in Beijing filled with math geniuses, real math geniuses, looking for a place to invest it.

And the world was not ready for all this new money. There's twice as much money looking for investments, but there are not twice as many good investments. So that global army of investment managers was hungrier and twitchier than ever before. They all wanted the same thing: a nice, low-risk investment that paid some return. But then something happened that makes matters worse. At this precise moment, one guy took one of that army's favorite investments and made it a lot less attractive.

Alex Blumberg

This is where we have to talk about Alan Greenspan, right?

Adam Davidson

Yeah. We have to.

Alex Blumberg

All right. But I'm just going to promise people that this is the only time you're going to hear Alan Greenspan in this story, so bear with us.

Adam Davidson

Here's one of his speeches that really drove that army of investment managers crazy.

Adam Davidson

You may not believe me, but that little statement, that is central banker speak for, hey, global pool of money, screw you.

Alex Blumberg

Come on. That's not what he said.

Adam Davidson

It is. I speak central banker. Believe me, that's what he said. What he's technically saying is he's going to keep the fed funds rate-- that's when you hear the fed interest rate-- at the absurdly low level of 1%. And that sends a message to every investor in the world: You are not going to make any money at all on US treasury bonds for a very long time. Go somewhere else. We can't help you.

And so the global pool of money, which does speak central banker, they understood what he was saying. They looked around for some low-risk, high-return investment. And among the many things they put their money into, there's this one thing that they fell in love with. To get it, they called Wall Street, a guy like this.

Adam Davidson

Mike was one link in a chain that connected the global pool of money to its new favorite investment: residential mortgages, the US housing market, and guys like Clarence Nathan. Think how attractive a mortgage loan is to that $70 trillion pool of money. Remember, they're desperate to get any interest return. They want to beat that miserable 1% interest Greenspan is offering them. And here are these homeowners paying 5%, 9% to borrow money from some bank. So what if the global pool could get in on that action?

There are problems. Individual mortgages are too big a hassle for the global pool of money. They don't want to get mixed up with actual people and their catastrophic health problems and their divorces and all the reasons that might stop them from paying their mortgages. So what Mike and his peers on Wall Street did was to figure out a way to give the global pool of money all the benefits of a mortgage-- basically higher yield-- without all the hassle and risk.

So picture the whole chain. You have Clarence. He gets a mortgage from a broker. The broker sells the mortgage to a small bank. The small bank sells the mortgage to a guy like Mike at a big investment firm on Wall Street. Then Mike takes a few thousand mortgages he's bought this way, he puts them in one big pile.

Now he's got thousands of mortgage checks coming to him every month. It's a huge monthly stream of money, which is expected to come in for the next 30 years, the life of a mortgage. And he then sells shares of that monthly income to investors. Those shares are called mortgage-backed securities. And the $70 trillion global pool of money loved them.

Alex Blumberg

The problem was, to make a mortgage-backed security, you needed mortgages, lots of them. So for Mike Francis to satisfy this demand and take his quite hefty fee from the global pool of money, he needed to buy up as many mortgages as possible.

And to do that, he called a guy one link below him on this mortgage-backed security chain, a guy named Mike Garner, who worked at the largest private mortgage bank in Nevada called Silver State Mortgage. And to give you a sense of how fast this business was growing, Mike Garner got into the mortgage business straight from his previous job as a bartender.

Alex Blumberg

Mike Garner's job, the guy in Nevada, was to buy up individual mortgages, mainly from brokers, bundle 200 or 300 of them together, and then sell them up the chain to Wall Street, to guys like Mike Francis.

Adam Davidson

There's just too many Mikes here.

Alex Blumberg

I know. So many Mikes. There's actually just two Mikes. There was Mike Francis, the guy on Wall Street, and Mike Garner, the guy we're talking about now.

Adam Davidson

He's in Nevada.

Alex Blumberg

He's in Nevada, right. And in the beginning, he'd only buy mortgages that were pretty standard and pretty safe, mortgages where people had come up with a down payment and proven that they had a steady income and money in the bank. And they sold so many of these mortgages that there came a point in 2003 where just about everybody who wanted a mortgage and was qualified to get one had gotten one.

But the pool of money had just gotten started. They wanted more mortgage-backed securities. So Wall Street had to find more people to take out mortgages, which meant lending to people who never would have qualified before.

And so Mike Garner in Nevada noticed that every month, the guidelines were getting a little looser. Something called a stated income, verified asset loan came out, which meant that people didn't have to provide a paycheck stub or W-2 form to get a loan, as they had in the past. They could simply state their income, as long as they showed that they had money in the bank.

Alex Blumberg

Actually, that pulse thing, also optional, like this case in Ohio where 23 dead people were approved for mortgages.

Adam Davidson

An interesting fact here: Mike Garner's bank did not care all that much how risky these mortgages were. This was a new era. Banks did not have to hold onto these mortgages for 30 years like they used to. They didn't have to wait and see if they'd be paid back. Banks like Garner's would just own the mortgages for a month or two, and then they sold them on to Wall Street. And then Wall Street would sell them on to the global pool of money.

Alex Blumberg

Which is how we get half million dollar, no income, no asset loans.

Adam Davidson

And loans to dead people. So there's this whole other thing going on, as well. Housing prices were rising fast. I think we all remember that. Lots of people in the mortgage industry had this faith that housing prices in the US simply never go down. So from the bank's perspective, even if the worst happens and someone defaults, the bank would then own a house which is now worth even more than what they gave out in the loan.

So all Mike cared about was whether or not his customers, the Wall Street investment banks, would buy those mortgages from him. And he was under pressure to approve more and more loans. Because other guys in his company, the actual guys cruising strip malls all across Nevada buying mortgages from brokers, their commission depended on selling more loans. And occasionally, those guys would hear about some loan that some other mortgage company offered that they weren't allowed to offer. And they'd complain to Mike.

Alex Blumberg

This is Glen Pizzolorusso, who was an area sales manager at an outfit called WMC Mortgage in Upstate New York. And just to repeat, he said 75 to 100 grand a month. That's over a million dollars a year. Glen was just out of college. His job was a lot like Mike Garner's. He's the same link in the chain. And Glen loved his job.

Alex Blumberg

And when Glen wasn't working, he was doing his next-favorite thing, spending. Preferably in the company of-- and this is his term-- B-list celebrities.

Alex Blumberg

Glen had five cars, a $1.5 million vacation house in Connecticut, and a penthouse that he rented in Manhattan. And he made all this money making very large loans to very poor people with bad credit.

Alex Blumberg

But Glen didn't worry about whether these loans were good, either. That was someone else's problem. And this way of thinking thrived at every step of this mortgage security chain. A guy like Mike Francis from Morgan Stanley, he told me he bought loans, lots of loans, from Glen's company. And he knew in his gut that they were bad loans, like these NINA loans.

Alex Blumberg

It's easy to ignore your gut fear when you're making a fortune in commissions. But Mike had other help in rationalizing what he was doing, technological help. Mike sat at a desk with six computer screens connected to millions of dollars worth of fancy analytic software, designed by brilliant Ivy League graduates hired by his firm. And the software analyzed all the loans in all the pools that Mike bought and then sold. And the software, the data, didn't seem worried at all.

Adam Davidson

Wait, Alex. I want to step in here, because this is a very important piece of tape. A big part of this whole story, this whole crisis, is that a lot of really smart people, people who knew better, fooled themselves with this data. It was the triumph of data over common sense. Can you play that tape again?

Alex Blumberg

Yeah, sure. Here you go.

Adam Davidson

As we now know, they were using the wrong data. They looked at the recent history of mortgages and saw that the foreclosure rate is generally below 2%. So they figured, absolute worst-case scenario, the foreclosure rate might go to 8 or 10 or even 12%. But the problem with that is that there were all these new kinds of mortgages given out to people who never would have gotten them before. So the historical data was irrelevant. Some mortgage pools today are expected to go beyond 50% foreclosure rates.

And then things got even worse. The thing that took this problem and turned it into a crisis was something else that was new, something called a collateralized debt obligation, a CDO. And that brings us back to the guy we met at the awards dinner in the beginning, Jim Finkel.

Adam Davidson

Jim Finkel runs this CDO shop, Dynamic Credit. It takes up three modified apartments on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The trading room is like a factory floor for CDOs. It's where they make the things. But what is a CDO? He shows us on a computer screen.

Adam Davidson

To start with, every CDO has its own name. Finkel loves his country house in the Berkshires, so he always names CDOs after towns in western Mass, like Monterey.

Alex Blumberg

Let's translate some of that. A mortgage-backed security, remember, is a pool of thousands of different mortgages. These are all put together and divided into different slices. Jimmy used the word "tranche." "Tranche" is just French for "slice." Some of these slices are risky, and some are not. A CDO is a pool of these tranches, a pool of pools. And Jim and most companies like his weren't buying the top-rated tranches, the safest ones, the triple-As. They were buying the lower-rated stuff, the high-risk stuff.

Adam Davidson

There's another term the industry uses. This is not a joke. They call these lower-rated tranches "toxic waste." They're so high-risk, they're toxic.

Alex Blumberg

And so basically, Adam, a CDO is a financial alchemy, right?

Adam Davidson

Right.

Alex Blumberg

Jim takes this toxic stuff, these low-rated, high-risk tranches, puts them all together, re-tranches them, and presto, he has a CDO whose top tranche is rated triple-A, rock-solid, good as money.

Now, if this seems too good to be true to you, you're in good company. Guys like billionaire investor Warren Buffett said the very logic was ridiculous. But back in 2005, 2006, the global pool of money, they couldn't get enough of these things. And the CDO industry was facing the same pressures everyone else was at every other step of this chain, to loosen their standards, to make CDOs out of lower and lower-rated rated tranches.

This is Jim's partner, Tonko Gast.

Alex Blumberg

Let's go back all the way to the other end of this mortgage chain and meet one of those people in one of these poorly underwritten mortgages that Tonko Gast just referred to, that the global pool of money was eagerly buying up. This guy's name is Richard, and we met him at a foreclosure prevention conference in Brooklyn.

Adam Davidson

He's a Marine, a big guy, over six feet tall. And when he came back from Iraq a few years ago, he bought a house with one of those fancy new mortgages with an adjustable rate. Recently, his rate reset. His mortgage payments have gone up by more than $2,000 a month, and he's falling behind.

Alex Blumberg

Richard, like more than 4 million Americans at this point, is fighting to keep his home. And we actually tagged along with him one day as he did that.

Adam Davidson

The offices of NACA, the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America in Newark, New Jersey, were short on frills. Kerry Campbell, who's helping Richard today, is a counselor here. Kerry shows Richard the loan documents he filled out when he bought the house by his original broker. And Richard's pretty surprised when he sees the numbers that his mortgage broker filled in on the forms.

Adam Davidson

Another thing the papers reveal? How much that creative broker made: $18,500. As Kerry says, that's 18,000 reasons to falsify Richard's mortgage documents and to put him in a house he can't afford.

Ira Glass

Coming up, we travel in time from May 2008, when this was all recorded, to the present, to answer what happened to Richard? Did he keep his house? And when the economy collapsed, which of these other guys kept their houses? In a minute, from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International, when our program continues.

Ira Glass

This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week in our show, we choose some theme, some topic, and bring you stories on that topic. Today, we return to the giant pool of money. In the first half of our program today, we heard a story first broadcast in May 2008, before the worst of the economic crisis. And over just the last few weeks, Adam Davidson and Alex Blumberg have been checking in with various people in that story to see what has happened to them, what has changed for them in the last 18 months.

And to find out how they see things now, here's Alex.

Alex Blumberg

Let's start with some good news. Richard Campbell, the Marine we spoke to, a year and a half ago, he wasn't sure if he was going to keep his house. And he was working with NACA, a housing advocacy group, to see if they could convince the bank to lower his mortgage payments.

Adam Davidson

So that's the good news. He went from paying nearly six grand a month to just under three grand. But the bad news is, it's taken up most of the last year and a half to get this done. The problem was, Richard, like a lot of people, bought his house with two mortgages, and the second mortgage, NACA couldn't help him with.

Alex Blumberg

And so Richard has spent a year and a half battling his mortgage servicing companies, waiting on hold, getting transferred to different supervisors. He says he got within two days of getting foreclosed on. And it's taken its toll.

Adam Davidson

Richard's luck started to change, actually, while he was watching one of those local morning shows, Good Day New York. They were doing a segment on President Obama's mortgage relief plan. Richard realized, hey, they're talking about me. I have a mortgage I can't afford. I have a history of trying to pay but not being able to because of a ridiculously high interest rate. I qualify for that plan.

Alex Blumberg

But even after that, it was still months trying to convince his mortgage company that he actually qualified, months of arguing with people on the phone and sending in different documents. Until finally, one day, he got a call from a guy named Peter at his mortgage servicing company.

Alex Blumberg

This is Clarence Nathan. He's the guy from the beginning of the program who got that $540,000 loan that he wouldn't have given himself. You remember him.

Adam Davidson

When we met Clarence in March of 2008, he was living in that house, the one that he'd gotten the loan on, and he hadn't paid a mortgage payment in about a year. When we caught up with him last week, he wasn't so eager to call attention to his situation.

Adam Davidson

This is something we hear about a lot. There's so many more mortgages in default right now, it's overwhelming the system. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that there are 1.2 million homeowners with seriously delinquent mortgages where the lender has made no effort to start foreclosure. In July of this year, there were more than 200,000 mortgages where borrowers hadn't made a payment in over a year, and the lender still hadn't started to foreclose.

Alex Blumberg

And so homeowners like Clarence are actually benefiting from the fact that the economy is doing so badly, that this crisis is so big. If it was just Clarence in trouble, the bank would probably have taken his house by now. But since there're so many people like him flooding the system, he's gotten a reprieve. Looked at one way, this hasn't gone so badly for Clarence. He's lived in a house for free for nearly three years.

Adam Davidson

But on the other hand, he's 64 years old, and the bank could come for the house at any moment. He told us he doesn't think it's likely he'll ever get out of the debt he got into in this crisis.

Alex Blumberg

Now, what about the guys who made it so easy for Clarence and Richard to get into these bad mortgages, the guys who took those mortgages and lots of other mortgages like them, packaged them up, and sold them to the giant pool of money? Take Jim Finkel, the guy at the CDO factory. Intellectually, he knew that he was making his CDOs out of loans to people like Clarence. But it took him a long time, even after this huge crisis hit, to really understand what that meant.

Adam Davidson

What was really going on out there was a lot of loans to people like Clarence. But by the time those loans got to Jim, they were just numbers and data in a spreadsheet, credit scores and appraisal values and down payment amounts.

Alex Blumberg

Which is why Jim Finkel believed that the CDOs he was making were good investments, investments that he himself wanted in on.

Alex Blumberg

And just to explain, investment managers like Jim are subcontractors to the investment banks on Wall Street. A big Wall Street firm like Merrill Lynch would come to Jim and say, we have some people who want to buy a CDO, can you put one together for us? And then Jim and his company would go about buying up various mortgage-related securities and putting them together into the CDO.

Adam Davidson

But those investment bankers who hired him to put those deals together, they got paid in fees.

Alex Blumberg

Of all the people we caught up with, Glen Pizzolorusso was the most transformed. Remember, he was the guy who used to party with B-list celebrities like Tara Reid, with all the cars and houses. When we last spoke to him in spring of 2008, the company he worked for had gone out of business, and he'd lost almost everything. He had one house left, but his loan on that house was for a lot more than the house itself was now worth.

Alex Blumberg

In other words, both of the guys in our story who got home loans that they couldn't pay back, Richard and Clarence, they're still living in their houses. And the guy who made millions making loans like the ones that they got, he's the one who lost his house. Glen says he can't afford to rent, so he and his wife and three kids ARE living now in a place that his dad owns.

Alex Blumberg

If it sounds like Glen is doing strangely OK, he is. Losing a few million dollars has actually made his life better, in ways we'll get to in a minute.

Adam Davidson

But first, things got a lot worse. For starters, he became a villain on the internet. People who heard our original story singled him out as someone to blame.

Alex Blumberg

Which seemed unfair to us, because Glen was certainly not responsible for this crisis. We've interviewed dozens of people who made much more money than Glen did and played much bigger roles. Glen was just more honest than anybody else we talked to, and he was honest about things that he knew would make him look bad. But he says we didn't help him any, either. There was one line in particular, the one where I said he made all this money making very large loans to very poor people.

Adam Davidson

Talking to Glen now, he seems like a guy in the early stages of a major life change. He's going back to college. He loves school now. He used to always hate it.

Alex Blumberg

In fact, he does a lot of things he never used to do, like listen to the news and read books. He spends a lot of time with his kids now, no time at all with B-list celebrities. He wants to get his degree in theology and law and then go into politics. He says he really wants to do some good in the world.

Adam Davidson

But he points out, his big life change, at first, anyway, it was not his choice.

Adam Davidson

So another character in our story that we wanted to check in on is the giant pool of money itself, all that money global investors have that they're looking to invest somewhere.

Alex Blumberg

When we last met the giant pool of money before the financial collapse, it was big, $70 trillion. And it was growing fast. It had doubled in six years.

Adam Davidson

So we checked back in. We called the International Monetary Fund and found out a few interesting things. One, that 70 trillion number, that was wrong. The IMF had underestimated how much money there is and how fast it had grown. Back in 2007, that number really should have been almost $80 trillion.

Alex Blumberg

And today, two years later, we talked to the very same person, Ceyla Pazarbasioglu.

Adam Davidson

Very nicely done.

Alex Blumberg

Thank you. After nearly two years of recession, the collapse of housing prices all over the world, the giant pool of money has, according to her, grown. The IMF thinks it is now about $84 trillion.

Adam Davidson

Now, we were shocked that it grew at all.

Alex Blumberg

Of course.

Adam Davidson

But here's the context. The bursting of the housing bubble did do some damage to the giant pool of money. The IMF thinks investors in subprime securities and the like lost at least $3 trillion. That's like losing all the money spent in a year in Russia and Canada combined.

Alex Blumberg

So given all that, how did the giant pool of money get bigger? Well, two major things happened. One, investors pulled money out of stock markets all around the world and added it to the giant pool of money. Two, government stepped in. The Federal Reserve and central banks all over the world actually created trillions of new dollars and euros and yen. It's more new money than ever before, and much of that has made its way into the giant pool.

Adam Davidson

In other words, the giant pool of money would probably have shrunk by a good amount, except the world's governments and the world's central banks have been pumping out trillions of dollars to keep the world economy from complete collapse.

Alex Blumberg

But while the size of the giant pool of money has gotten bigger, its attitude has gotten a lot smaller. Remember that army of investment managers?

Adam Davidson

The nervous guys?

Alex Blumberg

Yeah. Well, two years ago, there wasn't anything in the world they wouldn't throw money at. They'd take any risk for a bit of return. Now, they're terrified. They want to invest in solid, safe, boring, low-interest government bonds. The safer, the better. One of the hottest items out there right now, one-month treasury bills, paying effectively 0% interest.

Adam Davidson

Meanwhile, as you've probably noticed, credit is tight everywhere. People with great credit scores and a lot of money in the bank have a hard time getting approved for home loans. Businesses can't convince anyone to lend them money to build new factories. Cities can't borrow money to build schools and hospitals. That's a big part of why we've been stuck in this recession.

Alex Blumberg

The world's governments have tried to step in to supplement the giant pool of money, but the annual budgets of all the world's governments combined is less than $15 trillion.

Adam Davidson

That's less than one fifth the size of the world's investments. It turns out, there's just not enough government in the world to replace the lending the giant pool of money used to do.

Alex Blumberg

And that is the reason nobody can say with certainty when the economy will get better again. Because we're waiting for investors everywhere to feel safe to invest again. We're all waiting on the giant pool of money.

Ira Glass

Alex Blumberg and Adam Davidson. It was after they did the first giant pool of money broadcast that our show and NPR News decided that lots of economics reporting like this might be a good idea as we headed into tough economic times. And we started this project, Planet Money. If you liked today's program, check out their thrice-weekly podcast-- you're going to be getting this three times a week-- and their blog at www.npr.org/money.

Ira Glass

Alex Blumberg produced today's show with Jane Feltes, Sarah Koenig, Lisa Pollak, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer was Julie Snyder. Our special guest editor for today's show was Les Cook of NPR News. Adrianne Mathiowetz runs our website. Production help from Seth Lind, Emily Youssef, and Aaron Scott. Music help from Jessica Hopper.

[ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS]

Our website, where you can listen to our show for absolutely free or sign up for our free weekly podcast, or you can also listen to any of the shows-- there's almost a half-dozen now that we've done with the Planet Money team explaining all aspects of the economy-- www.thisamericanlife.org.

This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our program by our boss, Mr. Torey Malatia. He and I, we like to go out at night together sometimes. He's pretty chill. Torey describes it like this.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.