Structured finance for beginners

Like many of you, I could care less about finance and the activities of Wall St. However, you can't swing a cat these days without hitting an article using the acronym 'CDO' and the terms 'credit default swap', 'tranches', 'AAA-rating', etc....Thus, a finance for dummies (i.e. me) would be helpful. Lo and behold, someone wrote one I found helpful. 

Incidentally, that blog, BaselineScenario is generally instructive. One of its main contributors, Simon Johnson, former chief economist at the IMF (sigh), has been getting a lot of attention for his article, The Quiet Coup, claiming that the oligarchs have a stranglehold on American political life.  Not news but, coming from an IMF dude who should know a thing or two about oligarchy, pretty significant.  The IMF, backed by the US, has a brutal history of 'persuading' governments to change their economic ways.  The same kind of medicine is merited in our current crisis, but it is no surprise that the US refuses to handle our case as we've been insisting other governments handle theirs.  

Or at least that's Johnson's claim.  The other theory is that the cases are the same:  they both share the idea that some nation's wealth is looted and redistributed to the richest citizens in the world, wherever they may reside.  The case that this is happening in the US is pretty strong; and we are all familiar with the IMF's history in developing countries.