Watch this as it is a great explanation of what happened in the financial crisis, and more importantly, it helps us to understand what is continuing to happen now.
Inside Job, Narrated by Matt Damon (Full Length HD) from jwrock on Vimeo.
The value of Inside Job is that it does not treat the financial crisis as some mysterious accident. It walks through the incentives, the conflicts of interest, and the policy choices that helped create an environment where reckless behavior could keep growing.
That is why it remains useful viewing. If we only remember the crisis as a sudden market event, we miss the larger lesson. The real issue was a system that rewarded risk while leaving ordinary people to absorb much of the damage when the bets went bad.