If you're not a regular listener of NPR's "This American Life," you probably should be.
Or at the very least, you should listen to the latest episode of it, which features a seven-month investigation by our reporters Jesse Eisinger and Jake Bernstein. As our partners at "This American Life" describe it, it's "the inside story of one company, one small group of people, who made hundreds of millions of dollars for themselves while worsening the financial crisis for the rest of us."
You can read more about the Magnetar Trade here at ProPublica, listen to it streaming on "This American Life," or even download the episode as an mp3.
The story also inspired a truly amazing song about CDOs. Complex financial instruments have never sounded so good: