British comics Bird and Fortune explain the financial crisis in this clip entitled “How the Markets Really Work”. It’s a lot funnier than my last 401k statement … but just as painfully close to the truth.

An excerpt from this “interview”, discussing the sub-prime fiasco:

Surely the reality is that the people who have lent all this money have been incredibly stupid.

Oh no, no…the reality is that what is stupid is that at some point somebody asked how much these houses are actually worth. I mean, if they hadn’t asked that question everything would have gone on perfectly as normal.

Now some will say that this will lead to a financial melt-down. Can it be avoided?

It can be avoided provided the governments and central banks give us — the speculators and financial advisors — the money back that we’ve lost.

But…isn’t that rewarding greed and stupidity?

No, it’s rewarding what Prime Minister Gordon Brown calls “the ingenuity of the markets.”

I see….

We don’t want this money to spend on ourselves. We want this money to go into the market so we can carry on borrowing and lending money as if nothing had happened without thinking too much about it.

Well, if worst came to worst and you didn’t get this money, what then?

Well then, the market would crash and I would say to you what people like me always say, “It’s not us who will suffer, it’s your pension fund.”

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