<http://www.bostonmagazine.com/articles/a_crash_course_in_crisis_economics/
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A Crash Course in Crisis Economics**Starring (to the Extent, for Good or for Ill, That Any of This Can Come Down to One Person, Which as We'll See Is Only So Much) Barney Frank By Maureen Tkacik
I. A Refresher on Recent Events and a Primer on Important Terminology
Inside Barney Frank's district office in Newtonville, a strikingly well-dressed man who happens to be in the business of manufacturing solar panels is patiently waiting to speak to someone on the congressman's staff. This summer the man's Marlborough-based company had been working on raising $375 million by selling convertible debt— bonds affixed to stock options—to the public. As a condition of securing the financing, the investment bank handling the offering required the company to lend it some 31 million of its shares. But the deal never went through, because the investment bank was the soon-to- implode Lehman Brothers...a consequence of which was that the well- dressed man's company, Evergreen Solar, never got its shares back. Barclays, the British bank that bought Lehman's investment banking division, isn't letting the shares go, forcing Evergreen Solar into suing to get them back. And so the well-dressed man is here, to learn what other options he might have.
Such are the Kafkaesque scenes that emerge during the complete breakdown of a system, which, you may have noticed, is what we now find ourselves living through. It's not a situation made for easy comprehension, but when economists and politicos and anyone else with a time-share on the moment try to explain it to us, two big themes tend to come up: "information asymmetry" and "moral hazard." You cannot have a halfway-serious discussion about the economic crash—or, for that matter, American politics generally—without them, and so it is with them that we will begin.
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