• The Crisis of Credit: Visualized — The thesis project of Jonathan Jarvis, a student at the Art Center in Pasadena, CA. This is an animated video that succinctly explains how the miscalculations of homeowners, mortgage lenders, investment bankers, and investors led to the credit markets freezing; also explains why leveraging leads to trouble and how the credit rating agencies got duped. Relatively easy to follow with a bit of humor thrown in to lighten the mood.
• The Subprime Primer — The subprime lending meltdown explained with stick figures. This 45-slide presentation details the creation of collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and the fallacy of perpetually rising house prices. Warning: contains PG-13 language (which makes it rather darkly comedic).
• Kiplinger.com: 15 Things You Need to Know About the Panic of 2008 — When the U.S. Federal Reserve lowered the federal funds rate from 6.5% to 1% over a three-year period from 2000-2003, money got really cheap really quickly. This forms the basis of the current crisis, as explained in the 14 points that follow. This primer concludes by saying that stable home prices are on the horizon and while the economy may suffer from aftershocks for years to come, there’s no need to lose hope (yet).
• Mint.com: A Visual Guide to the Financial Crisis — An easy-to-follow flow chart that concisely connects events together. It all begins with the mania for home ownership fueled by historically low interest rates and the belief that housing prices will always go up.
• This American Life: The Giant Pool of Money — This radio show was produced in May 2008, prior to the stock market crash of the fall, so the reporting may seem a bit overly optimistic when we listen to it now. Still, this is a fantastic in-depth look at what fueled the demand for CDOs and subprime mortgages, as told by insiders. Explains that from 2000-2007, the median household income stayed flat while housing prices went way up. To pay off debt, homeowners took out home equity lines of credit, thereby going into more debt. This is fine as long as housing prices always continue to go up. Uh-oh!

So for those of you who were in the dark about how this whole mess started, I hope these resources have helped shed some light on the origins of our current economic situation. To keep up-to-date on the current recession and other economic news, check out Tip’d Economy and Recovery.gov.

My first impressions of Recovery.gov are actually pretty good. I’m not one to praise the government for anything (no, really), but I have to admit that federal laws governing accessibility standards of governmental Web sites make for a quality end product. The homepage text and navigation is clear, concise, and to the point–and how many Web sites can claim that, these days? I’d also like to say that I think Recovery.gov was a good pick for the domain name–much superior to Bailout.gov or CanadaRelocationGuide.gov.

Let’s move beyond the homepage and domain name and into the site tour: I’d recommend you check out the following seven pages/features in your quest to learn more about the recovery effort.

1. Where Is Your Money Going? (Graph): This handy little graphic shows you the view from 30,000 feet: how much bailout money is going to health care vs. education vs. tax breaks, etc. Pretty basic stuff, but also useful, and important to see visually. You can also see the same data in a tabular view.
2. “The Bill”: OK, strictly speaking, the “The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009″ isn’t hosted on Recovery.gov, but the site prominently features it and links to it. The entire bill is a 13Mb PDF file (ouch!), but if we’re all going to argue over and opine on the bill, it’d be a good idea to print it out and actually read the thing.(Or, maybe not, if the US Senators are any role models.)
3. Share Your Recovery Story: Well, you could interpret this form in one of two ways: a) it’s a cynical, cheap way to make citizens feel like Uncle Sam gives a damn about their opinions; or, b) it’s the Obama administration making good on its promise to actually listen to citizens and make decisions based on what the people want. Either way you look at it, Recovery.gov promises that “this site will allow you to peruse extensive data that will enable you to measure our progress”–so hopefully, all the submissions through this form will be available at some point in the future. (So go ahead and submit a smart-ass one about how you can’t afford the price of Arugula these days.)
4. Timeline: When I initially loaded the page, I thought “this page isn’t rendering so beautifully in my beloved Firefox 3.0 browser!”, but it turns out I wasn’t using it correctly: place your mouse cursor on the timeline, then click and drag to move the timeline forward. Pretty cool, actually.
5. Estimated Job Effect Graph: This page shows you how many jobs are created/saved by the bailout package, state by state. 269,000 jobs are being created or saved in my state (Texas). Heck, this Web site itself is probably employing 3 or 4 people. If you mouse-over on North Dakota, you’ll see that 8,000 jobs are being created or saved. My question is: How can the entire population of 237 people do all 8,000 jobs? They’d have to each work like 34.5 fulltime jobs, and there aren’t enough hours in the week to do that, unless you don’t sleep and work at 9 jobs simultaneously. Just kidding, North Dakota readers; you know I love you!
6. The Story of the Economic Recovery (Photo Gallery): OK, again, this page isn’t hosted on the recovery.gov domain, but it’s prominently featured throughout. This section links to a whitehouse.gov page, which in turn has a photo gallery widget that contains many old men wearing suits. In all seriousness, it has some decent photos if you’re interested in what “doing government stuff” looks like.
7. The FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions are frequently my favorite page on a Web site. If my little review of Recovery.gov didn’t answer all your questions, you’ll want to start here.

And that’s it for my review and tips on Recovery.gov. If I missed any cool pages or features, please let me know via a comment below!