As most of you readers may already know, I have been working at a financial services company since last September—yes, just before "The Collapse"—and thus I have a renewed interest in understanding the investment markets. And now the swings of the market have a more direct impact on all of us than before, when we maybe only needed to find a place to keep our retirement funds. So here are a few things I've been reading lately that I felt were worth passing on to you./p>

If you haven't already heard a reasonable explanation of what cause the U.S. economy's implosion this past autumn (I would call it "fall", but that would be too punny), there are several explanations I would recommend:

• This American Life and NPR teamed up for an excellent bit of radio reporting entitled "The Giant Pool of Money"
• For a more recent (and slightly sensationalist) write-up, check out Wired's article entitled "Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street".

So, in short, it seems that the primary cause of the current financial crisis is that Wall Street figured out how to bundle a bunch of not-so-great mortgage loans into a big investment package and still get them rated 'AAA'-safe, and banks and others bought them up like Cabbage Patch Kids, thinking they were minting easy money.

So where do we go from here? Obviously George W. Bush's tactic of ignoring the problem for 2 years didn't work (and now Obama's administration is saddled with the impossible task of recovery), and along with it the Republican ideal of reducing regulations placed on the market would similarly be a bad idea. But what could help prevent this kind of problem in the future, when Wall Street keeps inventing new convoluted and curious ways to invest faster than the SEC can investigate and rule on them?

Recently I have read two interesting proposals that I would pass on to you:

• An op-ed in today's Times recommends fixing the ratings system.
• Wired Magazine recommends that the SEC require much more public company data be published and tagged with XBRL so any investor can dig into the accounting data to learn the truth.

Both of these sound like reasonable suggestions to me. So what do you think?