This American Life's folks have been working on a follow up to "The Giant Pool of Money" and the New York Times article says that its going to air next week.

As the assumptions that had blown air into the bubble began to dissipate, many mainstream reports became increasingly skeptical in their reporting and blogs like Calculated Risk offered increasingly alarming insights.

After large-scale financial disasters, the press is usually criticized — often justly — for ignoring the problem, but it’s hard to make that case with the subprime mess. If no one saw this coming, they were not looking.

“This has been a very slow-moving train wreck,” said Andrew Leckey, director of the center for business journalism at Arizona State University. “But it came wrapped in the warm feelings of home ownership while the executives behind it used obfuscation and a lack of transparency to lie about how deeply they were in the subprime business.”

As Mr. Davidson and Mr. Blumberg showed, there’s more than one way to get behind the lies. Using an ad they placed on Craigslist — “Were you employed in the subprime mortgage industry?” — the pair proceeded to assemble a remarkably likable rogues gallery of participants up and down the subprime food chain. One was Clarence Nathan, who sounded like a nice guy, but his house was in foreclosure, and he did not have full-time employment. He had no assets to speak of, and yet he received a loan for $450,000.

And then Mr. Blumberg asked Mr. Nathan the stupid question: “Would you have loaned you the money?”

Mr. Nathan answered: “I wouldn’t have loaned me the money. And nobody I know would have loaned me the money. I know guys who are criminals who wouldn’t loan me that, and they break kneecaps.”

An alternative URL is http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1242
A PDF transcript of the show is here.