CBS News "60 Minutes" On The Subprime "House Of Cards"

CBS News' 60 Minutes ran a story last night on the problems in the housing and financial markets that are reverberating throughout the country. The story begins:

• It was another nervous week for the world's financial markets and for Wall Street. In the last six months, Americans have seen their investments shrink, their property values plummet, and the country edge closer towards a recession. At the heart of the problem is something called the subprime mortgage crisis, which began last summer and continues to ricochet through the economy. It sounds complicated, but it's really fairly simple. Banks lent hundreds of billions of dollars to homebuyers who can't pay them back. Wall Street took the risky debt, dressed it up as fancy securities, and sold it around the world as safe investments. It sounds like a shell game or Ponzi scheme; in some ways it was, a house of cards rife with corruption, greed, and negligence.

The story is set in Stockton, California, referred to as "the foreclosure capital of America."

For more, see House Of Cards: The Mortgage Mess (read transcript) (watch video).

Go here to watch Steve Kroft's Reporter's Notebook for his observations on this story.