RIP: NPR’s Toxic Asset

Nelson Hsu, Heather Murphy, David Kestenbaum, Chana Joffe-Walt/NPR

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


At the beginning of the year, the savvy reporters over at NPR’s Planet Money purchased their very own toxic asset. You know, the financial products, made up of home mortgage loans, that were at the heart of financial crisis. These assets earned investors a steady return while the housing bubble grew, in the mid-2000s. But as borrowers started defaulting on their mortgages and the financial sector imploded, these assets forged out of home loans turned, well, toxic, toppling banks and causing some trillions of dollars in losses to the economy. NPR’s financial reporters decided to buy one such toxic asset, warmly named “Toxie,” to understand exactly how these creatures worked. Throughout the year, they tracked Toxie’s declining health, as more of the loans backstopping the asset went sour, and even flew down to Florida to meet the borrowers whose loans went into Toxie. (Those reports are classic; they’re here and here.)

Today, I arrived at work to sad news: a message from David Kestenbaum, one of the Planet Money reporters, saying Toxie had died. To mark the occasion, here’s a fantastic animated video imagining Toxie’s funeral and telling her story:

And here’s a rundown, via Kestenbaum, of what the Planet Money crew say they learned from the experiment:

  • Toxic assets really are toxic. Toxie was a slice of a giant bond filled with some 2,000 mortgages from around the country. Half of those homeowners are not making payments or have been foreclosed on. The Planet Money team lost over half the money they spent on Toxie. That, despite careful research and the help of experts in purchasing her.
  • Toxie was a snapshot of the housing market: With the help of an investigative reporter in Florida, our reporters managed to find some of the homeowners whose mortgages are in Toxie. (This is no easy task, Toxie came with 300 pages of documentation, but not the addresses of the actual mortgages.) Some of the homeowners they met were people who had overstretched to buy a dream home. But others were investors who had purchased multiple homes in hopes of making money. And one mortgage from Toxie is listed in an FBI affidavit as fraudulent and possibly connected to a large house flipping scheme.
  • Toxie is survived by many other toxic assets: Remember, during the crisis, how people worried some of the world’s largest banks might be insolvent? A major reason was that they held toxic assets, and no one knew what they were worth. We now know what one was worth. Toxie turned out to be worth $449.06. But there are many more bonds like her out there. Toxie is survived by millions of investors and homeowners, who are part of some other toxic asset’s story. Two years into this mess, the housing market is still unstable and we don’t know how those stories will end.

I won’t add any more other than to say, Damn you, Toxie—you should’ve stuck it out a bit longer. The “Toxie” project (the full catalog of stories is here) was probably one of my favorite pieces of financial reporting throughout this entire mess. She’ll be missed.

WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. It's going to be a nail-biter, and we really need to see donations from this specific ask coming in strong if we're going to get there.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. It's going to be a nail-biter, and we really need to see donations from this specific ask coming in strong if we're going to get there.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate