Thanks for reading this week’s free Where’s Your Ed At newsletter. Friday’s premium issue asks: Is Oracle dying? It’s been a year since I launched the premium newsletter and I’m extending the annual discount to $60. Between now and 12AM ET, July 26, you can lock in that rate for life. In addition to the back catalog, subscribers will get a weekly post—often 10,000‑20,000 words—on AI, tech analysis, and market myths. Highlights include the Hater’s Guide to the Memory Crisis, how AI inflates costs, How Open AI Kills Oracle, the Hater’s Guide to NVIDIA, and the lie behind the AI Compute Demand Story.

In *The Big Short*, Mark Baum sees that synthetic collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) were 20 times larger than the underlying mortgage bond market, creating system‑wide risk. A study found 5500 different mortgage bonds referenced in CDOs over 36,000 times. Institutions like Lehman Brothers built increasingly complex, over‑rated CDOs, leveraging 25.3x in 2005 and winning awards for their perceived prudence. By 2006, 20% of new mortgages were subprime, fueled by low rates and lax underwriting.

Warnings from IMF’s Raghuram Rajan and Treasury Secretary Larry Summersmarshal were dismissed, while market innovators like Michael Milken touted CDOs as risk‑spreading financial innovation. The crisis erupted when adjustable‑rate defaults spiked, collapsing both CDOs and the speculative housing boom that had been built on an illusion of endless demand.