In book promo, CNN gives helpful financial tips

Over the weekend, CNN ran a special called "Gimme My Money Back", which was half a "special report" on what consumers need to understand during the financial crisis and half promo for business correspondent Ali Velshi's new book, of the same name.

They managed to keep it pretty un-infomercial-ish, save for Velshi's plugs of the book, with the experts and reporters they had on offering some pretty helpful tips about the basics of investing. The unfortunate thing, though, is that basic concepts like portfolio diversification and making debt elimination a higher priority than spending are things that people should know about before they enter high school, not once they're grown and managing retirement accounts that have already taken a beating in a financial crisis. Actually, we're probably in as deep of a recession as we are precisely because so many people are uneducated about even the basics of handling money.

You can't have a successful economy in which people are equipped to make money, only to piss it away because of their financial ignorance.

Either way, watch the video. It's a pretty good primer with a lot of plain language addressing what's happening with the financial markets and what you should know now, and many of the topics are things we've discussed here.