While many of us have a loose understanding of how the housing and financial markets contributed to our current recession, many of us are unaware of the ways that the accounting method – Mark to Market – contributed to the magnitude of the crisis.

I’ve heard the term ‘Mark to Market’ before, but my understanding was loose at best.  It was a blog post written by Pasadena’s local expert, Irina Netchaev, that really broke it down in a way that was simple enough for me to get my head around.  Understanding this one facet of the crisis is really eye opening and definitely worth taking 5 minutes to read.