You've got to hand it to the reporters over at NPR's Planet Money—they're always cooking up clever new ways to report on the big business and economic issues of the day. For their latest feature, two Planet Money reporters sought to better explain what a "toxic asset" was, one of the jargony words you hear bandied about but never simply defined. (I'd try to lay it out for you here, but their cuddly, toxic-asset, Where-the-Wild-Things-Are creature is unbeatable.) So those reporters put together $1,000 between themselves and bought a toxic asset. Their plan is to track the health of their asset over time as a way of describing what a toxic asset actually is. Their opening video is below:

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