If you want excellent explanations on how we got to where we are in our wonderful global economic meltdown, the following three pieces of reporting published in the last week is an excellent place to start.
First, listen to This American Life episode 375: Bad Bank:

The collapse of the banking system explained, in just 59 minutes. Our crack economics team–the guys who explained the mortgage crisis, Alex Blumberg and NPR’s Adam Davidson–are back to help all of us understand the news. For instance, when we talk about an insolvent bank, what does it actually mean, and why are we giving hundreds of billions of dollars to rich bankers who screwed up their own businesses? Also, two guys go to New Jersey to look at a toxic asset.

The second is Felix Salmon’s article, The Formula That Killed Wall Street:

As a result, just about anything could be bundled and turned into a triple-A bond–corporate bonds, bank loans, mortgage-backed securities, whatever you liked. The consequent pools were often known as collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs. You could tranche that pool and create a triple-A security even if none of the components were themselves triple-A. You could even take lower-rated tranches of other CDOs, put them in a pool, and tranche them–an instrument known as a CDO-squared, which at that point was so far removed from any actual underlying bond or loan or mortgage that no one really had a clue what it included. But it didn’t matter. All you needed was Li’s copula function.

Lastly is The Crisis of Credit Visualized, an 11-minute high-level overview of the worldwide credit crisis by Jonathan Jarvis:
http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=3261363&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=ffffff&fullscreen=1
The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.
All three put together will help explain where we are, how we got here and what future steps we might have to take. And all three do this is a way which isn’t condescending and without dumbing down the content.