Editor’s Note: Liz Peek is a financial columnist and the author of wowOwow’s Wall Street Weekly. Liz Peek’s SHEconomics series, herewith, is scheduled to become a book. Click here for Chapter 1 of SHEconomics.

Ladies: this is a call to arms! While we’re all busy blaming Alan Greenspan, President Bush, Ben Bernanke, Wall Street Fat Cats, Eliot Spitzer, Franklin Raines, Dick Fuld, Henry Paulson and the idiot that invented subprime mortgages, maybe we should also blame ourselves. Why? Because nearly half the nation affects to have no interest in finance, and wasn’t paying attention.

That’s right. Most women tune out the moment the conversation turns to investments or business, leading to this priceless moment: Last weekend my husband and I had dinner with three other couples. One of the husbands was a Major Mogul, now retired. As he leaned forward to talk to another Big Wig about the bailout bill he said to me, “I’m so sorry – this must be so boring for you, us talking shop.” Worse, as the eight of us sat around the dinner table, he actually said, “There are four great financial minds around this table – surely we can figure out what we should be doing in the market.” The hostess, who successfully manages a sizeable fund-of-funds, winked at me.

Though I was seriously tempted to box his ears (but instead went to help the hostess in the kitchen), I was somewhat sympathetic. He was only reflecting that most women’s eyes glaze over when words like derivatives and hedge funds pop up. I’ve seen it too! A couple of years ago a group of friends organized a birthday lunch for me. I arrived late, and tried to explain that I was in the midst of a riveting interview, and simply couldn’t bear to break it off. The fellow I was talking to – Bill Browder — ran an activist hedge fund in Moscow. Imagine, a money manager trying to take on the oligarchs! He had lived with bodyguards for more than a decade, but felt that under Putin things were gradually improving. Boy, was he wrong. Two years later when he returned from a trip to London, the Russians would not allow him into the country. He had provoked one too many oligarchs!

My friends were unmoved, even when I added the delicious backstory that Browder’s grandfather started the Communist party in the U.S., that Bill had been bankrolled by mysterious financier Edmond Safra and had gone to Russia a decade earlier with $10 million, but not one word of the language. Cool narrative, I thought, well deserving of an extra 20 minutes. I was honestly shocked to look around at my friends, and to realize that they didn’t share my excitement at all. I began to doubt my DNA. 

My friends are not stupid or uneducated; they just don’t have any interest in Wall Street, writ large. The problem is, as we are now seeing, the world of finance is not some far distant planet; it is close to home, impacting nearly every American.

Therefore, I am taking it as a personal challenge to bring women up to speed. Someone, for heaven’s sake, needs to ride herd on these donkeys on Wall Street and in Washington and get business back on track. You can’t weigh in if you don’t know what’s going on.  

I am inspired to undertake this adventure by the comments I receive on my articles on wowOwow. Many women are struggling to figure out what to do with their IRAs, they are looking for good stock advice and in some cases they are trying to overrule their husbands, whose investments have soured. Often, though, they lack confidence. My guess is that the Wall Street lingo leaves them feeling inadequate. That’s rubbish.

I am also inspired by a story that ran last week in the Financial Times, and that confirmed my view that if women had been paying closer attention we would not be in this mess. Iceland, which has essentially gone bankrupt, has turned its finances over to two women who have been appointed heads of the country’s two newly nationalized banks. The front-page summary made me laugh. It read “Iceland has turned to two women to rebuild its financial system after the banking empire built by its young, male business-school elite collapsed.” Hey – if they can do it, we can too!

So – here is my plan. Every week I will post a simple and digestible explanation of some financial term. I will demystify hedge funds, ETFs, private equity, activist strategies and so on – and hope to make it fun. Soon there will be no excuse for your husband or son or father to act like you can’t manage your affairs – or his! So pay attention ladies. Let’s get the other half of America tuned up so we can prevent the next disaster.

Click here to read Chapter One: Hedge Funds: Apocalypse Now or the Quickest Route to Carrie Bradshaw’s Wardrobe? by Liz Peek