27 Visualizations and Infographics to Understand the Financial Crisis
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. If there's anything good that has come out of the financial crisis it's the slew of high-quality graphics to help us understand what's going on. Some visualizations attempt to explain it all while others focus on affected business. Others concentrate on how we, as citizens are affected. Some show those who are responsible. After you examine these 27 visualizations and infographics, no doubt you'll have a pretty good idea about what's going on.
Visual Guides to the Financial Crisis
Let's start things off with some comprehensive guides to the financial crisis. Several of these are from GOOD magazine's recent contest to make sense of it all.
2008 Financial Crisis by Carolyn Aler and Sam Conway
A Visual Guide to the Financial Crisis by Jess Bachman
Jess from WallStats put this together for the Mint blog. I'm pretty sure they have him on retainer.
The Global Finanical Crisis by Cypher 13
Where Did All the Money Go? by Emilia Klimiuk
From Feliciano Rahardjo
Looks like the beginning of a comic book.
A Closer Look at the Global Financial Crisis by Liam Johnstone
Economic Meltdown of 2008-2009 by Pei San Ng
The Global Money Mess by Karen Ong
Crisis of Credit Visualized by Jonathan Jarvis
We saw this one a few days ago in animated form.
Stimulus vs Bailout Plans
OK, now that we have an idea of what's going on here, let's take a look at the stimulus/bailout plans. The government is handing out a lot of money. Where's it all going and when?
Bailout Tracker by The New York Times
Congressional Voting on the Bailout Plan by The New York Times
Gotta go through a lot of voting before deciding whether or not to spend $700 billion.
Total Spending by The Washington Post
Obama's $787 billion Dollar Economic Stimulus Plan by CreditLoan
Bubbles, bubbles, and more bubbles.
Slicing Up the Economic Stimulus Bill by Associated Press
Recovery.gov from Obama Administration
The Obama administration seems to understand that it's important to provide information to the public.
Effects on Business
Will the bailout do any good? What effect has the current state of the economy had on big business?
Map of the Market by The New York Times
How this Bear Market Compares by The New York Times
Making Sense of Problems at Fannie and Freddie by The New York Times
Golden Parachutes by Jess Bachman
The Fall of GM by Jess Bachman
The Cost of Bailing Out AIG via Many Eyes
Effects On the Individual
Enough about business. How are you affected?
Job Losses in Recent Recessions by Time Magazine
Visualizing Money
Right.org
One Trillion Dollars by Mint and WallStats
How Much is $700 billion? by USA Today
What Does One Trillion Dollars Look Like from PageTutor
Looks at Past Recessions
The best way to prepare for the future is to look at what was done in the past.
How the Government Dealt with Past Recessions by The New York Times
A Tally of Federal Rescues by The New York Times
See. I told you that you'd understand a this financial crisis a little better. Did I miss any other stellar graphics?
Resources:
- GOOD Magazine
- The New York Times
- USA Today
- The Wall Street Journal
- The Big Picture
- Mint
- WallStats
- Many Eyes
- Cool Infographics
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Very, very nice Post and Impressions.
Please, give more Tips for Visualization-Online-Tools and Tutorials for Data-Mining and Data-Visualization.
Excellent stuff Nathan…one stop-shop for all financial crisis visualisations
Nice round up. Its fun to see such a huge an important data set hit the net and the viz community, pro and am a like take it apart and do their thing. The sheer variety is good to see too, with only the government putting out the standard pie chat.
One graphic is incorrect.
“What Does One Trillion Dollars Look Like from PageTutor”
Click the image, you will see that this page shows the graphic for one *billion* dollars, in fact, one *trillion* dollars is 1,000 times larger.
The correct image has much more impact, I hope you will correct this.
These are really great. I think my favorite is the trillion dollar one, which looks even better when you see all the slide together.
Wow, bookmarked! Some great eye candies. Thanks for the compilation.
Bookmark! this will be helpful.
Nice collection, but your missing the hilarious infographic/parody on The United States Credit Score
http://www.creditloan.com/blog.....dit-score/
These graphics are good but they do not reference the legislation which resulted in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac sub prime mortgages. The U.S. Congress mandated a certain percentage of loans would be subprime to a particular demographic. Any banks who wanted to make a Mae or Mac backed loan had to participate in the subprime scheme as per requirement of the U.S. government.
The government thought it would be a good idea to make home loans to people who could not afford them so that they could suffer a debt they cannot afford. Brilliant.
The tools that say “$8+ trillion bailout” are totally meaningless. That’s perhaps what we would technically be on the hook for if the entire economic system were wiped out. And if it were all wiped out, well, I don’t think we’d be worried about people attempting to collect on it, or even really counting in U.S. dollars….
Jonathan Jarvis’ video explaining this is outstanding. Great work.
too bad emilia klimiuk can’t spell. made for an unpleasant read in an otherwise stunning set of illustrations.
Wow, bookmarked! A great work. Super graphics. Thanks for the posting. Best Regards BodoHL
Very helpfull to understand the current economic situation
Great compilation of visualizations – I’m always amazed how graphics and their designers are able to distill complex information into byte-size gems!
Excellent collection of infographics.
while the graphics look very good, some definitely need some sort of perspective, especially the ones closer to the end of the post. while the bailout has been significant in its size, comparing is to previous bailouts while ONLY adjusting for inflation is misleading – inflation is not the only adjustment variable. a $700bn bailout in a $15tr economy is large, but ignores the fact that the bailout is also spread out over two years. even assuming that it would be over one year, it is only 5% of the all of GDP. in 1970, the bailout would have needed to be only $150bn to be comparable in size to $700bn (both adjusted for inflation) to make it a fair comparison. in addition, here the bailout is not going to one company, but to a sector. in addition, spreading the bailout for two years (as expected) would only make it 2.5% of total economy size
you can argue that the bailout is ineffective and unfair, but i don’t see any reason to cause fearmongering only because it is difficult to quickly make inter-temporal comparisons.
Excellent, very useful to show people how this crisis developed. Can we discuss the possible way out too
It’s lose, not loose, Emilia
Interesting presentations. Now, how to do we get out of the crisis?
Wow! What a perspective. I think I understand the cause of this crisis much better now
Do any of these mention de-regulation of the banking industry under the Graham-Leach-Bliley amendment, or the Financial Services Modernization Act? Or GATT, NAFTA, and WTO?
It’s de-regulation and the Libertarian myth of the ‘free-market’ that has caused all this.
Until we start addressing these issues, and returning to FDR style social-democracy, the economy will continue to suffer.
Irresponsible Govt. , Wall St. and Man’s greed brought us here.
Exemplary illustrations.
Awesome graphics I often wonder the back and forth that must happen to get them looking so good.
On our site maptube we have a number of maps of the financial crisis which are crowdsourced through the BBC with viewers keying in their locaton and answering various questions – our server than scanning the database every half hour and producing a map of quesiton responses – you are wlcome to add this to the list of stuff if you think it relevant
here is the link – but you can overlay maps etc on this site too
http://www.maptube.org/map.aspx?mapid=325
Greta info, thanks. I’m trying to find a video I saw on the BBC website in which a man used an individual earning £15K to demonstrate what the credit crunch means proportionally. Does anyone recognise this description? Can you help me locate it? A link would be wonderful. Thanks!