The Financial Crisis in Charts

By | October 14, 2008

Thought I’d offer a brief history of the financial crisis as seen through Google Insights, which measures the popularity of a search term over time.

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Interest in the word subprime spiked a couple of times in 2007 (above) before we figured out it was all about toxic debts (below):

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and credit crunches:

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Then we realised suddenly we had to learn a bit more about Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae:

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and even basic terms like liquidity:

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Useful information. And it wasn’t just an economics lesson. We had to gen up on countries that we had recently given little attention to, like Iceland:

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Although it’s worth keeping it all in perspective. Search for the word meltdown, a commonly used term to capture the excitement of the past few weeks, and you get this. Clearly rising interest, but that spoke in 2005? It’s linked to Ice Age: The Meltdown, which grossed $70 million at the box office in its debut week:

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