interview question: give a brief account of the financial crisis

just wanted to ask how you guys would answer this question. i think it’s an interesting question in terms of the range of answers that could be considered acceptable/good please specify: - when did the crisis start (what event: bear’s hedge funds collapse, freddie/fannie going into receivership, lehman, or even earlier) - main drivers of crisis (lax mortgage standards, high leverage, CDS, etc) - how crisis went from financial sector to whole economy

Except for the first question, which has an absolute answer (the BNP Paribas tender offer failure signaled the credit crisis) the rest of the questions are “What’s the best football team?” questions. It’s hard to produce a wrong answer; just talk about the basics and back it up with facts/examples.

@ Zesty exactly dude! that’s why i am curious to see what others think are important facts to highlight. a banker’s view is probably different from a trader’s from equity analyst. with regards to the timeline i found this doc that’s kind of interesting: http://lauder.wharton.upenn.edu/pdf/Chronology%20Economic%20%20Financial%20Crisis.pdf

Gotta love how this person at Wharton is using Fox business as a cited source; FoxBusiness on the FrontPage of their website has an interview with Joe the Plumber about the debt ceiling negotiations! WTF, since when did Joe the Plumber become a Business/Economic Correspondent. That’s why I can’t take Fox Business seriously; no where near the caliber of Bloomberg Business, FT, Economist, WSJ, Barrons, MarketWatch, etc… So I’m wondering is this person just lazy to use a more reputable source.

"Jesus you can’t make a buck in this market, the country’s goin’ to hell faster than when that son of a b itch Roosevelt was in charge. Too much cheap money sloshing around the world. The worst mistake we ever made was letting Nixon get off the gold standard. " -Lou M