Stick Men And Cartoons Are All I Can Really Handle: a Review of Credit Crunch Cartoons

The chaos of last week is now starting to coalesce, moving away from the candy-floss mood swings of bourses everywhere, and into the stodgy brown bread of recession. Everyone can understand recession – it’s dole queues and meek borrowing and grey 80’s sky.

What aren’t so easy to understand are CDOs, SIVs, toxic assets, sub-prime, and the rest. You’ve got John Snow with his stripey socks explaining things, but you’re too far down the line and wish you’d been paying attention six months ago and ha ha those socks are just great. Sorry, what’s “Lehman Brothers”?

Sounds like what you need is a cartoon? When the human voice fails with its frustratingly unpainted imagery, and graphs become meaningless jagged terror-lines, wrap your brain in the balm of animation. And as there’s pretty much a whole new genre of credit crunch/financial meltdown comics and animations out there right now, we thought we’d do a review/roundup.

First up we have ABC News doing an admirable job of explaining the $700bn bailout in under 2 minutes. “This year a bunch of housing loans went bad and bankers got nervous” – really, that’s all you essentially need to know on subprime.

Then there’s these brilliant ones from Paddy Hirsch (check that Judeo-Irish lineage!), whose job it is to explain the whole thing to confused media types with his handsome, comforting face and stickman-led analogies about fun stuff like champagne, Ferraris and Antarctic exploration!

AirelonTrading does one where he tries to suppress his utter contempt for the IDIOTS that are his fellow man. “I’m not going to get into the importance of treasuries, the implication of bonds…[sighs deeply at how we can't understand the implication of bonds] I’m…going to reeeeally simplify this”. There then follows a rambling version of events that is caught awkwardly between neat summation and in-depth analysis, benefitting nobody. Also, worst flow chart ever. FAIL!

Crisis explained via the medium of marshmallows:

Via the medium of an impossibly mournful minor-key version of “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic” and ironic use of DuckTales footage:

Via a collection of deeply anachronistic and potty-mouthed Jews, Mexicans, Chinese and so on:

And the original and still the best stickman subprime primer:

Finally, BAD IDEA put a version of the above slideshow in our last issue, drawn beautifully by Jess Wilson. And here it is: The Bad Idea Subprime Primer.

Posted by Ben Beaumont-Thomas in Hot Money | October 22, 2008 5:50PM |