The crisis of credit (visualized)

Chapel Hill, North Carolina

As bad as the economy continues to be, I’ve found this a remarkably good time to be back at business school. And it’s not just about insulating myself from the dismal job market and taking the opportunity to develop skills and networks (although I’d be lying if it wasn’t partly this).

When the true crisis began last year, Kenan-Flagler was immediately tuned in. There were brown bag lunches with finance professors; our Macroeconomics core course was largely consumed with daily discussions on the latest economic gyrations; even Leading & Managing, an organizational behavior class, got in on the action with assignments that drew on NPR‘s insightful report, The Giant Pool of Money.

Forget about a Harvard case study. The case study was all around us.

And it continues to change and develop today. This has made my experience here all the more engaging and relevant — although it hasn’t given me much confidence in where we’re headed. Because when a leading finance expert who has spent most of his adult life studying the markets can only offer a shrug when asked what is driving the Economic Roller Coaster that we’re all on right now, this can’t bode well for the rest of us peons.

But how did we get here? A great explanation has just been created by Jonathan Jarvis. He’s not an economist nor a business journalist. Jarvis is a graduate student in the Media Design Program, a graduate studio at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. And he takes the cake for explaining the credit crisis in the simplest terms I’ve heard or seen.