Financiers invite Twitter to relive crisis in real time
THERE ARE some in the City who would probably prefer not to relive the crash, but for those that do, a pair of financiers have taken to Twitter to track the banking crisis as it unfolded exactly five years ago.
The account, named Real Time Crisis, updates the painful events of the 2008 crash for an audience who have since grown used to 140-character updates.
One of the anonymous finance workers who set up the account told The Capitalist: “We thought people would find it interesting, especially in terms of the balance between what people thought was important at the time, and what was only noticed later.”
Yesterday, the founders reminded their followers of the short-lived surge in the London Stock Exchange after the enormous bailout for government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Next Sunday will mark five years since Lehman Brothers, the fourth largest investment bank in the US, filed for bankruptcy.
In the coming weeks, crisis-watchers can look forward to the near-unprecedented hammering of US stocks that came afterwards (spoiler: they will later recover to hit record highs less than five years later).
The account can be found at @TBTFlive, coined for the “too big to fail” honorific given to major banks.
After picking up 900 followers in its first three days, the founders seem to have found a popular niche among the City’s tweeters.