The Global Financial Crisis

I really liked this course. It is a detailed acount of how the global financial crisis came about, starting with the housing crisis (including sub-prime) and the global savings glut. It continues with how the anxiety started and spread through the global financial system, turning in to a full-blown panic. Next is the measures taken to combat the crisis, and the course ends with describing the double dip recession in the euro zone.

There are two presenters of the course, professor Andrew Metrick of Yale, and Timothy Geithner, Secretary of the Treasury during the crisis. Professor Metrick is an excellent presenter, one of the best I have listened to. He is animated and into the subject he talks about, and takes care to expalain all technical terms he uses.

Timothy Geithner talks about talks about the government response to the crisis, which is very interesting, since he was actually there when it happened. Unfortunately, his presentations aren't as good as professor Metrick's - he is more monotone, and uses some jargon without explaining the meaning (for example, what are swap lines?)

The most interesting parts of the course for me was the section on the cause of the housing crisis (was it moral hazard, government failure, or bubble thinking), and the explanation of the euro zone problems and comparison to the gold standard (as a single currency) in the 1930s.

I spent around one hour a week on the course. I listened to the lectures on my phone while commuting to and from work. After every 5 to 10 minute segment there was a quiz with two multiple choice questions to see if you understood the material. If you failed the quiz you could just re-take it until you passed. After each module (around 10 video lectures), there was a multiple choice quiz with 8 questions (mostly), and you had to get at least 6 right. But if you failed, you could re-take that too. The questions were at a good level, not too easy, but not too hard either. There were no other assignments, so it was a quick and easy course to take. I finished it in around half the alloted time, and only used my commute time to learn the material.

One problem with watching the videos on my phone was that the slides had blue background. When the text was white, it was OK to read, but sometimes the text was purple, and it was impossible to read it on the phone screen. There were also a lot of graphs and charts (very good), but some of them where also very hard to see on the phone screen. Professor Metrick usually talked us through everything in the diagrams anyway, so it was not a big problem there. Timothy Geithner commented less on them, so it was a little harder to follow in his parts. All videos were professionally produced by Yale University.

Overall, an easy and quick course with very interesting material. I learned a lot, and their conclusions felt well motivated, drawing on research reports, and presented in lots of graphs and diagrams. Time well spent for me!

Henrik Warne's review is spot-on; I will not duplicate what he said. Just want to add that although Timothy Geithner is the headliner, he only made an appearance in 3 of 11 weeks. Andrew Metrick did all the heavy lifting, and he is both a good explainer of ideas and notably better than Geithner.

In my opinion the course could be improved with a head-on examination of critics' viewpoints regarding the crisis and the response to it. There should be an entire lecture, near the end of the course, where the critics' arguments are laid out one-by-one and rebutted (or perhaps agreed with). As-is, the class is primarily a financial-history class which mostly takes for granted that the response to each phase of the crisis was appropriate.

My goal in taking the class was simply to have a more educated opinion on what happened and why, and that goal was reached. I recommend taking this class.