Why Did the 2008 Financial Crisis Happen?
What if you had been there in 2008? Starting from whether to lend 100% of a home's price to someone with no job, through bundling loans into bonds (MBS), the rating agencies that stamped AAA and the CDOs, to the CDS insurance that pays out on failure — you choose at every step and experience, as a story, why and how the 2008 global financial crisis really happened.
What is this content?
'Why Did the 2008 Financial Crisis Happen?' is a choice-driven story where you become a player in the 2008 financial chain, deciding at each step and experiencing, as a narrative, how the crisis was built.
It opens with you deciding whether to lend 100% of a home's price to someone with no job, then follows — through the characters' dialogue — how that loan gets bundled into a bond, spreads worldwide, and finally collapses. It's made so that 'why it happened' clicks into place without any jargon.
Five steps: loans → MBS → CDO → CDS → collapse
① Reckless lending (subprime): even people who can't pay get 100% of the price. As long as prices rise, it looks fine. ② Securitization (MBS): bundle thousands of these loans into a bond and sell it, and the risk moves to others while the bank's books go clean.
③ Ratings and CDOs: risky slices are repackaged and a rating agency stamps them 'AAA,' turning bad loans into 'safe assets.' ④ Insurance (CDS): insurance that pays out on failure is sold far beyond any ability to cover. ⑤ Collapse: rates rise, prices fall, and the whole tower topples like dominoes as Lehman Brothers goes bankrupt.
Not one villain's fault, but everyone's current
The core message is that the crisis wasn't caused by a single villain but by everyone acting 'rationally' because everyone else did. Through your choices you feel the structural problem firsthand: when risk can always be passed on, no one owns the risk.
Whatever you choose, the story converges on the crisis — a device to show how much stronger a system's incentives are than any one person's choice. The characters and events are based on the real 2008 crisis, but dramatized for learning and fun.