How to Memorize Major Financial Crises: 30 Cards from Tulip Mania to COVID

Four hundred years of crashes fit into 30 flashcards. The Economic History: Major Financial Crises deck (code RS8452) runs from Dutch tulips in 1637 to the COVID shock of 2020, then closes with the vocabulary economists use to explain why it keeps happening. The trick is not to memorize 23 disasters one by one, but to see the same machine break in different decades.

What the cards actually say

Everything the deck covers

Tulip Mania, South Sea Bubble, Panic of 1837 (Andrew Jackson vs the Second Bank), Panic of 1873 and the Long Depression, Panic of 1907, Black Tuesday and the Great Depression (25% US unemployment, deflation), the 1973 oil embargo, stagflation and the Phillips Curve, the Latin American debt crisis (Mexico's 1982 default, the Lost Decade), Black Monday, Japan's bubble, the 1997 Asian crisis (Thailand, Indonesia, South Korea, IMF), the dot-com crash, Argentina 1999-2002, the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (Lehman Brothers, CDOs, TARP), the European sovereign debt crisis and Greece, the 2010 Flash Crash, China's 2015 crash (Shanghai Composite -43%), COVID-19 (14.7% US unemployment), quantitative easing, contagion, systemic risk, Dodd-Frank, Basel III and the Volcker Rule.

Study it as one recurring pattern

The last card lists the common ingredients: leverage, asset bubbles, regulatory failure, herd behavior, underestimated risk, contagion, government rescue. Use it as a template. For every crisis card, answer three questions out loud before flipping: what inflated (tulips, railroads, Tokyo real estate, subprime housing), what popped it (Vienna exchange, rate hikes, Lehman), who cleaned up (J.P. Morgan, the IMF, TARP, QE). Cards 6-7 and 16-17 already split cause and effect for 1929 and 2008; doing the same mentally for the others turns 23 facts into one story you can retell in an exam essay.

Two updates to write on your cards

• The Nikkei record is no longer a ghost. The 38,916 peak of December 1989 was finally beaten on 22 February 2024. Add that date to card 12: the Lost Decades ended up lasting 34 years in index terms.
• The deck stops in 2020. Write one card for March 2023: Silicon Valley Bank failed after a deposit run tied to rate hikes, and UBS took over Credit Suisse. It is a textbook case of the deck's own moral hazard and contagion cards.

Also note that historians now consider Tulip Mania's economic damage smaller than the legend suggests; keep the card, but treat it as the first recorded bubble story rather than a proven macro crash.

For the theory behind QE, stagflation and fiscal policy, pair this deck with How to Learn Macroeconomics: 90 Cards on GDP, Inflation and Policy.

Open Flip It and search for deck RS8452 to start.