How to Create a Crisis (Web Site)

How to Create a Financial Crisis is a conversation via text messaging with Léon Courville, professor of economics and former President and Chief Operating Officer of National Bank of Canada, who invites users to create a financial crisis in order to understand its theoretical underpinnings and, more importantly, the human behaviour behind it. The experience is optimized for mobile phones and also accessible on tablets and computers. Each user engages in a 20- to 25-minute conversation with the professor, who unpacks five concepts that are vital to understanding the forces at work in the modern financial system. Through these exchanges, the user meets key players—including consumers, bankers, investors, politicians, and oligarchs—and explores the nature of imbalances within the compensation system, practices of debt securitization, flaws in financial regulations, the concentration of influential power (the “too big to fail” syndrome), and the usurpation of democratic systems by financial oligarchies.