Your assignment
Role: Cross-functional analyst briefing a board risk committee on what crisis history can and cannot establish
Deliverable: An authority-instrument-channel-outcome matrix and a 1,200-word board memo identifying evidence strength, lags, counterfactual gaps, and entity-accounting translation needs.
Evidence basis: public records
Evaluation criteria
- institutional separation (25%): Distinguishes NBER chronology, fiscal authority, monetary authority, emergency facilities, and later evaluation.
- transmission trace (30%): Maps instruments through financial and real channels with timing, exposure, and uncertainty.
- causal discipline (25%): Separates sequence and mechanism from estimated effects and identifies the missing counterfactual.
- entity translation (20%): Specifies contract, valuation, credit-loss, liquidity, recognition, and disclosure evidence before entity conclusions.
Assignment
Build an institutional matrix before writing a narrative. For each action, name the authority, instrument, announcement and effective dates, intended channel, exposed balance sheets or contracts, observed outcomes, lag, and causal status.
Keep the financial crisis and NBER recession chronology separate. Then translate one macro channel into a hypothetical firm's evidence needs without assuming that a lower market price, liquidity shock, credit loss, impairment, fair value, and cash shortfall are the same measurement.