Our big data series this week gives us a better understanding of the different financial crises that have been crippling countries and economies all over the world. Monetary crunch comes in many forms and it’s important to be able to identify them for our own good as well.

Our first piece is from awesome.good.is, which speaks of the 2008 financial crisis as it relates to the homeowner sector. Home prices inflated by 400 percent, from $50,000 during the 80’s to $250,000 to date, and with it foreclosures intensified as well. Exacerbating the situation, people are losing confidence in banks because it has been very well demonstrated in the past that even the most powerful financial organization can fall in the blink of an eye.

Subprime mortgage-backed securities have been uncovered in bank portfolios worldwide, and both the American Home Mortgage Investment Corporation and Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy in recent years.  The Federal Reserve bailed out of Bear Stearns as well.

At the international level, China and Japan hold the strongest confidence in their banking system (measured by credit default swaps), while the United States and United Kingdom have the least conviction. It’s understandable though, given that the two countries were most affected in the recent financial institute closures.

Speaking of historic financial crashes, General Motors was desperate for a federal bailout a couple years back. Here’s Jess Bachman trying to make sense out of the financial crisis that GM got itself into, visualized with this infographic. Bachman believed, based on internal and external factors, that the bailout will only postpone what was meant to happen.

Our next piece is from crisisofcredit.comm which simplifies the story of credit crisis. The project is part of the creator’s thesis in the Media Design Program, a grad studio at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. It has taken on several credit crisis complexities, such as how the demand for mortgages was driven by investors. “The goal of giving form to a complex situation like the credit crisis is to quickly supply the essence of the situation to those unfamiliar and uninitiated.”

Among the many pecuniary talks we’ve heard about from the US in recent years, job losses caused by the recession is what got spurred people to panic. Yet again, this issue is hard to make a sense of if you just look at the raw figures. Here’s a series of infographics from flowingdata.com that depicts job losses recently, even as it compares to those during World War II.

“There are so many ways that you can cut a dataset whether it be big or small. Cut it by time, different chunks of time, categories, etc., and you just might get a different story out of your graph. Over on Barry Ritholtz’ blog, The Big Picture, debate over the extent of job losses and this recession led to these four depictions of, well, job losses and recessions.”

Looking at financial crisis at a global scale, you might find this infographic pretty handy. It gives us a closer look at investors, investment banks, homeowners and the US Federal Reserve as they relate to financial crisis and each other.

And in another infographic, the global financial crisis is being blamed on the US housing market. It comes as an upshot of 9/11 and the dot com bust in the early 2000s, which caused the Federal Reserve to lower their interest rates to 1 percent in order to avert the recession, allowing banks to borrow money for a very low rate to lend to its customers for mortgages. These mortgages ended up being bought by Wall Street and repackaged as CDOs to sell to investors who were no longer making money on Federal Reserves.

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.