The day the world changed: A former trader on how credit crunch kicked off

A financial crisis tends to be associated with fears of a bank run

When I received a phone call from a trader colleague at Merrill Lynch on August 9 2007, I was in the middle of chopping wood in the Swedish countryside. As always, I had my mobile on me in case of an emergency.

I answered the call to a frenzied account of an extraordinary development in the financial markets. My colleague kept repeating that things were “crazy” and “completely mad”. At the time, there was nothing in what he said that made me worried about my trading position, let alone the global financial system. Rather, it was the market prices,