Transparency: The Largest Bankruptcies in History

I wonder: what is the standardised valuation of these companies? Did you think about inflation when putting this together? In other terms: in which years’ dollars are these bankruptcies calculated?

I wonder where Bethlehem Steel’s bankruptcy falls on the list. That was a huge one as well.

Strange to see the calamity that was Enron absolutely dwarfed by Lehman Brothers.

The figured account for inflation? I think past sinking boats would be comparible to current. 

This is a terrible graphic for two reasons. 1. The x-axis is meaningless.2. The lengths of the ships in the graphic, not their areas, are proportional to the values. This makes, for instance, the Lehman Bros. bankruptcy appear four times as large as the WaMu failure, not twice, which is the reality.

Graphics are very pretty but not actually “GOOD.” One of the principles of designing a good graphic representation of numeric data is that the AREA of the graphic should be proportionally related to the number being represented. When you’re making a bar chart where the width of the graphics is constant, than the length is proportional. But in this case where they’re using a boats, by increasing the length proportionally, the area increases disproportionally, thus making the Enron collapse visually appear to be 3 or even 4 times the size of the WaMu collapse, when in reality it was only twice the size. Sorry guys, but pretty as this is, its actually a failure.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3CIabaoHf4

If Edward Tufte were dead, he would be spinning in his grave. This
is a terrible, TERRIBLE “infographic”, made up almost entirely of what
Tufte calls “chartjunk”. Some issues:

(1) Is the value of the bankruptcy represented by the length of the ship, or the area of the ship?(2) If the area of the ship is what counts, the hulls and
superstructures create an uneven and unclear representation of just how
much area each ship represents.

(3) Are we supposed to assume the ships continue beneath “the water”, or is only the visible part of the ship relevant?

(4) Lack of baseline makes it hard to compare the data.

(5) Apparently, the ship sizes DO NOT even reflect the true sizes of
each bankruptcy! There are only 6 sizes of ships, and each bankruptcy
is classed into one of these 6. Wonderfully useless.

(6) Are these inflation-adjusted dollar values? The “infographic” does not tell us.

In sum, this graphic is entirely useless. Whoever made it should be
sentenced to hand-plot bar charts of customer satsifaction survey data
with a ruler and graph paper for the rest of his natural life.

I like how the sailboats are still 20some Billion Dollars.  So its not the most scientific graphic in the world.  It looks nice!?!  Read this post on how the politics republicans and democrats play are really just the same, only on different topics.

I just dont understand how big coorporations that have been in business so long can all of the sudden go bankrupt in a matter of months. Wouldnt you think they would have savings built up over the 50+ years of being in business?

”I’m not that interested in return ON my investment as much as I’m interested in return OF my investment.’ – Will Rogers

ju2tinCalm down. Thinks you have too much time on your hands…

If only they would sink ‘to the bottom’. Instead, rusting hulks, covered by holes and patches of bubblegum flounder about in our financial seas, demanding rescue from the Coast Guard (us).

I agree entirely with  ju2tin. The graphic is grossly misleading, as described by Tufte in his first book, The Graphic Display of Quantitative Information.You should buy a copy.

Tufte’s views, as understandably mentioned, are, however, entirely archaic and irrelevant here. Our visual vocabulary is expanding rapidly and our ability to absorb compound information through creative means is growing with it.

Without too specifically defending this image alone, but rather the information graphic as a concept, I think trying to limit ourselves to Tuftean principles everytime we want to graphically express data would be a ghastly oversight to the most important part of visual communication, the narrative.

Not only can an image convey data but it can tell a story.

If all you’re looking for, however, is the data, I highly recommend The Economist or our very own Staturday.

How does the “wreck of the PennCentral”, circa 1970, compare?

Do the discussions on this site always reflect so well the war between Tufteans and, erm, those other people? With datagraphics as awful as this, I’d expect so. I’m glad Always With Honor made it fun for me though, phew! I don’t know how I could have got through that data without them.It sure doesn’t look to me like those figures are inflation-adjusted—an intentional political bias trying to add heft to criticism of the last decade’s ‘naked capitalism’? It wouldn’t surprise me from an organisation that places accessibility and ‘fun’ over accuracy. 

Having just checked out AWH’s website, I see they are the people responsible for some of the bits of illustration in Monocle magazine. Sounds about right—now there’s a magazine with a <i>seriously</i> mixed-up world view. 

Good enough for marginally informed laypeople. Add another BIGGER ship in dotted lines to the right to represent the near-future sinking of the U.S. Givernment.

I agree with Matthew.  When the Penn Central declared bankruptcy on June 21, 1970. It was the largest  in US history up until that time.

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@Atley while I am perfectly happy to acknowledge that time marches on so that what Tufte wrote years ago may not be the end of the story. Nevertheless, I struggle to see the “narrative” at work here. Of course you did say you weren’t defending this particular graphic, but the tone of your comment suggests that you might be comfortable with the general approach. Personally, I think this is a travesty of form over function. The obsession with a design idea tramps all over the ability for the data to be clearly communication. This is pure chart junk!

Guys, try to take this in context.  If all graphics were made according to Tufte’s principles, we’d be looking at solid grey bars on white all the time.  That great for scientific or business environments where you’ve got a captive audience who have to look at the charts as part of their jobs but this magazine has one chance to grab our attention and I’d say its quite well with this graphic.Sure the data is not represented proportionally; the boats emphasize form over function etc…as a data graphic its a fail, no argument there.but as an interesting magazine piece, its attracted our eyeballs so its a success.

The data underlying the graphic is bad as well. Because Lehman was a bank, it held a tremendous number of assets and liabilities on its balance sheet that make asset-value-pre-bankrupcty an apples-to-oranges statistic. This is a common mistake for people who don’t look at financial company balance sheets for a living. A better metric would probably have been book value (assets minus liabilities), which obviously represents the “shortfall” in the company’s ability to cover its debt (although that has a few caveats too).