Many happy returns! (The happiness of your returns can go down as well as up.)

There wasn’t a single moment at which the credit crunch started, but today is a good candidate for being its third anniversary – when a major investment bank announced it was having desperate liquidity trouble, and the ECB and the Fed started large-scale support operations.

To mark this, and given that I’m not in a position to write much at the mo, here’s a self-indulgent plug for my old explanation of the credit crunch in words of one syllable. Still just about hangs together, I reckon.