Hard to believe, but the credit crunch officially started on August 9th, 2007, when the French bank BNP Paribas told investors they would no longer be able to cash in on funds linked to the US subprime market.

Can you believe it was three years ago? I can’t. The features desk spent some time trying to work it out yesterday with astute logic. (‘No, it can’t be, because so-and-so hadn’t had her baby then’ … ‘actually, I remember someone making a joke about the credit-card crunch and I haven’t seen them in two years so it must be true.’) But yes, three years ago, most of us were still blissfully ignorant of the importance of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, bear markets, subprimes, the mancession and the rest of it.

It all feels like it only happened yesterday. There’s a name for this phenomenon, as psychology lecturer Steve Taylor explains in his book, Making Time. ‘Forward Telescoping’ is the tendency to think past events happened more recently than they actually did. See how accurate you are with these events (answers at the bottom):

- What year did Bill Clinton have an affair with Monica Lewinsky?
- In what year did the Live8 concerts take place?
- When was Friends first broadcast in the UK?
- When did Heath Ledger die?

Did you get any of them right? If you’re like most people, you will have dated the events too recently.

It’s amazing to think that we’ve lived through three years of this particular financial crisis already. What have you learned since then?

Answers:

- Clinton and Lewinsky: 1995
- Live8: 2005
- Friends: April 1995
- Heath Ledger died in January 2008