The general point of this visualization is to show how good (or bad) professional investors - Wall Street - are at predicting future interest rates and economic cycles, to which interest rates are closely related.
Considering the time frame for which I could get the data, what we can specifically see from the graph is that the crisis of 2008 was completely unforeseen until the very last minute: moving the slider, you can see that before the gray line (which represents the day when the prediction was made by the market) gets very close first to the spike and then to the plunge in interest rates (blue line) the prediction (red line) shows no sign of what's to come.
After the plunge, it is interesting to notice how the market always underestimated the duration of the crisis: the red line is always getting up faster than what the blue line actually did.
Do you think I should point this out with an explanation in the page? I was thinking it would cleaner to keep text to a minimum and let the data talk, but maybe I overestimated the self-explaining nature of this visualization.
Now that I think about it, instead of some paragraphs of text to explain the graph, I could add a space for short comments that change as the slider is moved: when we are approaching the crisis I could point that out, when the prediction is better or worse I could tell that, and so on. What do you think about this solution?
In alternative, or in addition, I could make a video with spoken commentary explaining the same thing. This wouldn't be interactive, though, but I could still link from the video to the interactive graph. In your experience, would this work/help?
I would really like to find the best way to let people understand what they are seeing... without being boring!
Thanks
Dan
