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It’s like the old line attributed to Mark Twain: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”
Ask a CFO what parallels they see between the uncertainty of 2025 and the staggering economic collapse of 2007–8, and you’ll get some variant of that famous Twainism.
In the worst way, we’re so back. 60% of CFOs expect a recession by the end of 2025, according to a Q1 CNBC CFO Council survey, while Goldman Sachs recently upped the likelihood of a recession in the next 12 months to 35%.
And yet, everything’s different. To truly understand the potential dangers of our current moment, you have to look back. For starters: 2008 didn’t start like this. It started with a bang.
Here’s CFO Brew’s oral history of the 2008 crash, as told by finance and accounting professionals.
Interviews have been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
Hard and fast
Ari Shwayder, lecturer of business economics and public policy at the University of Michigan, who worked at McKinsey before and after the 2008 crash: When things crashed, it was one of those classic [scenarios] when all of a sudden it happened all at once. It felt like everything was fine; there was very little uncertainty. And then, all of a sudden, the banking system blew apart over the course of a couple of months.
Shari Freedman, CFO for literacy nonprofit Room to Read: In 2008, it was immediate. Once [Lehman Brothers] collapsed, the whole market collapsed.
Kelly Bargabos, CFO and COO of San Diego Theatres: I was in the diamond jewelry industry when 2007–2008 hit. We were a wholesaler, and we sold to [high end] retail jewelry stores. We were hit really hard and really fast, [as] one of the first sectors to really be impacted by the real estate bubble that burst and the beginning of the economic downturn.
The reason we were hit so hard and so fast is because we were a luxury diamond jewelry brand, and the people who bought our products in the retail stores were the hedge fund managers. They were the Wall Street traders, all those people who lost their jobs, lost their income, lost their retirements. That was our customer base, those people with high disposable income.
Bill Zarrilli, CFO of CSMI Consulting Group, who was CFO for a sales training company during the crisis: When it first started, we noticed that clients were starting to defer their decisions for sales training, and we worked with Fortune 1000 companies. We started to get some visibility that companies were pulling back on sales training, and the reason they were giving us [was] their own business challenges, their own need to wait for better economic visibility.
All hands on deck
As warning signs flared, it was quickly all hands on deck for finance professionals.
Bargabos: We didn’t have any fantasy about waiting it out, riding it out. We didn’t have the cash flow to do that. So we had to take some pretty drastic measures. [We got] down to a skeleton crew, and then it really became about cash management and inventory management.
Zarrilli: Working with the CEO, we started to develop a strategic plan to reduce costs in the most thoughtful and measured way we could. We put everything on the table: headcount reductions, hiring and salary freezes, and obviously the deferral of any discretionary spending.
Bargabos: I lived and breathed hourly cash management [and] forecasting. How much cash do we have? What are we projecting for the week? How am I going to make payroll? Because we were maxed out on our line of credit, I only had available to me the money I collected in receivables. My biggest takeaway that’s stayed with me for the last almost 20 years is that discipline around cash management, inventory management.
Freedman: [Right before the crash] we began renegotiating our debt package. For us, that is the story of how we survived, to be frank, 2008 and everything that went after, because we successfully completed our transaction in early September. I remember flying to Houston and signing the bank deals, and I think a week or two later, [Lehman Brothers] fell apart and kicked off the financial collapse. Within weeks, other organizations had their credit lines discontinued. Everything sort of just started to collapse.
Turnaround
You couldn’t pay CFOs to go back to that stressful time, but eventually better days ahead came into sight.
Zarrilli: After we experienced some significant declines in revenue in 2008 and 2009, it started to turn in 2010, when we actually saw the pipeline starting to grow again and revenue started to grow in 2010 versus 2009, so that was the turnaround time when we first saw some daylight.
Bargabos: There wasn’t a specific day or a moment when we were like, “Phew, okay, made it through that. Now we can get back to business as usual.” It was more of a slow loosening. Our business settled, but it was a very slow comeback.
Lessons learned.
After CFOs untangled the worst parts of the crisis, everyone had something they would’ve done differently.
Zarrilli: What I learned is we could have spent more time using that downturn in business volume to focus on our processes, to improve them, and to focus on maybe there were some technology investments we could have made during that time, as limited as they might be. When you’re running fast and your business is growing, sometimes it’s hard to invest the time into some of those areas.
If you can remove some of the uncomfortableness of being in that situation out of your mindset and focus on process improvement and efficiencies that will maybe not make a major change to the business while you’re in that recessionary timeframe but will give you an edge on acceleration coming out of it, that’s where, facing that type of situation again, I would have tried to steer the organization to do more.
Bargabos: Looking back to that specific time period, I think what we could have done better is anticipate more what could happen to our market, and how fragile the luxury sector could be if high earners are threatened. In our culture, I think we have this false sense of security, especially in the luxury high income realm, because it’s very rarely threatened.
Ben Taylor, CFO of biotech company Recursion, who worked at Goldman Sachs during the 2008 crisis: Where I saw it go wrong [for CFOs in 2008] was when people assumed that it was just going to be short term, and so they put in short term measures, whether that’s short term debt or bridge financings, all of those sort of things that were meant for a six or a 12 or an 18 month fix. If you take shorter term fixes, that actually puts you in a position where you have a lot of risk exposure, because then you have to either refinance or create another fix 12, 18 months from now. But now you’re in a worse position, because the economy has continued to be bad.
History rhymes
In 2025, the lessons of 2008 still apply—even when it feels like we’re in uncharted territory.
Shwayder: The 2008 crisis was a very classic demand-side recession. There was a banking crisis that happened that caused people to get scared. People cut back on consumption, businesses cut back on investment, and so demand dropped precipitously. What I worry about right now is policymakers seem to be careening us toward a self-made, on the supply-side, recession. By introducing tariffs, that’s going to force costs and prices up on a lot of American companies and consumers. If that does happen, and we see prices going up and the economy is slowing down, then the Fed is in a bit of a pickle.
Freedman: The thing I worry the most about is that there is the possibility that all this chaos will actually trigger something that is unintentional, but they can’t get their hands back on. They can’t get back control, because the destabilization of the cooperative environment is actually what is at stake here. [The US is] going after our allies…and I just don’t know that there would be a leader to step in and say, “We need to fix this together” if something triggers.
The things that got us out of 2008 and didn’t bring us to the brink of world disaster—we didn’t go into a depression. It was bad, but it wasn’t 10 years of bad. It was actually resolved because of that cooperative environment. I’m more worried about that, to be honest with you. That should we face something like that, there isn’t going to be cooperation.
Taylor: It’s a really, really complex environment now. On any individual issue, it could be a black swan issue. But when you’ve got literally thousands of things expected and unexpected that could all have their own black swan issues, it’s just going to happen. What makes sense to me is we’re going to continue having a lot of volatility.
Bargabos: We’d like to live in this world where everything’s great, and sometimes it takes a crisis to stop us and remind us that we’re not as in control as we think we are. At this point in my career and the experiences that I’ve had, nothing would surprise me at this point.
Taylor: How did [the 2008 crisis] shape my career? I think a lot of it is knowing that these events are not black swans, that these events are actually happening on a fairly regular basis. If you think about it, it’s about every decade: I saw the dotcom bubble burst first, and then there was 2008 and then Covid, and a lot of little things in between there too.
Freedman: Don’t panic, and get your house in order. Collect receivables, send out your bills, pay your bills. Make sure that the day-to-day functionality of your business is working. Those pieces are the things you can anchor…and understand what your risks are.
If you’re vulnerable because you’re cash constrained, then you’re vulnerable to interest rates. If…your product is manufactured externally, someplace outside of the US, you’re more vulnerable to tariffs. It’s [about] understanding your business model and where your vulnerabilities are is the first place to think about, how am I going to navigate? Navigation is really about: Can I set myself up a little bit better? Can I ride through?
This is one of the stories of our Quarter Century Project, which highlights the various ways industry has changed over the last 25 years. Check back each month for new pieces in this series and explore our timeline featuring the ongoing series.
