Earlier this month, Swiss Re hosted its 2009 economic forum and, as always, had an amazing wealth of data and insight to share. I was just going through the presentation from the event again today while researching a story and was once again taken aback by how well one of the slides illustrated just how unique the 2008 financial meltdown was.

The dates are tough to make out at this resolution, but the point here is the colors. Look at how even other recession years fall into the normal distribution bell curve while 2008, the lone red rectangle, sits nearly by itself alllllllllllll the way off to the left.

Scary stuff.

The data credit got clipped off, but the chart should read “Source: Axa”