Apparently a historical event doesn’t have to be “over” for a museum to create an exhibit about it.

The Museum of American Finance, a relatively-young museum found at the heart of New York’s Financial District, opened a new exhibit last week entitled “Tracking the Credit Crisis: A Timeline,” as the first exhibit to spotlight the ongoing global financial event that began some 18 to 24 months ago.

The giant exhibit, measuring 20 feet across and accompanied by a 10 minute video, is the museum’s first attempt to try to break down the complicated nature of the financial crisis that has plagued Wall Street and wiped out some $40 trillion in wealth for the everyday citizen, said Executive Director Lee Kjelleren.

“The challenge for our museum, and all museums, is to try to break down complicated subjects into readily understandable presentations,” Kjelleran said in an interview. “We want to be the ‘go to’ place for this issue.”

The timeline, which was a creation of Kjelleran and museum staff, uses color-coded text to show a reader how each company, government or market event related with others during the crisis. The timeline uses a chart of the Dow Jones Industrial Average as a background.

The museum’s timeline starts before what has been generally considered as the “official start” of the credit crisis -- the collapse of the two Bear Stearns hedge funds in the summer 2007 -- with the bankruptcy of subprime lenders Mortgage Lenders Network USA and ResMae in February 2007.

The timeline then tracks all of the major events during the crisis, from the sale of Bear Stearns to JPMorgan Chase (JPM), to the nationalization of Fannie Mae (FNM) and Freddie Mac (FRE), to President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus package. The exhibit ends currently with the $60 billion quarterly loss of American International Group (AIG) announced in March of this year.

The exhibit will be updated each month with the credit crisis’s major events as long as the museum sees fit.

Of all the events chosen to be highlighted by the museum, the exhibit spends considerable energy on the September bankruptcy of the then 150-year old investment banking firm Lehman Brothers, which the museum called a “turning point” in the credit crisis.

“That was a watershed moment in our American financial history,” Kjelleran said. “The uncontrolled bankruptcy of Lehman shook the very foundations of our economy.”

The bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, the largest corporate bankruptcy in U.S. financial history, caused ripple effects in the U.S. financial markets that caused the near-implosion of the U.S. financial markets, according to various market participants and economists. In that same troubling week, Merrill Lynch was sold to Bank of America (BAC) and American International Group nearly failed and required what was then $80 billion in aid.

The exhibit does not track everything, Kjelleran admits, leaving out events such as the “breaking of the buck” by the money-market mutual fund Reserve Fund that same week Lehman failed. Instead, he said the exhibit tries to give the broadest overview of the crisis.

The Museum of American Finance, which is an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution, is located at 48 Wall Street at the corner of Williams St. and Wall St. For more information, please visit http://www.moaf.org.