In their paper (Bloom and Webinger, 2011) the authors identify the multidisciplinary nature of accounting, in terms of how it influences and is influenced by other business disciplines, and suggests ways in which the current Global Financial Crisis (GFC) can be used as a potent teaching and learning device for both illustrating these multidisciplinary linkages and enhancing students' understanding of the intermediate financial accounting subject itself. In this commentary, Ralph Alder opines that Bloom and Webinger should be greatly commended for their teaching innovation. Their approach, which specifically showcases a variety of GFC-synonymous dysfunctional business practices, offers substantial opportunities to motivate a student's study of accounting and reveals how, at a minimum, financial accounting is inextricably linked to such allied business fields as economics, finance, and banking. He goes on to contrast swings in unemployment and housing in the USA with those experienced in New Zealand and Australia between 2007 and 2010, pointing out the possibility that, depending on the given student population, other, non-GFC phenomena possess superior significance and topicality over the GFC. Alder concludes that he is in full agreement with Bloom and Webinger on the utility of using the GFC to motivate students' study of financial accounting. He further argues that the GFC can be successfully used to contextualise the study of management accounting. The main caveat he would associate Bloom and Webinger's approach is that the study of the GFC on its own is unlikely to produce the historical perspective needed to create the attitude and policy changes that are so desperately required. [This article responds to Robert Bloom and Mariah Webinger's "Contextualizing the Intermediate Financial Accounting Courses in the Global Financial Crisis" v20 n5 p469-494 2011 (EJ1109610).]