The breadth of issues raised by the ongoing global financial crisis (GFC) has made accounting education potentially very exciting of late, particularly in the fields of financial reporting and auditing. Students can find it difficult to engage with the conceptual principles that underpin accounting regulation and it can be challenging for the educator to find interesting ways of, for example, teaching the method(s) of accounting for an acquisition. Both principles and rules suffer the risk of being very dry classroom material. On this basis, the GFC seems to offer a "win-win" opportunity for all parties in accounting education. Unfortunately, however, it also poses significant challenges. One major challenge which is highlighted by Bloom and Webinger (2011) is the danger posed by the "tunnel vision" approach to both teaching and research which permeates current academic thinking. The aim of this Commentary is to offer support for the proposed ideas on incorporating lessons from the GFC into intermediate accounting courses, whether such courses are taught in the USA or elsewhere. More specifically, it is argued that lessons from the GFC can be incorporated into teaching by building a course around a framework which reflects the financial reporting supply chain. [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).]