2007-2008 Financial Crisis

In 2008, the housing market crashed and America fell into a recession. Many Americans lost their homes. Many investors lost large sums of money, and overall the economic recession hurt America as a whole. Today, we see that the stock market is more regulated than it was in 1929 with the Great Depression and 2008 with the Great Recession, but it is still not regulated as much as it previously was. In 1999, portions of the Banking Act of 1933, more commonly known as the the Glass-Stegall Act, were repealed. The repeal of the Glass-Stegall Act in 1999 sparked the Housing Crisis of 2005 and ultimately led to the Great Recession that America experienced in the 2000’s.

The financial crisis of 2007-2009 resulted from a variety of external factors and market incentives, in combination with the housing price bubble in the United States. When high levels of bank and consumer leverage appeared, rising consumption caused increasingly risky lending, shown in the laxity in the standard of securities ' screening and riskier mortgages. As a consequence, the high default rate of these risky subprime mortgages incurred the burst of the housing bubble and increased defaults. Finally, liquidity rapidly shrank in the United States, giving rise to the financial crisis which later spread worldwide (Thakor, 2015). However, in the beginning of the era in which this chain of events took place, deregulation was widely practiced, as the regulations and restrictions of the economic and business markets were regarded as barriers to further development (Orhangazi, 2014). Expanded deregulation primarily influenced the factors leading to the crisis. The aim of this paper is to discuss whether or not deregulation was the main underlying reason for the 2007/08 financial crisis. I will argue that deregulation was the underlying cause due to the fact that the most important origins of the crisis — the explosion of financial innovation, leverage, securitisation, shadow banking and human greed — were based on deregulation. My argument is presented in three stages. The first section examines deregulation policies which resulted in the expansion of financial innovation and

The financial crisis that happened during 2007-09 was considered the worst financial crisis in the world since the great depression in the 1930s. It leads to a series of banking failures and also prolonged recession, which have affected millions of Americans and paralyzed the whole financial system. Although it was happened a long time ago, the side effects are still having implications for the economy now. This has become an enormously common topic among economists, hence it plays an extremely important role in the economy. There are many questions that were asked about the financial crisis, one of the most common question that dragged attention was ’’How did the government (Federal Reserve) contributed to the financial crisis?’’

As of December 2007, the United States fell into the worst economic recession seen in 60 years. This recession was caused by banks’ risky investments that were then were purchased and sold by investors without the customers knowing. This was a violation of the Glass –Stiegel Act. Even though so many corporations were practicing these shady deals, none were punished even though laws were being broken. Loans were given to people whether the bank thought they could pay it back or not. This became a huge problem for the banks because so many people were not able to repay the money that they borrowed. Banks were losing more money than what was coming in at the time. As less and less money was coming into the banks, they began struggling to stay

At the time after the stock market crash (1929), during the Great Depression, most of the people agreed that the main cause for the event was the “improper banking activity” which was mainly seen as the bank involvement in the stock market investment. Banks were taking high risks in hope for rewards, they were “accused of being too speculative in the pre-Depression era” (HEAKAL, 2010, pg.1). They were not only investing their assets, but they were also buying issues in order to resale them to the public. Nearly five thousand banks failed in the U.S. during the Great Depression. As a result of that most people wouldn’t trust the U.S. financial structure anymore. In order to rebuild the

The market is a very fluid situation and this is becoming more and more apparent in the past ten years with the Great Recession from 2007-2009. Therefore, businesses are operating in an economy where the competition is high and the potential for failure has become significant. Those two aspects have been and should be on the forefront of every organizations mind. Companies should have a strong focus on examining and evaluating not only their financial standings, but the other competitors in their market in order to boost sales and continue on the path to maturity. If a company is successful in reaching this goal they will have the ability to hold the competitive edge on their rivals. Major organizations such as Home Depot and Lowes are placing more focus on increasing that edge, while contending with others in their pool, overall to increase, gain, and retain a piece of the devoted consumer.

On September 15, 2008, Wall Street entered the largest financial crisis since the Great Depression. On a day that could have been called Black Monday, the Dow Jones Industrial average plummeted almost 500 points. Historically prominent investment giant Lehman Brothers filled for bankruptcy, while Bank of America bought out former powerhouse Merrill Lynch (Maloney and Lindeman 2008). The crisis enveloped the economy of the United States, as effects are still felt today. Experts still disagree about what exactly caused the greatest financial disaster since the Great Depression, but many point to the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 as a gateway to the rise of extreme laissez-faire policies that allowed Wall Street to take on incredible risk at the expense of taxpayers. In the wake of the crisis, politicians look for policies that reign in the power of Wall Street, but the fundamental relationship between economic and political power has made such regulation ineffective.

The Glass-Steagall Act, which was implemented in 1933, was enacted in response to the abuses by the banks prior to the stock market crash of 1929. The law separated commercial banks and investment banks: the commercial banks would be allowed to take deposits and make loans and investment brokers were allowed to underwrite and sell securities. The law worked well for the most part from 1933-1999. Then in 1999, The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 allowed commercial and investment banks to merge. After GLB was passed, it did not take long for the deregulation to cause many banks and Wall Street to take advantage of the situation. The banks began to generate very risky and fraudulent loans and then bundled and sold them worldwide as solid mortgage backed securities on Wall Street. Inevitably, of course, these securities catostrophically changed our world economy for the worst. Subsequently, though, a silver lining emerged iin July of 2010, the Dodd-Frank regulatory reform bill was passed to reduce the chance of this happening again. Although the Dodd-Frank reform bill is a step in the right direction, the measure does not go far enough. Many believe that the only solution is to bring back Glass-Steagall.

The 1930s, the period of the Great Depression is perhaps the most unstable financial time in United States history. The decade where more than 40 percent of nation’s banks disappeared crippled the economy for years and caused the Senate to pass the Glass-Steagall Act (part of the U.S. Banking Act of 1933). The main purpose of the legislation was to separate commercial and investment banking, limiting commercial banks’ securities and activities within commercial banks and securities firms and to restore confidence in the U.S. banking system. For the next 30 or so years, there was a substantial government safety net and government played a huge role regulating the economy and maintaining the aggregate demand through fiscal and monetary policies. (Arthur MacEwan. “Inequality, Power, and Ideology: Understanding the Causes of the Current Economic Crisis.” Real World Macro, Economic Affairs Bureau, Inc. November 2012.)

were reaping the rewards while taxpayers were inheriting the risk. In 1993 Congress met the opposition half way by slowly incorporating direct federal loans but still keeping guarantees in place for the banks. After the financial crisis of 2008, President Obama completely eliminated the middleman and fully implemented direct student loans (Kingkade). Although this stopped large banks from profiting off of government backed loans, it still didn’t reduce the supply of loans or the ease of obtaining them.

“The 2007-8 stock market crash was largely due to widespread defaulting on subprime mortgages.” (The 2007-08 Financial crisis in review) In other words, towards the end of 2006, almost all borrowers defaulted. Instead of getting money, lenders got houses back, and put them again on sale. With the huge number of houses on the market, the supply was massively high, while the demand was low. Hence, the bubbles started bursting and the prices of the houses started declining

In the beginning of the financial crisis, most people normally will not realize or predict the disaster that is coming. As John Kenneth Galbraith discussed in “The Great Crash 1929,” “only after the market crash were there plausible grounds to suppose that things might now for a long while get a lot worse” (pg. 90). During the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the most destructive stock market crash happened in the United States’ history. There are numerous causes dedicated to this crash, such as, the inequality and the poor regulations of structures. The causes of this 1929 Great Crash are similar to those of the Financial Crisis in 2008. However, the Wall Street Crash of 1929 led to “a longest and deepest economic downturn in the United States’

Ever since the economic virus called “negative interest rates” scattered over European and later Japanese banks, our economic system has been the most unstable since the financial crisis of 2008. The virus, negative interest rates, is a concept in which the central bank charges interest in borrowing money and holding an account. It was brought forth in efforts to increase economic growth by giving commercial banks a tax on the large amount of reserves they hold in the bank. In other words, commercial banks’ negative charge results in the commercial banks having to pay to keep their money at the central bank.

The financial crisis of 2007 arose when banks, such as HSBC announced losses due to mortgages in the US housing market (BBC News - Global recession timeline, 2016). The crisis had a global impact as financial systems are interconnected. This crisis had huge impacts in many countries. In fact, in 2009, the UK Chancellor, Alistair Darling announced that the UK had a record debt of £175 billion (BBC NEWS | UK | UK Politics | Tax rise as UK debt hits record, 2016).

The financial crisis of 2007 and 2009 was the worst since the great depression. It was not a single event but a series of crises whose seeds had been planted in yet another recession of 2001 and the era of the internet bubble years earlier (Bodie, Kane, & Marcus, 2011). One of the reasons for the crisis was the rise in subprime lending. Subprime loans were offered to individuals who did not qualify for prime rate loans and carried a higher rate of interest than prime loans (Gilbert, 2011). Another reason behind the subprime mortgage crisis is argued to have been due to the lack of ethics and poor policies such as the Goldman rule which encouraged pursuit of profitable opportunities irrespective of the effects on others (Watkins, 2011).