Federal National Mortgage Association ( Freddie Mac )

In the year 2000, the stock market crashed whichshifted thepeople’s money away from the stock market and into the housing market. Many people were buying homes, which led to banks offering more loans, including subprimed loans. Most loans, specifically, subprimed loans began going into default once the credit markets froze in the summer 2007. Things began to deteriorate rapidly. The offering of subprimed loans stopped completely and interest rates for other types of borrowing such as corporate loans and consumer loans rose dramatically. Since the interest rates of loans were so high, home owners were not able to afford to make payments, which caused them to be evicted from their homes. In 2013, the government introduced new laws and

The general objective of this policy paper is to deeply understand the latest and most influential financial reforms and the current financial environment in U.S through relatively comprehensive analysis with regard to the Dodd-Frank Act. In doing so, I move forward to provide some suggestions on improving the relevant legislature.

In 2008, a series of bank and insurance company failures triggered a financial crisis that effectively halted global credit markets and required unprecedented government intervention. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were both taken over by the government. Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy on September 14th after failing to find a buyer. Bank of America agreed to purchase Merrill Lynch and American International Group (AIG) was saved by an $85 billion capital injection by the federal government. Shortly after, on September 25th, J P Morgan Chase agreed to purchase

In 2008 America’s financial system was brought to a stand still as decades of negligence and financial decisions caused our economy to sink into the worst recession since the great depression. Cultivating a problem worse than America has seen in roughly a century points one finger not at a particular cause, but a string of events that finally gave way. Now, eight years later our economy is still recovering, and time has allowed us to look back at decades of mistakes to try and connect the dots of the perfect storm that collapsed our financial market in 2008. In 2009 Brookings Institution, one of Washington’s oldest think tanks, concluded there were three causes that resulted in the crisis. Economists Martin Baily and Douglas Elliot stated that the results of government intervention in the housing market, the influences Wall Street had on Washington, and global economic forces were the three main causes of the economic collapse. They believed that a housing bubble inflated when Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two government-sponsored enterprises, intervened in the housing market. The banking industry was called out to be blamed for years of manipulation of our political and financial systems. Lastly, Baily and Elliot cite the global economy and the existence of a credit boom throughout European and Asian nations. Low inflation and consistent growth throughout the world economy spiked investors’ interest in acquiring riskier investments, which encouraged

This paper aims to analyze persuasive reasons for the remarkable success of Canadian Banks in the subprime meltdown. Regulations have been set before the crisis. However, different countries’ implementations are different in practice. The main arguments of this paper are related to the number characters-, leverage ratio and return of equity/asset (R-O-E/R-O-A). Using empirical data of these ratios in different banks in Canada and America lead the paper to several soundness conclusions.

In recent years, financial organizations have been bailed out to prevent the financial collapse of the economy. The Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) provided relief funds to financial institutions. This program is a part of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008. While controversial, the Obama administration determined it was necessary to prevent worldwide economic failure. This bail out was necessary to add stability to the financial markets after high-risk investments and fraudulent practices of the largest banking institutions in the US

By allowing banks to become “too big to fail”, the failure of one leads to massive repercussions for the entire economy. In a contrasting environment where many small institutions exist, the implosion of one bank will not have this far-reaching, catastrophic impact. In recent years, reforms have taken place that limit a company’s ability to be “too big to fail”. In the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008, measures to revitalize the financial system included the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protect Act of 2010, named after U.S Senator Christopher J. Dodd and U.S Representative Barney Frank. The Act aimed to increase regulation and transparency in an industry that had so clearly lacked them and minimize future risk in the

The 2008 housing market meltdown in America created a ripple effect that had a negative impact on multiple real estate and stock markets throughout the world. Also, many people who were investors in the America market have never recovered from this financial disaster. So, one must contemplate how this event could have transpired in a country with such a strong economy with governmental regulations designed to protect the average investor. Nevertheless, it is simple, it took brokers, real estate appraisers, realtors, Wall Street, and mortgage companies combined unethical behavior to allow greed to be his or her guidance in pursuing wealth form unsuspecting new home purchasers who could afford his and her recent purchase, a new house.

In How Markets Fail: the Logic of Economic Calamities, the author, John Cassidy, details the growth of the free market ideology. This ideology, he argues, has become an over idealized utopian notion of a self-regulating market has been expanded upon over decades to become common rhetoric that influenced policy. This driving theory became accepted into global, but specifically the American context, and led to the financial collapse of 2008 due to lax policies which encouraged risky behaviour in the belief the market would simply sort itself out, which in the end it did not. Cassidy argues that the self-regulating market in essence is a fallacy and the solution to prevent further market failures can only be obtained through a hybrid of free-market and government supervision. Cassidy effectively argues his point by detailing the historical development of the self market theory which provides a framework to later explain the market failure of 2008. Convincingly, he argues that there should be a focus on rational economics which have existed for decades but have been pushed aside in favour of the utopian self regulating market.

During the spring of 2008, rumors were circulating that the investment bank Bear Stearns would fail due to their massive investments in subprime mortgages, or “toxic assets.” These rumors were able to decline the companyʻs stock from $171 to $57 dollars a share, and bankruptcy was imminent. Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, realized that Bear Stearns could not be allowed to go bankrupt because they were deeply connected to many other firms, which would result in major economic failure. In response to the crisis, Bernanke lent money to JP Morgan, which then lent the money to Bear Stearns, as the Federal Reserve could not directly lend money to Bear Stearns as it is an unregulated investment bank. After this process, Henry Paulson, the Treasury Secretary, relied on the principle of moral hazard and notified the other banks that

During the great depression in 1934 many people didn’t have jobs. Not having jobs meant that it would be awfully hard for them to obtain a loan from banks in order to purchase homes. The government decided to help the American people by creating the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) which basically stepped in and allowed banks to offer mortgages to more people with the promise that the banks would get their money back. The FHA finances itself with insurance premiums that they charge borrowers as well as interest that they receive on reserves. They use these funds to underwrite more loans which helps out people with their mortgages.

Your credit score represents your creditworthiness. When you borrow money, your lender sends detailed information to the credit bureau, to create a credit report that analyzes how well you handle your debts. This number can determine everything from the interest rate on your mortgage or auto loan, to whether you’ll be approved for a credit card, to whether you can rent an apartment. The Fair Isaac Corporation (better known as FICO) is the most widely used credit rating agency in the US. This formula calculates your financial habits into a single three-digit FICO score ranging from 300 to 850.

One of the current topics in financial news concerns regulatory legislations and specifically the Dodd-Frank act that was enacted after the 2008 financial crisis. As with most regulatory legislations, there are both pros and cons with proponents to each side. I find the current arguments similar to the issues surrounding the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 that was enacted after many financial accounting scandals in the late 1990s. While many believe both pieces of legislations make the financial markets safer and more transparent, there needs to be a balancing act to allow capitalism to also flourish in a free economy.

In 2008 Fannie and Freddie lost a combined $47 billion in their single-family mortgage businesses, forcing the companies to dig deep into their capital reserves. By late summer in 2008—about a year after the start of the housing crisis—Wall Street firms had all but abandoned the U.S. mortgage market, while pension funds and other major investors throughout the world continued to hold large amounts of Fannie and Freddie securities. After the housing market collapsed, Fannie and Freddie needed a $200 billion bailout. If Fannie and Freddie were allowed to fail, experts agreed that the housing market would collapse even further, paralyzing the entire financial system. The Bush administration in September 2008 responded by placing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into government conservatorship, where they remain today.

After destroying an estimated $19.2 trillion of household wealth, costing an estimated 8.8 million jobs domestically, and preventing unknown trillions of dollars in productivity, ethics in the capital markets industry has become a topic of great debate (U.S. Department of the Treasury, 2012). This section will look at the events and behaviors that contributed to the 2008 Financial Crisis and attempt to answer the question: Who is to blame for the Financial Crisis?