Essay on Financial Crisis of 2008 Analysis

The outbreak and spread of the financial crisis of 2007-2008 have caused the most of countries into severe economic difficulties and also created an adverse impact on the global economy. The beginning of the financial crisis is defaults in the subprime mortgage market in the USA. Although the global economy seems to recover since 2009, the impacts of the crisis still affect many countries until now. This essay focuses on the background and impacts of financial crisis, and the learning from the movie The Big Short.

In 2008, the world experienced a tremendous financial crisis which rooted from the U.S housing market; moreover, it is considered by many economists as one of the worst recession since the Great Depression in 1930s. After posing a huge effect on the U.S economy, the financial crisis expanded to Europe and the rest of the world. It brought governments down, ruined economies, crumble financial corporations and impoverish individual lives. For example, the financial crisis has resulted in the collapse of massive financial institutions such as Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brother and AIG. These collapses not only influence own countries but also international area. Hence, the intervention of governments by changing and

In the 1980s, investments banks such as Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns, JP Morgan, and Morgan Stanley started selling mortgage bonds. Mortgage bonds were a collection of thousands of home mortgages, purchased from lenders, and their associated income streams (monthly payment). To address the fact that some homeowners often refinance their debt when interest rates are low which prematurely pays off the debt, mortgage bonds were stacked into layers called ‘tranches’. The lowest tranche represented mortgages to be paid off early, and the highest layer was the last mortgages to be paid off.

In the lead up to the current recession, when the real estate market began to fall, there were so many investors shorting stocks and securitized mortgage packages that were already falling, that the market simply fell further. There were no buyers at the bottom, and the professional investors made millions off of the losses of others. Beyond this, there was no real federal regulation for securitized mortgages, since there was no real way to gauge the mathematical risk of any given package. This allowed the investors to take advantage of the system and to short loans on real people’s homes. Once these securities were worthless, many of the homebuyer’s defaulted on their mortgages and were left penniless. No matter from which angle this crisis is looked at, the blame rests squarely with the managers who began the entire cycle, the ones who pursued the securitization of mortgages. Their incompetence not only led to the losses of Americans who have never invested in the stock market, but to losses for their shareholders.

It is necessary to first explain what Thomas Sowell an economics scholar says “The cast of characters” (Sowell 2). The nature of the housing market makeup is much more than just a bank issuing loans. The importance is to understand what lies behind the scene and from there comprehend the causes of the housing crisis. The Federal Reserve System in general regulates banks across the county. The Federal Reserve also has power to “take action which affect interest rates and the money supply” (Sowell 2). The Federal National Mortgage Association and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation are “two government-created, but privately owned, profit-making enterprises that buy mortgages from banks” (Sowell 3). The Federal National Mortgage Association is also known as Fannie Mae, and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation is also known as Freddie Mac. These Associations as stated above buy loans from banks, which ultimately eliminates the banks wait for 30 years of monthly payments. According to book The Housing Boom and Bust “Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac purchased more than one-third of all the mortgages in the nation that were resold by the original lenders.” The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development is another major entity in the real estate housing market. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development is also known as (HUD) and “exercises authority over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,

The Global Financial Crisis, also known as The Great Recession, broke out in the United States of America in the middle of 2007 and continued on until 2008. There were many factors that contributed to the cause of The Global Financial Crisis and many effects that emerged, because the impact it had on the financial system. The Global Financial Crisis started because of house market crash in 2007. There were many factors that contributed to the housing market crash in 2007. These factors included: subprime mortgages, the housing bubble, and government policies and regulations. The factors were a result of poor financial investments and high risk gambling, which slumped down interest rates and price of many assets. Government policies and regulations were made in order to attempt to solve the crises that emerged; instead the government policies made backfired and escalated the problem even further.

Mortgage-backed securities (MBSs) are shares of a home loan sold to investors. They work like this: A bank lends a borrower the money to buy a house and collects payments on the loan. This loan and a number of others, perhaps thousands, are sold to a larger bank that compiles the loans together into a mortgage-backed security. The larger bank then issues shares of this security, called tranches (French for "slices"), to investors who buy them and ultimately collect the dividends in the form of the monthly mortgage payments. These tranches can be further repackaged and sold again as other securities, called collateralized debt obligations (CDOs). Home loans in 2008 were so divided and spread across the financial spectrum; it was possible a given

Collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) refers to a kind of innovative derivative securities product which simply bundling mortgage debt, bonds, loans and other assets together and then rearranging these assets into different tranches with different credit ratings, interest rate payments, risks, and priority of repayment to meet the needs of different investors. As borrowers began to default, investors in the inferior tranche of the CDOs took the first hit, so the owner of this tranche of CDOs may be riskier. In order to compensate for the higher risk, the subordinate tranche receives higher rate of return while the superior tranche receives lower rate but still nice return. To make the top even safer, the banks ensured it small fee called the credit default swap (CDS). The banks do all of the works so that creating rating agencies will stamp the top tranche since as a safe, triple A rated

During the time prior to the mortgage crisis, the economy was looking good to the mortgage brokers and lenders in the United States as well as new homeowners. After all, it is the ‘American Dream’ to own a

The financial crisis of 2008 was one of the worst recessions in American history since the Great Depression. During the financial crisis of 2008, big banks lost their money, the stock market crashed, people lost their houses, and the value of loans plummeted. The financial crisis of 2008 was a crisis in value for the financial market, which bled into the economy of the country. The way that the system of banking was set up made the economy of the country extremely vulnerable to any risks taken in the financial market. In the end, the government had to step in to bail out banks and to create policies to upturn value into the economy. In this paper, I describe the financial system that was in place, which caused the crisis of 2008, and suggest that a regulatory system is established to decrease bank sizes and remove the shadow banking system in order to avoid a similar devaluation in the future.

The 2008 financial crisis can be traced back to two factor, sub-prime mortgages and debt. Traditionally, it was considered difficult to get a mortgage if you had bad credit or did not have a steady form of income. Lenders did not want to take the risk that you might default on the loan. In the 2000s, investors in the U.S. and abroad looking for a low risk, high return investment started putting their money at the U.S. housing market. The thinking behind this was they could get a better return from the interest rates home owners paid on mortgages, than they could by investing in things like treasury bonds, which were paying extremely low interest. The global investors did not want to buy just individual mortgages. Instead, they bought

Just after ten years of Asian financial crisis, another major financial crisis now concern for all developed and some developing countries is “Global Financial Crisis 2008.” It is beginning with the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers on Sunday, September 14, 2008 and spread like a flood. At first U.S banking sector fall in a great liquidity crisis and simultaneously around the world stock markets have fallen, large financial institutions have collapsed or been bought out, and governments in even the wealthiest nations have had to come up with rescue packages to bail out their financial systems. (Global issue)

Housing prices in the United States rose steadily after the World War II. Although some research indicated that the financial crisis started in the US housing market, the main cause of the financial crisis between 2007 and 2009 was actually the combination of housing bubble and credit boom. The banks created so much loan that pushed the housing price to the peak. As the bank lend out a huge amount of money, the level of individual debt also rose along with the housing price. Since the debt rose faster than people’s income, people were unable to repay their loan and bank found themselves were in danger. As this showed a signal for people, people withdrew money from the banks they considered as “safe” before, and increased the “haircuts” on repos and difficulties experienced by commercial paper issuers. This caused the short term funding market in the shadow banking system appeared a

In relation to the increase in house’s price, the rise of financial agreements such as mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and collateralized debt obligations (CDO) encouraged investors to invest in the U.S housing market (Krugman, 2009). When housing price declined in the U.S, many financial institutions that borrowed and invested in subprime mortgage reported losses. In addition, the fall of housing price resulted in default and foreclosure and that began to exhaust consumer’s wealth and

Without the CDOs and securitization the logic of mortgages is simple: banks make loans to households that are backed up by the estates. Banks themselves bear the risk of default on the mortgage and benefit from the repayment and interest on mortgages. If default on mortgages happens, banks can choose to liquidize the houses to cover the loss.