Identify and discuss the interrelationships among the key factors highlighted in the global financial crisis “Inside Job” has identified two main themes that have been typically responsible for the financial crisis of 2008. Firstly, extensive deregulation since 1980s has been largely responsible. Secondly, the academia has played a pivotal role in legitimizing deregulation and has hence been indirectly, if not directly, responsible for the one of history’s biggest financial meltdowns. As far as deregulation is concerned, it affected the global financial system in a very complex and intriguing way largely through derivatives. Derivatives, as the world was unfortunate to discover, were the brainchild of the top executives of Investment …show more content…
Even sub-prime loans were combined to create CDOs and were sold heavily to investors worldwide primarily because these sub-prime loans carry high interest rates for investment banks. Through extensive loans that were not adjusted for risk, a bubble was created as demand sky-rocketed driving up prices of markets such as that of real estate and when CDOs went bad, which they were bound to, the global financial system choked. Additionally, during the bubble, investment banks were borrowing heavily to raise more loans to combine them to create CDOs and owing to deregulation, the leverage ratio of investment banks went up to an astounding figure of 33 to 1! It is quite important to understand the role of another market created by CDOs, that of Credit Default Swaps (CDS). CDS were derivatives sold by insurance companies to investors who owned CDOs so that if a CDO went bad, insurance companies would compensate for the losses of the investor in return for premiums paid by investors to insurance companies. Moreover, speculators which included investment banks could also buy CDS to bet against CDOs they did not own. Since CDS market was unregulated, insurance companies did not keep reserves to cover potential losses. Hence, when CDOs failed, insurance companies were caught on the hook and went
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.
On July 21, 2010, President Obama signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which is commonly referred as the Dodd-Frank Act. This act was passed as a response to the Great Recession in order to prevent potential financial debacle in the future. This regulation has a significant impact on American financial services industry by placing major changes on the financial regulation and agencies since the Great Depression. This paper examines the history and impact of Dodd-Frank Act on American financial services industry.
Because of this downfall of the housing market, the U.S. economy fell along with other markets across the country. Homeowners had mortgages higher than what their homes were valued at, the decline in housing prices caused many people to default on their mortgages which caused the values of mortgage backed securities and CDO’s to collapse, leaving banks and their financial institutions holding those securities with a lower value of
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
In 2008 the United States economy faced it most serious economic downturn since the great depression. This crisis began in 2006 when the subprime mortgage market showed an increase in mortgage defaults. This would lead to the decline of the U.S. housing market after a decade of high growth. The problems in the mortgage market where able to spread to other sectors of the economy especially in financial markets because of Collateralized Mortgage Obligations or CMOs. CMOs where mortgage backed securities that where given out by investment banks and where not regulated by the government. These securities fell as did mortgages due to increasing default rates. Because of CMOs companies bought Credit Default swaps or CDSs. These CDSs where nominally
In 2008, the United States went through one of the most significant economical period in history. The housing market and banks started to fail and people were unable to pay off their loans on the houses. This lead to a giant need for government intervention in determining which investment banks and corporations were worthy of being considered “too big to fail”. If they were in this category, the government would supply them with the funds necessary to not go bankrupt. Most of the time, the corporations would put this money towards consolidating their balance sheets, rather than solving the problems. This paper looks in depth into the 2008 financial crisis: the course
CDSs are used as an insurance against the possibility that the borrower could not repay his or her loan. In such case the issuer has to pay a specified sum to the buyer. Of course they are sold for a premium and if no credit events occur, the issuer makes profit. After the subprime mortgage crisis began, and many borrowers started defaulting on their loans, the pressure on the companies that had issued CDSs was rising. There were companies that simply did not have enough money to repay everything they owed. A famous example is AIG. The subprime mortgage crisis and the bankruptcy of big financial companies, like Lehman Brothers, meant that AIG had to pay much more money that it expected and made the company insolvent. The company itself had AAA rating shortly before this. This made the investors confident that even their high-rating investments failed, the insurer would certainly be able to repay them. A bailout from the US government followed. Generally, the issuers of these instruments can be held accountable for issuing them, without the ability to pay what they had to, when the credit events occurred. Of course many of them were mislead by the credit rating agencies and the overall conviction in the market that it was not as risky as it actually was. Many people argue that such instruments need to be regulated much better. They can create clear conflict of interests. For example, a
Q. 1. What were the major factors that led to the recent financial crisis? How did we get here?
“Since 2007 to mid 2009, global financial markets and systems have been in the grip of the worst financial crisis since the depression era of the late 1920s. Major Banks in the U.S., the U.K. and Europe have collapsed and been bailed out by state aid”. (Valdez and Molyneux, 2010) Identify the main macroeconomic and microeconomic causes that resulted in the above-mentioned crisis and make an assessment of the success or otherwise of the actions taken by the U.K government to resolve the problem.
The financial crisis from 2007 to 2009 may well be called the financial engineering and corporate authority gone wild. The birth of the financial crisis can be draw back to the property asset bubble in the US between 1997 and 2006. This financial bubble was enabled by a badly regulated subprime mortgage industry and the assumption that property prices would continue to
Blyth starts his deliberation off with a chapter on America and Europe. He discusses how America was too big to fail and how Europe was too big to bail. He analyses the reasoning as to why the whole world needs to be austere. Blyth explains that austerity is a means to reduce moral hazard. In the early 2000s, Alan Greenspan eased regulatory control in the American Treasury system. In doing so, it allowed for the introduction of new instruments of lending. These instruments can be described as derivatives. After the deregulation within the financial system, the financial banks decided to do what it liked. Blyth depicts what were the causes of the financial disaster were and continues to explore the repercussions of the post Lehman Brothers trauma.
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.
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
In the new system, an investment banker buys the mortgage from the lender, borrowing millions of dollars to buy thousands of mortgages, and every month he gets payments from homeowners for each of the mortgages. The banker then consolidates all the mortgages and splits the final product into three sections: safe, okay, and risky mortgages, which make up a collateralized debt obligation (CDO). As homeowners pay their mortgages, money flows into each of the sections, with the safe filling first and the risky filling last, contributing to their respective names. Credit agencies stamp the top two safer mortgages with a triple A or triple B rating, which are then be sold to investors who want a safe mortgage, while the risky slice is sold to hedge funds who want a risky investment. The bankers make millions, pay back their loans, and investors also make a worthwhile investment. So pleased are the investors, however, that they want more. Unfortunately, back at the beginning of the cycle, the mortgage broker can no longer find qualified mortgagers
The new lackadaisical lending requirements and low interest rates drove housing prices higher, which only made the mortgage backed securities and CDOs seem like an even better investment. Now consider the housing market which had become a housing bubble, which had now burst, and now people could not pay for their incredibly expensive houses or keep up with their ballooning mortgage payments. Borrowers started defaulting, which put more houses back on the market for sale. But there were not any buyers. Supply was up, demand was down, and home prices started collapsing. As prices fell, some borrowers suddenly had a mortgage for way more than their home was currently worth and some stopped paying. That led to more defaults, pushing prices down further. As this was happening, the big financial institutions stopped buying sub-prime mortgages and sub-prime lenders were getting stuck with bad loans. By 2007, some big lenders had declared bankruptcy. The problems spread to the big investors, who had poured money into the mortgage backed securities and CDOs. They started losing money on their investments. All these of these financial instruments resulted in an incredibly complicated web of assets, liabilities, and risks. So that when things went bad, they went bad for the entire financial system. Some major financial players declared bankruptcy and others were forced into mergers, or needed