Summary: The 2008 Financial Crisis

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 late 2007, early 2008 the United States and the world was hit with the most serious economic downturn since The Great Depression in 1929. During this time the Federal Reserve played a huge role in assuring that it would not turn into the second Great Depression. In this paper, we will be discussing what the Federal Reserve did during this time, including a discussion of our nation’s three main economic goals which are GDP, employment, and inflation. My goal is to describe the historic monetary and fiscal policy efforts undertaken by the U.S. Government and Federal Reserve, including both the traditional and non-traditional measures to ease credit markets and stimulate the economy.

On October 3, 2008 President George W. Bush signed the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, otherwise known as the “bailout.” The Purpose of this act was defined as to, “Provide authority for the Federal Government to purchase and insure certain types of trouble assets for the purpose of providing stability to and preventing disruption in the economy and financial system and protecting taxpayers, to amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to provide incentives for energy production and conservation, to extend certain expiring provisions, to provide individual income tax relief, and for other purposes” (Emergency Economic Stabilization Act). In my paper I will explain and show the relationship between the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 and subprime lending, the collapse of the housing market, bundled mortgage securities, liquidity, and the Government 's efforts to bailout the nation 's banks.

Unfortunately, the mortgages would take a turn for the worst; thus, resulting in investment funds lost and the inability to repay the loans that they borrowed from the banks (Isidore, 2008). Left with nothing, the banks were forced to declare the loans as unrecoverable, reduce the bank’s reserve, and limit their ability to generate new loans (Isidore, 2008). These actions destroy the economy because both businesses and buyers need loans to pay for investment expenditures and finance consumption (Isidore, 2008). An early problem was “ mortgage-backed security”. According to AP Economics 19 edition, “ Mortgage- backed securities are bonds backed by mortgage payments”(Brue). In order to create mortgage- backed securities, lenders begin by creating mortgage loans (Brue). When they do, the lenders combine hundreds of loans into one and sell them off as bonds; basically selling the right to regain all future payments (Brue). In the end, banks receive an individual payment for the bond. Bond buyers recover the mortgage payments as the gain on the investment (Brue). As first, it seemed like a good decision on the bank’s party because it moved any future default risk on those mortgages to the buyer’s bond (Brue). Unfortunately, they fail to realize that they had lent the significant amount of money they got from investment funds to selling bonds (Brue). Moreover, the banks bought huge amounts of

The Global Financial Crisis or 2008 financial crisis is considered by many economists to have been the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. It resulted in the threat of total collapse of large financial institutions, the bailout of banks by national governments, and downturns in stock markets around the world.

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

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?’’

The collapse of Lehman Brothers, a sprawling global bank, in September 2008 almost brought down the world’s financial system. Considered by many economists to have been the worst financial crisis since the Great depression of the 1930s. Economist Peter Morici coined the term the “The Great Recession” to describe the period. While the causes are still being debated, many ramifications are clear and include the failure of major corporations, large declines in asset values (some estimates put the drop in the trillions of dollars range), substantial government intervention across the globe, and a significant decline in economic activity. Both regulatory and market based solutions have been proposed or executed to attempt to combat the causes and effects of the crisis.

The banking crisis of the late 2000s, often called the Great Recession, is labelled by many economists as the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Its effect on the markets around the world can still be felt. Many countries suffered a drop in GDP, small or even negative growth, bankrupting businesses and rise in unemployment. The welfare cost that society had to paid lead to an obvious question: ‘Who’s to blame?’ The fingers are pointed to the United States of America, as it is obvious that this is where the crisis began, but who exactly is responsible? Many people believe that the banks are the only ones that are guilty, but this is just not true. The crisis was really a systematic failure, in which many problems in the

When housing prices began to drop and interest rates began to rise, borrowers couldn’t afford their monthly payment. When the loan amount became higher than the worth of the house, the borrowers simply walked away and defaulted on their loans (Conners and Gwartney 64). This caused the banks, as well as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to have many default loans on their books.

It is widely believed that the 2008 financial crisis finds its roots in the greed of fat cat Wall Street bankers but, in fact, the crisis finds its origins in a myriad of different inputs. Just like a financial portfolio, the 2008 financial crisis was the work of years of diversified sources. This “perfect storm” so to speak struck Wall Street in the fall of 2008 the Dow Jones

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

According to the specialists, there are many reasons for this global financial crisis. We try to focus some prime reasons behind this

This chapter is about the background of 2007-2008 financial crisis. The 2007-2008 financial crisis has a huge impact on US banking system and how the banks operate and how they are regulated after the financial turmoil. This financial crisis started with difficulty of rolling over asset backed commercial papers in the summer of 2007 due to uncertainty on the liquidity of mortgage backed securities and questions about the soundness of banks and non-bank financial institutes when interest rate continued to go up at a faster pace since 2004. In March 2008 the second wave of liquidity loss occurred after US government decided to bailout Bear Stearns and some commercial banks, then other financial institutions took it as a warning of financial difficulty of their peers. In the meantime banks started hoarding cash and reserve instead of lending out to fellow banks and corporations. The third wave of credit crunch which eventually brought down US financial system and spread over the globe was Lehman Brother’s bankruptcy in August 2008. Many major commercial banks in US held structured products and commercial papers of Lehman Brother, as a result, they suffered a great loss as Lehman Brother went into insolvency. This panic of bank insolvency caused loss of liquidity in both commercial paper market and inter-bank market. Still banks were reluctant to turn to US government or Federal Reserve as this kind of action might indicate delicacy of