The Causes and Consequences of the Financial Crisis of 2008

In the movie the big short, Lewis Ranieri, who is a banker of the Wall Street, created an idea that companies packed thousands of mortgage all bundled together to sell, which is the AAA credit-rating bond, and can obtain high yields with low risk because everyone should pay for their mortgage. The concept of Lewis Ranieri is called mortgage-backed securities (MBS). However, the demand of buying MBS is more than MBS supply. Therefore, when the risk of MBS is high, Collateralized Debt Obligation (CDO) is a way to change subprime loans to high- rating bonds and it can be sold again. Although CDO is full of subprime loans, it still can get AAA rating because

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

The beginning of the crisis is rooted in banks giving out subprime loans to people who would have not otherwise been given these loans. The banks assumed that these loans could be bundled and the numbers proved that they were safe investments, because enough people would pay their loans back.

So what exactly happened to the subprime mortgage market that caused all of this? It actually goes back to 1998 with the Glass-Steagall legislation, which separated regular banks and investment banks was repealed in 1998. This allowed banks, whose deposits were guaranteed by the FDIC to engage in highly risky business because they were guaranteed their deposits up to $250,000 per depositor. Following the dot-com bust in 2000, the Federal Reserve dropped rates to 1 percent and kept them there for an extended period. This drop in rates caused bank managers to have to go after higher-yielding bonds because they could no longer make decent yields off of municipal bonds or treasury bonds. They, like Wall Street, got creative with lending, and went after high-yield mortgage-backed securities like subprime mortgages which were mostly dominated by non-bank originators but because of the demand, many banks and private sector lenders jumped on board to increase profits.

A few years later the market took a turn for the worse, where interest rates were on the rise, and homes were losing their value quickly. Now borrowers that were in these interest only ARM’s needed to refinance these loans because the rates were going up, to a point where the homeowner was not be able to afford the payment. The Federal Reserve tried to stimulate the economy by lowering interest rates during the recession in early 2001, from over 6% in 2000, to a rate just above 1.25% in 2002. These low rates encouraged many Americans to apply for loans for homes that a few years ago they would have not been able to. To encourage the homeownership boom, the Bush administration urged Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to allot more money for low-income borrowers so they could buy their own homes. This resulted in the subprime mortgage

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 financial crisis that put our economy on a downhill rocky road is known as the Great Recession of 2008. The U.S. Governments resolution to one the biggest panics was revolved around multiple bailout and fiscal measures. The fight to pull our weakening economy out of a dark hole left the American people with hope of advancing what gets thrown their way. The many bailout programs implemented by the U.S. Government can only hold the economy together for so long until were up to our knees in debt.

hroughout History, our great Nation, the United States of America, went through many era's of financial crises that resulted in depressions. This also happened in 2008, when we experienced an immense financial crisis known as the Great Depression of 2008-2009. In an effort to end the financial crises, the government established three major bailouts: the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 (EESA), the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). Overall, the financial crises of the Great Recession of 2008-2009 caused the government to implement various bail-outs in an attempt to stabilize the economy. These programs have their own advantages and disadvantages that affect individuals and

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

The Financial crisis has its roots in real estate and the famous sub-prime lending crisis. In 1990, during president Bill Clinton administration, Commercial banks and residential properties witnessed their values increase for almost a decade. Increases in the house market coincide with the lowering of interest rate and lending standards to unqualified borrowers accepting them to take out mortgages whereas at the same time the government deregulations mixed the lines between traditional financial institutions and mortgages lenders. The real estate loans were distributing through out the financial & Banking system in the shape of CDOs and other complex derivatives in order to scatter or spread the risk; however, when home values stopped to rise and homeowners flopped to keep up with their payments and banks were forced to foreclosure their homes.

The effects of the 2008 Financial crisis were felt globally, it being the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Suggested in the documentary Inside Job shown in class, there were many factors which led to the 2008 Financial crisis. To better understand how it happened, we have to look back to the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Once this new sub-prime market began to take off, greed began to set in as well as many other untested variables. As for greed, lenders devised new loan packages that gave initial discount rates that later matured, many times underwriting people who could barely afford the initial rate, let alone the matured rate. The stage was also being set for disaster because the market was being flooded with capital. Rates were falling, which increased demand, which in turn appreciated the value of the housing market. This fueled the fire because brokers were making more commission on home sales and originators were selling off their mortgages to the secondary mortgage markets after collecting the originating fees they then packaging these into several vehicles of securities and bonds for investors. This freed up more capital to originate more sub-prime mortgages and the cycle continued to balloon. The economy was now roaring out of the 2001 recession which was the result of the tech bubble. As housing values increased, consumers were encouraged to refinance and use home equity lines of credit to pay off other bills, remodel kitchens to increase their home value, pay for college

The problem was everyone who qualified for a mortgage already had one. Lenders knew if they sold a mortgage to a person that defaults the lender gets the house, and houses were always increasing in value in that market, that would be a valuable asset to sell. To keep up with the demand from investors, lenders started selling mortgages to borrowers who wouldn’t have qualified before because of the risk for default. These mortgages are called sub-prime mortgages and lenders started creating tons of them. In the unregulated market, lenders employed predatory tactics to get more borrowers with attractive offers such as no money down, no credit history required, even no proof of income. People never would have qualified before were now buying large houses, and the lenders sold their mortgages to Investment bankers. The investors packed subprime mortgages in with prime mortgages so credit agencies would still give a AAA rating. The rating Agencies who had a conflict of interest by receiving payments from the investment banks, had no liability if their credit ratings were correct or not. They turned a blind eye to the risky CDOs and kept giving AAA ratings. This worked for a while and everyone was happy including the new homeowners. The housing market became hyper inflated with more homeowners than ever. Wall Street continued to sell their CDO’s which were ticking time bombs. The subprime mortgages began

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

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