The Global Financial Crisis

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

The financial crisis did not happen in a day or two, it was triggered by a variety of events that happened.in years ago. In year 1998, The Glass-Steagall legislation was repealed, it is a legislation that separated investments and commercial banking activities in the financial sector. This act then allowed banks in the US to act in both the commercial and investment fields, which allowed them to participate in highly risky business. This is somehow responsible for the mortgage-backed derivatives, which is a main cause of the

In 2008 the United States experienced the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression in the 1930s, primarily because of the bursting of the U.S. housing bubble and increasing default rates on subprime mortgages which caused the price of house to increase once a high amount of loans were given out by banks to potential homeowners. Securitization played a big role in this because of how risky the regulations are and the giant corporate companies that are truly fluctuating and controlling the market. At the peak of the financial crisis new specialized mortgage lenders and securitizers came along unrestricted by government regulations which resulted in an extreme number of foreclosures and the stock market to plummet.

On September 15, 2008, Wall Street entered the largest financial crisis since the Great Depression. On a day that could have been called Black Monday, the Dow Jones Industrial average plummeted almost 500 points. Historically prominent investment giant Lehman Brothers filled for bankruptcy, while Bank of America bought out former powerhouse Merrill Lynch (Maloney and Lindeman 2008). The crisis enveloped the economy of the United States, as effects are still felt today. Experts still disagree about what exactly caused the greatest financial disaster since the Great Depression, but many point to the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 as a gateway to the rise of extreme laissez-faire policies that allowed Wall Street to take on incredible risk at the expense of taxpayers. In the wake of the crisis, politicians look for policies that reign in the power of Wall Street, but the fundamental relationship between economic and political power has made such regulation ineffective.

A mortgage meltdown and financial crisis of unbelievable magnitude was brewing and very few people, including politicians, the media, and the poor unsuspecting mortgage borrowers anticipated the ramifications that were about to occur. The financial crisis of 2008 was the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression; ultimately coalescing into the largest bankruptcies in world history--approximately 30 million people lost their jobs, trillions of dollars in wealth diminished, and millions of people lost their homes through foreclosure or short sales. Currently, however, the financial situation has improved tremendously. For example, the unemployment rate has significantly improved from 10 percent in October of 2009 to five percent in

An excess of regulation, rather than an insufficiency of it, was the principal cause of the recent credit crunch.

were reaping the rewards while taxpayers were inheriting the risk. In 1993 Congress met the opposition half way by slowly incorporating direct federal loans but still keeping guarantees in place for the banks. After the financial crisis of 2008, President Obama completely eliminated the middleman and fully implemented direct student loans (Kingkade). Although this stopped large banks from profiting off of government backed loans, it still didn’t reduce the supply of loans or the ease of obtaining them.

The financial crisis of 2008 did not arise by chance. The meltdown was precipitated by systematic striping away of the New Deal era policies of bank regulation. Most notable of these deregulatory acts was that of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999. This bill repealed the legislation which held commercial banks and investment banks separate. As the beginning of the 21 century approached many bankers clamored for an end to the policy of the “firewall” between Investment and commercial banks. Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, sought to create more competition in the financial services industry. The policy, however, lead to the conglomeration of many corporate entities as banks had the capital to invest (in the form of consumer deposits) in a

The financial crisis of 2008 was one of the largest financial meltdown rivaling the Great

The two largest modern bank runs in American history were the Savings & Loans Crisis of the 1980’s and the Financial Crisis in 2008-2009. Both crises left permanent scars on our financial system and provide important lessons moving forward. In this paper, I will provide a comparative analysis of the various causes, economic effect and regulatory responses, in an attempt to perhaps display a pattern for these crises that we can lean on to prevent future ones. Ultimately, the analysis yielded that at the core both crises were caused by regulatory negligence, attempting to cheat the system and government policy mistakes regarding financial policy, all contributed to the rise of these crises. Both had detrimental economic effects, and both regulatory

The financial crisis of 2007–08, also known as the Global Financial Crisis, is considered by many economists to have been the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Mr. Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve at the time, believed it was equally problematic in many ways; although unemployment only reached half the level due to the Fed’s actions combined with a $700B stimulus. It collapsed large financial institutions, and stock markets dropped to half their pre-crisis level. The surface cause was the bursting of the U.S. housing bubble, which had peaked in 2004, caused the values of securities tied to U.S. real estate pricing to plummet, damaging financial institutions globally.

The outbreak of 2007-2009 financial crisis and its devastating impact on the economy left no room for further implementation of conventional monetary policy. Once the zero lower bound had been reached, as well as the connection between official interest rates and market rates was lost, it was obvious to policymakers that they were in front of an exceptional situation, and in an analogy to what Hippocrates claimed about remedies, this situation called for exceptional measures that could support the functioning of financial markets.

The financial crisis was triggered by a complex interplay of policies that encouraged home ownership, providing easier access to loans for subprime borrowers, overvaluation of bundled subprime mortgages based on the theory that housing prices would continue to escalate, questionable trading practices on behalf of both buyers and sellers, compensation structures that prioritize short-term deal flow over long-term value creation, and a lack of adequate capital holdings from banks and insurance companies to back the financial commitments they were making. Questions regarding bank solvency, declines in credit availability and damaged investor confidence had an impact on global stock markets, where securities suffered large losses during 2008 and early 2009. Economies worldwide slowed during this period, as credit tightened and international trade declined. Governments and central banks responded with unprecedented fiscal stimulus, monetary policy expansion and institutional bailouts.

The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) is considered by many, particularly economists, to be the most disastrous financial crisis since the Great Depression back in the 1930s. It was the systematic collapse several large financial institutions based on Wall Street triggered by the housing bubble burst, followed by immense market value drop in the Dow Jones and the US dollar. This led to a massive financial bailout carried out by the US government, called the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, valued at up $700 billion dollars. This financial crisis, which occurred from 2007 to 2008 lead to the global recession, also known as the Great Recession which went on from 2008 to 2012. The effects or more specifically the financial effects that the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2008 were many, all of which will be discussed in this analysis later on. But more importantly, were the factors involved which contributed to this financial crisis.

The origin of the financial crises was the burst of the housing market. The ending of the dot com bubble as well as the Enron scandal in the beginning of the new millennium put the US financial situation into a fragile state. To get the country going again the Federal Reserve Board reduced the interest rate to boost borrowing and investing. The historically low interest rate together with other governmental incentives allowed people, who had previously not been able to afford a house purchase, to invest in “the American dream” with so called subprime loans. With house prices constantly rising there seemed to be little that could go wrong, for the home buyers as well as for lenders. This was reinforced by the, at the time, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Alan Greenspan, who in his testimony before Congress about the economic outlook