The Great Panic: The Crisis, The Walking Plague

The Meltdown is a PBS special on the events of the financial crisis of 2008, in a timeline format, revealing the thinking behind decisions made during the fateful months before the stock market crash in August of that year. Some financial gurus on Wall Street devised a plan to bundle several mortgages together into a group, and then selling that bundle to another group of investors looking to invest in securities. The lender did not need to earn money from the loans he was giving out, he merely gained enough of a profit from the bundling operation that billions were being made on Wall Street from 2005-2008. The problem is that these bundles were risky, and as credit unworthy individuals defaulted on their mortgages, the entire system crumbled into what is now known as the Stock Market Crash of 2008, and have subsequently lived during the Great Recession.

In late October 1929 investors in New York City began to panic. Stocks that they had bought at high prices began to drop. More and more investors sold their stocks at whatever price they could get. Over two days, the value of companies being traded on the stock exchange fell almost 13 percent on Monday and another 12 percent the next day. That day became known as "Black Tuesday." Fortunes were wiped out. The stock market had crashed. All across the country, and all around the world, people paid attention to the news closely. Some investors killed themselves. Millions of people from all over the world who owned stocks waited helplessly as stock values crashed. After the crash, the amount of goods and

The Economist begins by explaining how the “subprime” loans are aimed at those with a bad credit record. This give readers an idea of how the financial crisis started. As the article progresses, they made many assumptions without backing their statement up with evidence. For example, they assume that subprime borrowers were poor and less likely to be white than those who could get a lower, fixed rate mortgages. Although readers may think this makes sense, but since its not supported by an evidence or statistic, this statement may not be entirely true. The Economist is consider to be a neutral and high quality news company. This article indeed was neutral as it was not written in favor of a liberal or conservative view. However, in the article,

Years before the crisis occurred, investors were looking for some place to put their loads of money to make more money. In the past these investors would go to the

It is clear that the most popular terms, which could be seen on media including the Internet, newspaper on the late of 2000s, are Global Financial Crisis (GFC), credit crunch, sub-prime crisis or bankruptcy. The financial crisis, started in the late of 2007 in the USA and quickly become international phenomenon, is seen to be the worst crisis since the Great Depression, 1929-1933 (Hull, 2012). GFC was a steel punch, which has probably destroyed the biggest and unbreakable economy in the world, the USA. It seems that the idiom “Too big to fail” may not true in all circumstances. There were some big financial institutions receiving bailout from the government and some announced go bankrupt such as 160-year-old bank and the forth-largest bank before the crisis, Lehman Bothers Bank . There were a lot of researches, books and journals discussing and debating every perspective the turmoil including causes, determinants and consequences. Further more, there were some researches of

The Financial Crisis was the worst economic event to occur in the United States since the Great Depression in the 1930’s. Millions of people lost their jobs, assets, and life savings as a result. The crisis also affected millions of people all around the world as the event unfortunately made low income citizens in other countries even poorer. The causes of the Financial Crisis are pretty clear, greed seemed to fuel the entire event. Anything that the executives and other high ranking people of financial institutions could do for more money, they did even though it came at the expense of others. Had the government not stepped in and bailed out some of the companies that were on the brink of bankruptcy, who knows how much long the Financial Crisis could have lasted. Now you would think that lessons would be learned by this horrific event, but that is not necessarily the case. While the government took measures to prevent another Financial Crisis America could easily have another Financial Crisis again in the future, and this one may be worse than the first.

The 2007 - 2009 financial crisis was the worst financial and economic crisis since the 1929 stock market collapse leading to the Great Depression, hence it has been dubbed the Great recession. This disruption in the economy due to the lost confidence in the financial institutions undermined the stability of the financial system and led to the loss of jobs and trillions of dollars in wealth and savings for entities within the economy. The gravity of the U.S crisis influenced the global financial system leading to a worldwide crisis.

The end of 2007 confirmed the conventional view that the initial financial problems were concentrated in institutions exposed to mortgage securitization. But how it is that financial imbalances were transmitted into macroeconomic disruptions? What mainly channeled the crisis to other sectors was the resulting contraction in credit, of banks and other financial intermediaries. It is important to differentiate between the loss of financial actors associated with mortgages, which was the initially crisis, and the losses caused by the after effects, also called second-round effects, which had significant consequences on the supply of credit. It will be analyzed in detailed above, how the problems associated with the housing bubble resulted in the contraction of credit supply by financial institutions.

Accounting’s Positivistic Tendencies: Overlaying a Social Science with Pure Scientific Rationale
Tutorial 5 - Week 6

The best evidence so far for the existence of an American empire, despite denials to the contrary, is the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). The persistent removal of restrictions and oversights on the domestic financial system of the US, combined with the decisions of individual firms, other governments and foreign financial organisations, culminated in the singe largest depreciation of assets and currency valuations in history, surpassing even the Great Depression in its extents.

On September 15, 2008, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. With $639 billion in assets and $619 billion in debt, Lehman 's bankruptcy filing was the largest in history, as its assets far surpassed those of previous bankrupt giants such as WorldCom and Enron. Lehman was the fourth-largest U.S. investment bank at the time of its collapse, with 25,000 employees worldwide. Lehman 's demise also made it the largest victim, of the U.S. subprime mortgage-induced financial crisis that swept through global financial markets in 2008. Lehman 's collapse was a seminal event that greatly intensified the 2008 crisis and contributed to the erosion of close to $10 trillion in market capitalization from global equity markets in October 2008, the biggest

The financial collapse of 2007/2008 was due to the significance of sub-prime mortgages and mortgage-backed securities. A sub-prime mortgage is a mortgage given to individuals who are refused prime mortgages. Whilst mortgage-backed securities is when banks securitise mortgages by pooling them together and then selling them to investors. Investors then receive monthly interest and principal payments, whilst banks receive a fee for the sale. In 2007/2008 those who had sub-prime mortgages were failing to keep up with principal payments, which was exacerbated by rising interest rates. Meanwhile, subprime mortgage-backed securities decreased in value forcing banks to sell them at low prices and incur a financial loss on those remaining. Consequently, these factors made institutions suffer with reduced demands for mortgages, declines in stock prices, falling liquidity in the market and having to write off millions of bad debt. As a result, this started the financial crisis of 2007/2008.

The global financial crisis has raised many concerns for the need to restructure the approach of risk and regulation in the financial sector (KPMG 2011). Figure. 4 has shown the structures of Basel III. It aims to increase the capital and liquidity of banks and therefore maintaining the stability in banking sector with full effect in 2019 (Banks For International Settlements 2011).

Nationwide Building Society is a mutual financial institution dealing with mortgage loans, investments, retail banking, current accounts, loans, house insurance, travel insurance and credit cards. It is the largest building society in the United Kingdom and the world. It falls under the banking and financial services sector. The great recession of 2008 hit the banking and financial services sector hard as the recession led to the financial crisis of 2007-2009.

On September 15, 2008, the infamous investment bank Lehman Brothers was forced to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy by the federal court. The firm was entangled in risky business that ultimately led to its demise because they did not take reasonable care to avoid acts that were foreseeably damaging to the United States economy.