The Subprime Loan Crisis : An Analysis Of The Ethical Shortcomings

The foreclosure crisis in America has impacted everyone- even those who don’t own homes. Our nation is currently struggling with high unemployment, a relatively illiquid credit market, and a deficit that raises serious concerns about the value of the US Dollar in the not too distant future. With interest rates already at historic lows and the government pursuing an unprecedented policy of quantitative monetary easing, options for government intervention are limited. While there is no simple solution to this problem, I think that we must look at the reasons the housing market went into crisis, and based on that develop a regulatory system that will allow us to avoid another situation like this in the future. If Americans believe

The 2008 housing market meltdown in America created a ripple effect that had a negative impact on multiple real estate and stock markets throughout the world. Also, many people who were investors in the America market have never recovered from this financial disaster. So, one must contemplate how this event could have transpired in a country with such a strong economy with governmental regulations designed to protect the average investor. Nevertheless, it is simple, it took brokers, real estate appraisers, realtors, Wall Street, and mortgage companies combined unethical behavior to allow greed to be his or her guidance in pursuing wealth form unsuspecting new home purchasers who could afford his and her recent purchase, a new house.

“The single greatest contributor to financial crises is the Federal Reserve manipulating interest rates in ways that distort the true price of capital.” (Kibbe, 2011) The distortion of numbers created a false sense of overinvesting when in actuality they are responding to false economic signals. Just like the Great Depression, the stock market was not the only thing that was effected, unemployment doubled and debt rose from 66% to 103%. The housing market also took a hit falling 30%.

What caused the financial crisis to happen? The origin of the crisis, the film argues, can be traced back to the 1980s, when the process of deregulation was eagerly implemented under the Reagan Era. Prior to the emergence of Reaganomics, the financial industry was tightly regulated following the Great Depression. Most of the banks were local and were prohibited from speculating customers’ deposits (brought by the Glass-Steagall Act), while the investment banks were modest and private. However, everything changed after 1980, when Ronald Reagan became president and the U.S economy entered a thirty-year phase of deregulation. Financial institutions, which included commercial and investment banks then embarked on the process of maximizing profit by making risky investments with the depositors’ money. By the end of the decade, saving and loans companies went bankrupt, causing tax payers to lose more than one hundred billion dollars. However, the government did not implement any reform and deregulation continued to take place under the Clinton

Once the housing prices started to come down, the bad financing became an issue as the big banks were starting to run out of money. First the government thought that it wouldn't effect the rest of the economy. But then one big bank went bankrupt and the government had to bail out the rest of the biggest banks to avoid a total collapse of the economy. They even had to bail out the top there car manufacturers, GM, Ford and Chrysler by giving them money. Otherwise millions of people would have lost their

Financial crisis conditions, the most important things are the subprime mortgage and the exotic ABS such as CDOs. The low down-payment requirement and the lack of sufficient credit check enabled people who were not financially eligible to take large loans to get the money, and allowed them to continue to refinance these mortgages as the home price continued to rise. This introduced large amounts of risks into the market and could send the market into a vicious downward spiral if the home price started to plateau or decline. Also the creation of these MBS made the financial market to be very opaque and had a high level of leverage. People were unsure how much risk was there in their positions, and lacked

This almost brought down the world’s financial system, and threatened the collapse some of the large financial institutions. Which luckily was prevented by the bailout of banks by national governments, but left the stock markets to fend for themselves, thus causing global drop. It took huge taxpayer-financed bailouts to shore up the industry. Even so, the ensuing credit crunch turned what was already a bad turn out into the worst recession in 80 years. In 2008 the world economy faced its most dangerous crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The contagion, which began in 2007 when sky-high home prices in the United States finally turned decisively downward, spread quickly, first to the entire U.S. financial sector and then to financial markets overseas. The American economy is built on credit, and because of this credit went unchecked and got out of control. Many people were taking out loans, mortgages became simple. Many people got rich and wanted more. Banks made a cut on the sale, then packaged the mortgage with a group of other mortgages and erased all personal responsibility of the loans. The housing market eventually declined, causing massive losses in mortgage backed securities. Many banks and investment firms began losing money. This also caused a massive amount of homes on the market which lowered housing prices and slowed

In the beginning days of the 21st century, the United States experience an increase in the price of real estate. The causes of the housing bubble were many and, even after it collapse in 2007, the causes for it creation are still under scrutiny. As parties are still blaming each other, the losing party in this crisis is the general public as they have been made responsible for it aftermath through the collectivization of the financial cost. Inquiries into the causes of the housing bubble and its eventual collapse has brought to light an ever increasing number of players responsible for its creation, some going back t the 1970s.

The main root of crises was mortgage system of US. Before crises there was increasing number of offers for people who have willing to get mortgage even though they were considered as a bad credit risk. The reason why they did it, the price of house was rising continuously and they thought that would go on increasing. It was clear that if people cannot

As a topic for this research paper, I decided to analyze the ethics behind the recent mortgage crisis in the United States. Banks were approving people for loans very easily, to people they knew would not be able to pay them back. Thus, many people were buying homes, missing payments, getting foreclosed on, and ruining what credit they had. Throughout this paper I intend to show how the practices that the banks were using were unethical. I will show who stakeholders were, and analyze them through Utilitarian and Kantian standpoints.

Financial bubbles occur within the United States economy, and trends in investments cause rising and falling within the economy. In the early-to-mid 2000s, the housing market took center stage for Wall Street investments. According to the podcast, Wall Street investors wanted increases in investment returns, and the housing market became the prime source of these new, bigger returns. A “chain of command” started as banks decided to indirectly cash in on these mortgage loans. As people defaulted on loans due to rising interest rates, this very large contribution of the economy collapsed, and a recession of the late 2000s caused people to lose their jobs. This American Life gives a detailed account of the recession of the late 2000s brought on by the housing market, and it suggests how new trends in economic investing can

Throughout the better part of previous decade, housing prices in the United States, especially in and around metropolitan areas and high population growth areas (such as the Southwest) saw an unprecedented rise in housing prices . In 2007, many of the financial instruments which were used to back the purchase of these properties, such as subprime and Alt-A mortgages, as well as Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs), suffered a sudden and massive downturn . In hindsight, it is accepted by a wide range of economists and analysts that the huge upswing in prices and the ensuing downturn comprised a housing market bubble . Bubbles are often studied from the perspective of behavioral economics and complex systems . Many diverse economic agents, all facing the same information regarding rapid housing prices growth, can generate “irrational exuberance” within markets, leading to huge upswings in prices. Similarly, when the same economic agents begin to hear new information about the unsustainability of such a bubble, an opposing feedback loop is created. When the effect of one feedback loop begins to dominate another, we stand at the precipice of a crash .

There has been a debate for years on what caused the Financial Crisis in 2008 and if there was one main cause, or a series of unfortunate events that led to the crisis. The crisis began when the market was no longer funding many financial entities. The Federal Reserve then lowered the federal funds rate from 5.25% to almost zero percent in December 2008. The Federal Government realized that this was not enough and decided to bail out Bear Stearns, which inhibited JP Morgan Chase to buy Bear Stearns. Unfortunately Bear Stearns was not the only financial entity that needed saving, Lehman Brothers needed help as well. Lehman Brothers was twice the size of Bear Stearns and the government could not bail them out. Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy on September 15, 2008. Lehman Brothers bankruptcy caused the market tensions to become disastrous. The Fed then had to bail out American International Group the day after Lehman Brothers failed (Poole, 2010). Some blame poor policy making and others blame the government. The main causes of the financial crisis are the deregulation of banks and bank corruption.

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

They have different shapes and sizes, taking different forms during time, and usually spread across borders. Financial crises are often the product of asset and credit booms that eventually turn into busts. This booms can be identify in time but no one still has an answer of why they are allowed to continue, knowing that can rapidly become unsustainable and turn into busts or crunches. The subprime crisis: origins and evolutionThe subprime crisis is an over studied topic studied by a vast number of thinkers trying to establish the cause and to find the culpable for the greatest economic collapse since great depression. Trying to point out a single cause as the root of the crisis is however impossible as our current situation is the results of a set of political, economic and social policies. A lot of literature is dedicated to the subprime crises subject, all finding guilt in the management and moral hazard existent in the American economy. It all started on the American continent and soon became viral thru all the world’s economies. The interdependence of countries created a wave effect, so all the symptoms of the crises could be seen in different time periods, in the whole world. The growths catches a faster pace with the help of financial instruments that were created to provide liquidity to the markets. So we could see the widespread securitization of mortgages pushing the credit market to develop under