The United States ' Housing Bubble

Our economy is a machine that is ran by humans. A machine can only be as good as the person who makes it. This makes our economy susceptible to human error. A couple years ago the United States faced one of the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression, which was the Great Recession. The Great Recession was a severe economic downturn that occurred in 2008 following the burst of the housing market. The government tried passing bills to see if anything would help it from becoming another Great Depression. Trying to aid the government was the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve went through a couple strategies in order to help the economy recover. The Federal Reserve provided three major strategies to start moving the economy in a better direction. The first strategy was primarily focused on the central bank’s role of the lender of last resort. The second strategy was meant to provide provision of liquidity directly to borrowers and investors in key credit markets. The last strategy was for the Federal Reserve to expand its open market operations to support the credit markets still working, as well as trying to push long term interest rates down. Since time has passed on since the Great Recession it has been a long road. In this essay we will take a time to reflect on these strategies to see how they helped.

The United States will always recall autumn of 2008 as a time of financial terror, and rightly so. After the stock market crash, millions of Americans, previously unaware of the brewing crisis, lost their businesses, their jobs, and their homes. Even now, we still are in a period of recovery from the economic turmoil of that year.

Several years ago, many of us could not imagine mortgage meltdown ending. It seemed as if the foreclosures/short sales were increasing and the American dream of buying a home was decreasing. Many people felt hopeless and cheated when it came to the economy’s poor status due to the housing crash. Many lessons were learned from the collapse and although it may seem hard to believe, there were silver linings in the mistakes made during the mortgage meltdown. Today, real estate buyers are benefiting from the past mistakes and have more confidence in their home buying purchases.

The following essay will thoroughly examine the severe economic downturn of 2008, formerly known as the housing bubble collapse. We will mainly focus our discussion on the effects the financial crisis had on Canada and the U.S and examine why both countries were affected differently. Although the collapse of the housing bubble is the most identifiable cause, it is extremely difficult to pinpoint one specific defining moment or event triggering the global financial collapse. There are many factors involved, due to the complex nature of the financial systems across the world, and this paper will delve in the key contributing variables that led to this financial crises.

It is important to understand the different stages of a crisis to prevent one from happening, and being able to handle a crisis properly. Disastrous events will occur in the life of most businesses (Crandall, Parnell, & Spillan, 2013). There are two methods to handling a crisis.The first method is to keep a crisis from happening, and the second method is to try and make a positive outcome when a crisis does occur (Crandall et al.). Economic crisis affects many people, consider the housing boom crisis. Home owning families have a problem paying their mortgage, because of the housing rising prices, and they have issues with investing in an education due to the economy (A Housing Boom Puts Young People off Studying, 2015). In the year of 2006,

The lessons we should have learned should include the fact that we were warned and paid no attention.

When researching past economic recoveries, the housing market is the one to drive the economy out of recession. That being said, this economic recession hasn’t had much of an impact until recently. America’s housing boom had a tremendous influence on the economy for its low prices and flow of new home construction.

The 2008 financial crisis was the most serve crisis seen since the Great Depression (Duca). There were a number of factors that contributed to inflating the housing bubble, in which it collapsed under its own weight (Duca).

According to Evidensgruppen (2013), what signifies a housing bubble is when housing prices increase considerably during a period of time until it collapses and the price falls. Throughout a housing bubble, we can see that house prices have no relationship with factors that usually matter such as income tax, interest rate and unemployment. The sudden price escalation creates expectations among consumers that prices will continue to rise. This creates an enthusiasm to invest in properties because people think that they can buy a house and then make a profit on it when they later sell it. But if the housing prices do not increase as expected, people have a huge loan that they cannot afford to pay back which leads to a financial crisis. When scientists

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 financial crisis of 2008 was the key element which resulted in the depression that the globe is immersed in today. It was astonishing to see that a crisis in the American housing market can initiate an economic depression with effect ranging so far and wide, that it threatened the global economy. Often it is compared to be as large and impactful as The Great Depression of 1930's. The credit crunch resulting from the liquidity problems of the major market players created an atmosphere of utmost distrust amongst the investors regarding the financial institutions in place.

According to Wikipedia a housing bubble is a type of economic bubble that occurs periodically in local or global real estate markets. It is characterized by rapid increases in valuations of real property such as housing until they reach unsustainable levels and then decline. Four years into the housing bubble downturn, much of the country remains hopelessly confused about what happened, why it happened and who is to blame. In my research paper I will try and demonstrate what a housing bubble is, some of the reasons for the bubble, was it preventable, how it kept growing, how it burst and how it has affected our economy.

A combination of factors in the early 2000 's caused the perfect economic storm to trigger the worst recession the United States had experienced since the Great Depression of the 1930 's. The "housing bubble" and subsequent burst left homeowners owing more on their mortgages than the property was worth and fueled the financial crisis of 2007-2009. Many economists label the housing bubble as the single largest contributing factor to the financial crisis. Caused by low-interest rates, relaxed standards on lending and the misguided belief that prices and the value of homes would continue to rise, the US economy is still recovering from the effects of the housing bubble.

The burst of the housing bubble in the U.S., which peaked in 2004, led to a huge decline in value of securities that tied to U.S. real estate pricing. The effect caused massive damage to financial institution globally. These three factors including price appreciation in housing market, high growth of the private-label residential mortgage-backed security in the main fuel for the extensive growth of the mortgage market beginning in 2000. This section describes the fundamental factors, which are credit risk, liquidity risk, market risk, and operational risk, relating to the financial crisis between 2007 and 2008.

In a booming real-estate market, making money investing in homes is easy. Buy a house, slap on a new coat of paint or replace the carpeting and ride the appreciation train to a quick, profitable resale a few months later.