The United States 's Financial System

Big banks had a practice of loaning more money for the stock market, and real estate

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.

Imagine having a job and having no safe place to put your money or no place to gain interest for money just sitting in an account. Although this seems like such a smart and genius idea, believe it or not, most people actually did not support the idea of a national bank and didn’t want one at all. The reason Andrew Jackson wanted a national bank was because even though there was already a bank it only became a bank from the farmers, laborers and other working class Americans working hard, it really only benefited the upperclassmen and Andrew Jackson did not like that. The second bank was also a cause of the War of 1812 with the hundreds dollars of debt acquired from the war the United States needed a way to bring down the inflation from the state banks (“Bank War”). There were other banks throughout the country but they were all privately owned and each had their own system of money, whether it was gold, silver, paper money.

Our nation faces many problems, and has for many years. Today’s generations, and especially the mainstream media, seem most concerned with social issues such as abortion and same sex marriage. While these issues are important, our economic situation should receive more urgent attention. Americans are desperate for better days, but lack a meaningful understanding of how our financial system works. Almost 100 years ago, the creation of the Federal Reserve Banking System was instated. One could argue that this system is the base of why we are 18 trillion dollars in debt, and rising. The Federal Reserve Banking System has contributed

On October 3, 2008 President George W. Bush signed the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, otherwise known as the “bailout.” The Purpose of this act was defined as to, “Provide authority for the Federal Government to purchase and insure certain types of trouble assets for the purpose of providing stability to and preventing disruption in the economy and financial system and protecting taxpayers, to amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to provide incentives for energy production and conservation, to extend certain expiring provisions, to provide individual income tax relief, and for other purposes” (Emergency Economic Stabilization Act). In my paper I will explain and show the relationship between the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 and subprime lending, the collapse of the housing market, bundled mortgage securities, liquidity, and the Government 's efforts to bailout the nation 's banks.

During the twenty years it was in place the First Bank did change the economic downturn of the country after the war. The First Bank had branches in eight influential port cities and had a wide geographic existence. It influenced the lending policies of the state banks’ lending practices. The First Bank was like the state banks in that it made business loans, accepted deposits, and issued notes that circulated as currency and were convertible into gold or silver. But it differed from the state banks because its

The Federal Reserve System is the most powerful institution in the United States economy. Functioning as the central bank of the United States, acting as a regulator, the lender of last resort, and setting the nation’s monetary policy via the Federal Open Market Committee, there is no segment of the American economy unaffected by the Federal Reserve [endnoteRef:1]. This power becomes even more substantial in times of “unusual and exigent circumstances,” as Section 13(3) of the Federal Reserve Act gives authority to the Board of Governors to act unilaterally in lending and market making operations during financial crisis[endnoteRef:2]. As illustrated by their decision making in the aftermath of the 2007-2008 Great Recession,

The Banking Act of 1933 was vital to the nation. As the country was based on a gold standard, the government was only able to inject supplies of currency based on gold in-hand. Prior to the Banking Act of 1933, people had been hoarding supplies of gold due to their fear of the market’s instability. The government needed to inject liquidity into the market, so these supplies of gold were needed. Banks could not make loans without this liquidity. The government established the “Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation,” which would ensure the people’s deposits in banks up to $5,000. This would lead to increased confidence in the banks, as they people’s money would be secured by the government. Banks, with these increased deposits, could loan out more money

With the Fed now being put into place, the economy was booming all over again, in a safer manner. The Fed supported all banks across the country by acting as the main bank to all other banks, developing a national currency. Banks must have an account with the Fed, having the Fed keep a certain small percentage of the income to keep as a reserve. The national currency is heavily dependant on the Fed, as it’s the Government 's chief fiscal agent for being the holder of its gold, serving as a reserve for the nation’s banks. This money from the reserves is very helpful, as a large portion of the money stored was used to help pay for expenses in WWI and WWII.

After Congress refused the national bank before the war of 1812, the states started their own banks with their own currency. This made things difficult for the American people. There more than 400 different banks by 1818, with each of them having their own currency. Investors were losing and winning by just by picking different currency to follow. This left America in trouble. “To end the mayhem and strengthen the national government, proponents of the American System designed the Second Bank of the United States” (Shultz, 2014, p. 168). The new bank began in 1816. The start of the bank caused a major economic recession; when it first started it was loose with credit and then suddenly they changed to strict

In 2008 America’s financial system was brought to a stand still as decades of negligence and financial decisions caused our economy to sink into the worst recession since the great depression. Cultivating a problem worse than America has seen in roughly a century points one finger not at a particular cause, but a string of events that finally gave way. Now, eight years later our economy is still recovering, and time has allowed us to look back at decades of mistakes to try and connect the dots of the perfect storm that collapsed our financial market in 2008. In 2009 Brookings Institution, one of Washington’s oldest think tanks, concluded there were three causes that resulted in the crisis. Economists Martin Baily and Douglas Elliot stated that the results of government intervention in the housing market, the influences Wall Street had on Washington, and global economic forces were the three main causes of the economic collapse. They believed that a housing bubble inflated when Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two government-sponsored enterprises, intervened in the housing market. The banking industry was called out to be blamed for years of manipulation of our political and financial systems. Lastly, Baily and Elliot cite the global economy and the existence of a credit boom throughout European and Asian nations. Low inflation and consistent growth throughout the world economy spiked investors’ interest in acquiring riskier investments, which encouraged

The Federal Reserve Bank (FSB) is a regional bank for the central banking system of the United States. The regional banks enforce the monetary policies that affect the banks in their region.

The so-called Federal Reserve System (Fed) is a central banking system; unlike the banking system from other countries, the Fed build much later. In the American history, the origin organization that function as central banking is the the first bank of the United State (1791-1811) and the Second Bank of the United State (1817-1836). The United State government historically intended to build some central banking system like The Fed; however, people also worried about the power is going to be over controlled by the central bank; or the central bank itself is controlled by some particular interest groups. Many people worried about the idea of central banking system is due to the ideologies in the United States. The administrative power is excessively

Before the 1970s the banking was not a business that you went into to make money. That was until Louis Ranieri came around. Louis Ranieri had one idea that changed the housing market forever. His plan was to have a mortgage back security. A mortgage back security is an assist based security backed by a mortgage. For example, if you use your mortgage to start a business, your business is backed by that mortgage. The average mortgage loan has a fixed rate loan and takes thirty years to pay off, but then he thought to bundle them all together. They thought these would still be less risky because who would not pay their mortgage. They were doing hundreds of million dollars in mortgage bonds a year, but that all changed when they ran out of mortgages to put into the bonds. If there were no bonds then there was nothing left to make money, and the banking world was going to back to the way it was. Rather than letting that happen, the banks made a loan called a subprime loan.

The stock of the bank was bought and held mainly by the US government and numerous businessmen among the states of the Union. It paid interest on public debt, issue a national currency, dealt in foreign exchange, paid government officials, and numerous other tasks. It was both a private and public institution but if asked by the Treasury, it would have to open its books to inspection.