The Wall Street Meltdown

The bursting of the housing bubble, known more colloquially as the 2008 mortgage crisis, was preceded by a series of ill-fated circumstances that culminated in what has been considered to be the worst financial downfall since the Great Depression. After experiencing a near-unprecedented increase in housing prices from January 2002 until mid-2006, a phenomenon that was steadily fed by unregulated mortgage practices, the market steadily declined and the prior housing boom subsided as well. When housing prices dropped to about 25 percent below the peak level achieved in 2006 toward the close of 2008, liquidity and capital disappeared from the market.

The financial collapse is a very complex issue rooted in multiple causes, making it hard to put into a single sentence. However at it’s core the reason for the collapse is that many investors and banks tried to get rich by taking on assumptions about the housing market and taking on huge risks that they didn’t realize the full extent of.

It was not until 2007 when foreclosures occurred more and became prominent, especially since the last market crash during the Great Depression. As Gretchen Morgenson of the New York Times discusses, Bear Stearns was known for his great plays with mortgages on Wall Street. People who believed Stearns would pull the right decisions became scared as the values of their assets were decreasing. This created a necessitated attitude towards money since their was money being borrowed fighting against the collaterals, in turns the assets. When the assets started to decline, you need to start paying back money to those you have borrowed from. Roughly $1.6 billion was discarded in Stearns’ decisions, which was the start to the stress he would obtain from the crash. This enabled the world to see how weak the market was, especially those who had a role within the market. When banks also saw the weakness mortgage companies had developed, they decided to raise the cost of borrowing money from them, creating doubts if these mortgage firms, such as Stearns, would be able to solve this

While there are several speculated causes to the recession of 2007, one cause that stands out is the housing bubble burst. "As the housing bubble burst and trillions of dollars ' worth of toxic mortgages began to go bad in 2007, fear spread through the massive firms that form the heart of Wall Street ("Meltdown")". The first repercussions of the housing bubble bursting were the floating rumors about the investment bank, Bear Stearns. The rumors of the bank 's imminent bankruptcy were so abundant, that they became a self fulfilling prophecy ("Meltdown"). In an attempt to save the bank, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke created a deal with JPMorgan ("Meltdown"). This deal stated that "the federal government would use $30 billion to cover Bear Stearns ' questionable assets tied to toxic mortgages

The wall street crash also know as the wall street crash was an event on september 24th,1869.This event made millions of americans terrified and was one of the reasons for the Great Depression.The stock market crash of 1869 lasted for many days which made the american people panic.The stock market impacted american culture because it forced the government to realize the program controlling couldn’t be trusted.American needs to be prepared for the future, and the unemployment needed a boost.

On October 29, 1929 the United States Stock Market Crashed. It was devastating. About 16 Billion U.S. dollars went down the drain. I live in New York with my 2 brothers and sister: Jack, Daniel, and Maggie. We use to live in a pretty upscale apartment. However,The depression hit us like a train. My dad, Tom was laid off at his law firm right after the stock market crashed. He was desperate for money so he began work in a textile factory. Unemployment rates skyrocketed from a mere 3% to 25%! My mom, Jean, use to be a stay at home mom, but now works in a clothing sweatshop to put food on the table. With such little pay we were forced to move out of our beautiful apartment into a crummy run-down tenement. Shortly after, my father lost his job at the Textile factory. It 's 1931 right now and he hasn 't worked since. We couldn’t even depend upon our savings. Thousands upon thousands of banks were closed down, so we lost all of our money in the bank. My widowed aunt Celeste has also come to live with us. Her husband committed suicide after losing all his money when the Stock Market collapsed. My mom had to get a second job and make ends meet. But it just not enough. We were evicted from our tiny one bedroom tenement. We now reside in a Hooverville. We barely have enough money to put a little food on the table. My little sister has asthma and her medication costs a lot so she 's been sick lately. I mainly blame our financial situation on margin buying and President Hoover.

The day Bear Stearns fell was one of the worse financial upsets of our time. As a major American investment company, they ran out of money. Bear Stearns was definitely one of the most exposed to the subprime mortgage crisis after being hit hard in the summer of 2007 when two of its hedge funds crashed. The Federal Reserve and JP Morgan Chase orchestrated an extraordinary rescue attempt that allowed Bear Stearns to borrow emergency money to stay alive and steady. Consequently, in an effort to prevent a crisis on Wall Street.

The stock market is what one would know as a collective group of buyers/sellers that trade stocks, also known as shares on a stock exchange. These securities are listed on the exchange itself and trade freely each and every day. On the exchange, stocks move hands day in and day out. Companies are able to get their stock listed on the exchange at any time that they want. There are other stocks, too...known as OTC stocks or over the counter stocks that go through a specific dealer. Larger companies tend to have their stocks listed on exchanges all throughout the world. Participants in the market can be anyone from your grandma, to retail investors, day traders, institutional investors, and so forth. One notable exchange is the NYSE; also known as The New York Stock Exchange. Moving forward, a stock market crash is when a decline of stock prices takes place throughout the stock market that results in a catastrophic loss of wealth via paper. The crashes are driven strictly by panic 9 times out of 10 a crash takes place. As a crash is happening, panic occurs; the panic keeps evolving and ends up like the snowball effect before you know it. A crash occurs when economic events take place. These events are always bad news... The behavior of traders follows, which leads to a crash when panic ensues. Crashes normally occur of a seven day period and may extend even further. Crashes happen in bear markets as the market is already weak to begin with. Once traders see a drop in prices,

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.

“Stock Market Crash.” PBS, Public Broadcasting Service, www.pbs.org/fmc/timeline/estockmktcrash.htm. Accessed 13 Mar. 2017. To fully comprehend the logistics of the Great Stock Market Crash of 1929, one must recognize the basics of the stock market. “Capital is the tools needed to produce things of value out of raw materials.” At the time, capital was mainly represented as stock, and corporations owned the capital. Thus, whoever owns a share of the stocks owns a part of the corporation. In the 1920s, a boom in stock value occurred, so investors purchased a multitude of stocks. Yet, the mirage faded in 1929, and stocks swiftly crashed. As a result, banks, which had invested deposits in the market, lost depositors’ money;the banks attempted to

The turmoil in the financial markets also known as the financial crisis of 2008 was considered the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Many areas of the United States suffered. The housing market plummeted and as a result of that, many evictions occurred, as well as foreclosures and unemployment. Leading up to the financial crash, most of the money that was made by investors was based on people speculating on investments like real estate, stocks, debt buying, and complex investment tools instead of actual tangible products that people purchased or needed. There are a number of dangers that arise when investors make large sums of money that are not tied to the actual value of a product and investors should not be able to make substantial profits off of the misfortune and poor choices of others. Those practices are very unethical and there should have been an increase in government intervention after the financial crash of 2008. The financial crash of 2008 was result of deregulation and male dominance in the financial services industry.

The housing market crash, which broke out in the United States in 2007, was caused by high risk subprime mortgages. The subprime mortgage crisis resulted in a sudden reduction in money and credit availability from banks and other lending institutions, which was referred to as a “credit crunch.” The “credit crunch” and its effect spread across the United States and further on to other countries across the world. The “credit crunch” caused a collapse in the housing markets, stock markets and major financial institutions across the globe.

In the following essay, I will briefly summarize some of the main events leading up to the global financial crisis. Following this, I will discuss the effect this had on the banks and ergo the credit supply, then examine how this contributed to the corporate failure. I will also pay some attention to how the market imperfection can affect firms real decisions. Finally, I will sum up the main points of the essay.

During the run-up to the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) 2008 there were numerous contributing factors. One can observe the start of the crisis as a cascading timeline starting possibly decades earlier with the change to a deregulatory culture. The prevailing political environment in the lead up to the financial crisis was one of de-regulation with a focus to economic expansion. This political imperative towards deregulation started under President Reagan in the US and culminated at the turn of the century with the actions such as the repealing of the Glass Steagall Act. The economic environment in the run-up to the GFC was, as Mervyn King put it, a NICE period, No Inflation Constant Expansion, with the general opinion being that markets were on the up and would be so indefinitely. This environment lead to a lackadaisical attitude towards regulatory standards and circumvented caution in regards to the occurrence of financial crises.

In 2008, the market for purchasing and selling houses collapsed. Previous to 2008, speaking specifically between 2000 to 2006, many housing loan companies were offering a low interest rates, which lead to many lenders approving loan applications to individuals who had low or poor credit. When the collapse began, the once-low interest rates increased dramatically, causing many of those individuals were unable to keep up with their payments, which resulted in the foreclosure of their homes. To the extent of this dilemma, many banks went bankrupt, which lead to a number of Wall Street firms in taking a loss.