Crash of 2008

This article presents preliminary accounts of the sequence of events leading to the 2007-2008 financial crisis, of rival explanations for the crisis, of possible contributory factors, and of proposed remedies.

A detailed account of the sequence of events is set out on the Timelines subpage, together with links to contemporary news reports. Terms shown in brackets in the text are defined on the Related Pages subpage.

The crisis

The outcomes of the 2007-2008 financial crisis included the failure of many of the world's investment banks and the development of a "credit crunch" following the 2007 interbank market collapse - after which loans were refused to many who had hitherto been considered welcome borrowers, and significantly increased interest rates were charged to others. It developed into a threat to the continued existence of many financial markets and to a consequent loss of consumer and business confidence. The sequence of events that led to those outcomes is well documented but there is, as yet, no consensus concerning causes or remedies.

Background

In 2007, around 1.7 million properties were subject to foreclosure, many as a result of the subprime mortgage market. Also in 2007, a run occurred on the British bank and mortgage lender Northern Rock, an event not seen since the days of the Great Depression and other periods of economic downturn. In Feburary 2008, the British government bought Northern Rock.

In 2008, a number of other large banks have either gone out of business or have been sold: Lehmann Brothers declared bankruptcy in September 2008, and Merrill Lynch merged with the Bank of America in a deal worth $50 billion. The stock price of the insurance company American International Group fell 60% in one day. In the United Kingdom, Bradford & Bingley was nationalized, and other large financial companies are being nationalized all across Europe.

Rival explanations

A widely-held explanation of the crisis treats it as a fallout from the United States subprime mortgage crisis. For example, the explanation offered in September 2008 by the United States government can be summarised as follows.

Inflows of money from abroad -- along with low interest rates -- enabled more United States consumers and businesses to borrow money. Easy credit -- combined with the faulty assumption that house prices would continue to rise -- led mortgage lenders there to approve loans without due regard to ability to pay, and borrowers to take out larger loans than they could afford. Optimism about prices also led to a boom in which more houses were built than people were willing to buy, so that prices fell and borrowers - with houses worth less than they expected and payments they could not afford - began to default. As a result, holders of mortgage-backed securities began to incur serious losses, and those securities became so unreliable that they could not be sold. Investment banks were consequently left with large amounts of unsaleable assets, and many failed to meet their financial obligations. Arrangements for inter-bank lending went out of use, and banks through out the world cut back upon lending .

An alternative put forward by a former member of the Bank of England's monetary policy committee, portrays the crisis as " an accident waiting to happen" that was triggered by the subprime crisis, but could have been triggered by any of a variety of events. His alternative explanation can be summarised is as follows.

International organisations including the International Monetary Fund, and the Bank for International Settlements, and most central banks had long been warning about a serious underpricing of risk throughout the financial system. A general belief had arisen among bankers that if their bank got into trouble, their central bank would see it as a threat to the system and act to protect them from losses. Measurement difficulties may also have resulted in mistaken risk assessments by banks and their regulators. The failure of banking regulators to take action to avert the resulting danger may have been because they lacked the necessary regulatory instruments, or it may have been due to a lack of will. Central banks would have been reluctant to take corrective action by reducing their base rates because such action might confict with action to combat inflation. .

This explanation thus attributes the crisis to a variety of possible causes, including shortcomings of the regulatory systems, management failures by investment banks, and the conduct of banking regulators. Neither explanation excludes the possibility that the severity of the eventual crisis might have been increased by factors other than those held to be directly responsible. While it is too soon to expect the emergence of a consensus concerning their relative influence, there is already general agreement concerning the identification of possible contributory factors.

Contributory factors

Regulation

Governments have long been aware of the danger of a "systemic failure" following the failure of a major bank, and in 1974 the governors of the G10 central banks set up The Basel Committee for Banking Supervision to coordinate precautionary banking regulations . In the 1980s, however, it was widely considered that banking regulations were imposing excessive economic penalties, and there was a general move toward deregulation . Restrictions that had prevented investment banks from broadening their activities to include branch banking, insurance or mortgage lending were dropped, and reserve requirements were relaxed or removed. There followed a widespread restructuring of national financial systems and that was followed by a series of banking crises . A study for the Basel Committtee later concluded that financial liberalisation had left Spain, Norway, Sweden and the United States with regulatory systems that had been ill-prepared for the banking crises that they then encountered . Concern about the increased danger of widespread systemic failure led the Basel committee to publish a set of regulatory reccomendations that came to be known as Basel I which led to a general tightening of reserve requirements,. In 1999 further concern about the danger of instability led to the creation of the Financial Stability Forum to promote information exchange and international co-operation in financial supervision and surveillance. In 2004 the Basel Committee published revised recommendations known as Basel II intended to provide an improved accounting for investment risks in setting reserve requirements.

Other financial institutions are regulated by national authorities, including the Securities and Exchange Commission in the United States, and the Financial Services Authority in the United Kingdom. Until recently, restricted-membership hedge funds have escaped regulation, and those that are registered offshore continue to do so.

Financial innovation

Among major changes in banking practice that have developed since deregulation have been the growth of securitisation, enabling loans to be treated as assets comparable to tradeable bonds, and of the strategy known as "originate and distribute", under which banks originate loans and convert them into securities that they sell to non-bank financial institutions such as pension funds and insurance companies. The distributed securities leave the originating banks' balance sheets and thus escape the Basel I regulatory requirements but they were often transfered to hedge funds and structured investment vehicles that were controlled by the originating banks.

A parallel development was a massive expansion of the largely unregulated hedge funds - to the point at which they are estimated to account for 40 to 50 per cent of daily activity on the London and New York stock exchanges by 2005 .

The subprime mortgage crisis

The trigger for the credit crunch was the announcement in 2007 by a French bank that it could not estimate the value of mortgage-backed securities held by its hedge funds. Holdings that were in some way dependent upon such products were by that time so widespread among the world's banks that uncertainty about their value led to a universal loss of financial confidence.

References

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