Financial Crisis Essay

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The financial crisis of 2007-8 is considered the worst financial crash since The Great Depression of the 1930s. It began on the 9th of August 2007, with BNP Paribas admitting they had no real way of valuing complex assets, which will be expanded on later. Bloomberg estimated the total cost to the American economy to be $12.8trillion; a difficult figure to calculate considering the crisis affected home values, pensions, corporate earnings, losses in share markets, reduced consumer spending, and of course job losses. Historically, banks link savings to investment. Deposits are paid in by savers, the bank’s liabilities, some of that money is held in capital reserve and the rest is lent to businesses and entrepreneurs as loans, the bank’s assets. The savers will be paid interest on their deposits, and the enterprises will have to pay interest on their loans, higher than the interest paid to depositors; the difference in interest is the banks revenue. This is a fairly mundane business model which banks have been doing for over 600 years. Recent declines in interest rates have led to decreased profit margins on this type of intermediation. Banks needed to diversify, and the deregulation of UK banks in 1986, and the emergence of light touch regulation, allowed them to do such. Retail banks from here on offered services such as mortgages, pension plans and insurance. Investment banks, traditionally offering corporate services like merger and acquisition advice, now operate in proprietary trading in wholesale markets. OECD reports that non interest income accounts for 40.7% of credit institutions income in 2003, up from 25.5% in 1984. All this change in how banks operate, fuelled by declining margins and self-regulation, has led to the us... ... middle of paper ... ...lume basis. At Lehman Brothers, their own risk management department were constantly raising red flags which management overruled in order to seek more revenue. On December 12th 2013, The US Securities and Exchange Commission fined Merrill Lynch just over $130million for making false disclosures over 3 CDOs and holding inaccurate books. The banks believed the CDO machine couldn’t fail; they believed once they have sold on the toxic mortgages, it was no longer their problem. However, once the housing bubble burst, investors began to question the value of MBSs; there was a huge write down in their value, prompting huge losses in the financial sector. The long held myth that house prices do not decrease was found to be catastrophically inaccurate, and with the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, The Era of The Great Complacence was well and truly at its end.

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