scholarly journals Navigating the Turbulent Economic Waters of the 2007 Great Recession and the Crash of the Housing Market

10.28945/3947 ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 001-019
Keyword(s):  
Housing Market ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
Great Recession ◽  
Economic Downturn ◽  
Home Equity ◽  
Economic Activities ◽  
The Great Recession ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Economic Production ◽  
The U.S

What triggered the crash of the U.S. housing market? This analysis looks at the economic and industry forces that led to an economic downturn that put as many as half of all U.S. residential builders out of business. Since the Great Depression, the U.S. housing market has significantly influenced economic production and employment levels. Direct and indirect investments in the housing industry, along with the induced economic activities such as real estate transactions and construction as well as other factors, accounted for an estimated 15-20% of GDP during boom years (CBPP, 2012). The burst of the $8 trillion housing bubble in 2007 and the subsequent collapse of the financial markets in 2008 created massive disarray in homebuilding (Bivens, 2011). As many as 50% of homebuilders closed their doors, either voluntarily or through bankruptcy filings (Quint, 2015). Concurrently, from 2006 through 2012, the Great Recession resulted in the loss of over $7 trillion of home equity (Gould Ellen, 2012). Over 24 percent of home mortgages went “underwater” with balances exceeding home values (Carter & Gottschalck, n.d.). For some homeowners, the unfortunate thought of losing their homes through foreclosure and incurring disruption to family life became a reality. The stress from threats of the loss of a home, unemployment, and depletion of savings exacted a great toll on many. Not since the Great Depression has the U.S. economy faced forces so devastating to the housing market and personal wealth.

Taming the Megabanks

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arthur E. Wilmarth Jr.
Keyword(s):  
Great Depression ◽  
Great Recession ◽  
Financial System ◽  
The European Union ◽  
The Great Recession ◽  
Shadow Banks ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Securities Activities ◽  
Credit Boom ◽  
The U.S

This book demonstrates that universal banks—which accept deposits, make loans, and engage in securities activities—played central roles in precipitating the Great Depression of the early 1930s and the Great Recession of 2007–09. Universal banks promoted a dangerous credit boom and a hazardous stock market bubble in the U.S. during the 1920s, which led to the Great Depression. Congress responded by passing the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which separated banks from the securities markets and prohibited nonbanks from accepting deposits. Glass-Steagall’s structural separation of the banking, securities, and insurance sectors prevented financial panics from spreading across the U.S. financial system for more than four decades. Despite Glass-Steagall’s success, large U.S. banks pursued a twenty-year campaign to remove the statute’s prudential buffers. Regulators opened loopholes in Glass-Steagall during the 1980s and 1990s, and Congress repealed Glass-Steagall in 1999. The United Kingdom and the European Union adopted similar deregulatory measures, thereby allowing universal banks to dominate financial markets on both sides of the Atlantic. In addition, large U.S. securities firms became “shadow banks” as regulators allowed them to issue short-term deposit substitutes to finance long-term loans and investments. Universal banks and shadow banks fueled a toxic subprime credit boom in the U.S., U.K., and Europe during the 2000s, which led to the Great Recession. Limited reforms after the Great Recession have not broken up universal banks and shadow banks, thereby leaving in place a financial system that is prone to excessive risk-taking and vulnerable to contagious panics. A new Glass-Steagall Act is urgently needed to restore a financial system that is less risky, more stable and resilient, and better able to serve the needs of our economy and society.

scholarly journals The Great Recession’s Effect on Entrepreneurship

2011 ◽  
pp. 1-4
Author(s):  
Scott Shane
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Gross Domestic Product ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
Unemployment Rate ◽  
Great Recession ◽  
The United States ◽  
Domestic Product ◽  
Economic Downturn ◽  
The Great Recession ◽  
The Great Depression

Between December 2007 and June 2009, the United States suffered its biggest economic downturn since the Great Depression. Dubbed the Great Recession, this economic contraction saw gross domestic product decline 4 percent and the unemployment rate more than double from 4.9 percent to 10.1 percent.

Financial Crises and the Public Discourse on Financial Elites

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Youssef Cassis ◽  
Giuseppe Telesca
Keyword(s):  
Great Depression ◽  
Great Recession ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Codes Of Conduct ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Great Recession ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Late Twentieth

Why were elite bankers and financiers demoted from ‘masters’ to ‘servants’ of society after the Great Depression, a crisis to which they contributed only marginally? Why do they seem to have got away with the recent crisis, in spite of their palpable responsibilities in triggering the Great Recession? This chapter provides an analysis of the differences between the bankers of the Great Depression and their colleagues of the late twentieth/early twenty-first century—regarding their position within, and attitude towards the firm, work culture, mental models, and codes of conduct—complemented with a scrutiny of the public discourse on bankers and financiers before and after the two crises. The authors argue that the (relative) mildness of the Great Recession, compared to the Great Depression, has contributed to preserve elite bankers’ and financiers’ status, income, wealth, and influence. Yet, the long-term consequences of their loss of reputational capital are difficult to assess.

The Great Depression and the Great Recession in Interwar Greece and Today: A comparison

2015 ◽  
Vol 66 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sophia Lazaretou
Keyword(s):  
Great Recession ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Economic Downturn ◽  
The Great Recession ◽  
The Past ◽  
Greek Crisis ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Terra Incognita ◽  
Cross Country ◽  
Nominal Anchor

AbstractThe past Greek crisis experience is more or less terra incognita. In all historical empirical studies Greece is systematically neglected or included only sporadically in their cross-country samples. In the national literature too there is little on this topic. In this paper we use the 1930s crisis as a useful testing ground to compare the two crises episodes, ‘then’ and ‘now’; to detect differences and similarities and discuss the policy facts with the ultimate aim to draw some ‘policy lessons’ from history. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to study the Greek crisis experience across the two historical episodes. Comparisons with the interwar period show that the recent economic downturn was faster, larger and more severe than during the early 1930s. More importantly, analysing the determinants of the two crises, we conclude that Greece’s problems arose from its inability to credibly adhere to a nominal anchor.

scholarly journals War 2008 das neue 1929? Richtige und falsche Vergleiche zwischen der Großen Depression der 1930er Jahre und der Großen Rezession von 2008

2012 ◽  
Vol 13 (Supplement) ◽  
pp. 36-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albrecht Ritschl
Keyword(s):  
Great Depression ◽  
Great Recession ◽  
Global Financial Crisis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Final Phase ◽  
Main Hypothesis ◽  
The Great Recession ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Political Response ◽  
Fast Spreading

AbstractThe Great Recession of 2008 hit the international economy harder than any other peacetime recession since the Great Contraction after 1929. Soon enough, analogies with the Great Depression were presented, and conclusions were drawn regarding the political response to the slump. This paper is an attempt to sort out real and false analogies and to present conclusions for policy. Its main hypothesis is that the Great Recession resembles the final phase of the Great Contraction between 1931 and 1933, characterized by a fast spreading global financial crisis and the breakdown of the international Gold Standard. The same is also true of the political responses to the banking problems occurring in both crises. The analogy seems less robust for the initial phase of the Great Depression after 1929. The monetary policy response to the Great Recession largely seems to be informed by the monetary interpretation of the Great Depression, but less so by the lessons from the interwar financial crises. As in the Great Depression, policy appears to be on a learning curve, moving away from a mostly monetary response toward mitigating counterpart risk and minimizing interbank contagion.

Comment on “The Great Depression”

2009 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-129
Author(s):  
Eloi Laurent
Keyword(s):  
Great Depression ◽  
Great Recession ◽  
The Great Recession ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Push Forward

Put together, my remarks constitute an unsubtle attempt at rendering explicit the elegant implicit comparisons between the Great Depression and today’s “Great recession” that make Alan Brinkley’s article an insightful delight for the reader. At the end of his paper, Brinkley points out to some similarities between the two crises. In the brief following comment, I will push forward his conclusion but on a somewhat different path: in my view, if the consequences of the Great Depression and the “Great Recession” have so far been quite different, their causes appear to be in many respects alike, or at least parallel.

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