PROJECT: 2007-2009 GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS: CAUSES AND EFFECTS

ENG 75; 82A; 93: PROJECTS
2007 – 2009 GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS: CAUSES AND EFFECTS

The financial crisis of 2007–2009 began in July 2007 when a loss of confidence by investors in the value of securitized mortgages in the United States resulted in a liquidity crisis that prompted a substantial injection of capital into financial markets by the United States Federal Reserve, Bank of England and the European Central Bank. The TED spread, an indicator of perceived credit risk in the general economy, spiked up in July 2007, remained volatile for a year, then spiked even higher in September 2008, reaching a record 4.65% on October 10, 2008. In September 2008, the crisis deepened, as stock markets worldwide crashed and entered a period of high volatility, and a considerable number of banks, mortgage lenders and insurance companies failed in the following weeks.
Although America's housing collapse is often cited as having caused the crisis, the financial system was vulnerable because of intricate and highly-leveraged financial contracts and operations, a U.S. monetary policy making the cost of credit negligible therefore encouraging such high levels of leverage, and generally a "hypertrophy of the financial sector" (financialization).
The first symptoms of what is now called the late 2000s recession ensued also in various countries and various industries. The financial crisis, albeit not the only cause among other economic imbalances, was a factor by making borrowing and equity raising harder


CAUSE OF THE FINANCIAL CRISIS

In August 2002 an analyst identified a housing bubble. Dean Baker wrote that from 1953 to 1995 house prices had simply tracked inflation, but that when house prices from 1995 onwards were adjusted for inflation they showed a marked increase over and above inflation-based increases. Baker drew the conclusion that a bubble in the US housing market existed and predicted an ensuing crisis. It later proved impossible to convince responsible parties such as the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve of the need for action. Baker's argument was confirmed with the construction of a data series from 1895 to 1995 by the influential Yale economist Robert Shiller, which showed that real house prices had been essentially unchanged over that 100 years.
A common claim during the first weeks of the financial crisis was that the problem was simply caused by reckless, sub-prime lending. However, the sub-prime mortgages were only part of a far more extensive problem affecting the entire $20 trillion US housing market: the sub-prime sector was simply the first place that the collapse of the bubble affecting the housing market showed up.
The ultimate point of origin of the great financial crisis of 2007-2009 can be traced back to an extremely indebted US economy. The collapse of the real estate market in 2006 was the close point of origin of the crisis. The failure rates of subprime mortgages were the first symptom of a credit boom tuned to bust and of a real estate shock. But large default rates on subprime mortgages cannot account for the severity of the crisis. Rather, low-quality mortgages acted as an accelerant to the fire that spread through the entire financial system. The latter had become fragile as a result of several factors that are unique to this crisis: the transfer of assets from the balance sheets of banks to the markets, the creation of complex and opaque assets, the failure of ratings agencies to properly assess the risk of such assets, and the application of fair value accounting. To these novel factors, one must add the now standard failure of regulators and supervisors in spotting and correcting the emerging weaknesses.

Commodity bubble

The narrowing of the yield curve from 2004 and the inversion of the yield curve during 2007 indicated a bursting of the housing bubble and a wild gyration of commodities prices as moneys flowed out of assets like housing or stocks. A commodity bubble was created following the collapse in the housing bubble. The price of oil rose to over $140 dollars per barrel in 2008 before plunging as the financial crisis began to take hold in late 2008. A similar bubble in oil prices has preceded other historical economic contractions.

Sub-prime lending

Based on the assumption that sub-prime lending precipitated the crisis, some have argued that the Clinton Administration may be partially to blame, while others have pointed to the passage of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act by the 106th Congress, and over-leveraging by banks and investors eager to achieve high returns on capital.
Some, like American Enterprise Institute fellow Peter J. Wallison, believe the roots of the crisis can be traced directly to sub-prime lending by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which are government sponsored entities. On 30 September 1999, The New York Times reported that the Clinton Administration pushed for sub-prime lending: "Fannie Mae, the nation's biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people."
In 1995, the administration also tinkered with Carter's Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 by regulating and strengthening the anti-redlining procedures. It is felt by many that this was done to help a stagnated home ownership figure that had hovered around 65% for many years. The result was a push by the administration for greater investment, by financial institutions, into riskier loans. A 2000 United States Department of the Treasury study of lending trends for 305 cities from 1993 to 1998 showed that $467 billion of mortgage credit poured out of CRA-covered lenders into low and mid level income borrowers and neighborhoods.
Others have pointed out that there were not enough of these loans made to cause a crisis of this magnitude. In an article in Portfolio Magazine, Michael Lewis spoke with one trader who noted that "There weren’t enough Americans with (bad) credit taking out loans to satisfy investors’ appetite for the end product. (Investment banks and hedge funds) used (financial technology) to synthesize more of them. They were creating them out of whole cloth. One hundred times over! That’s why the losses are so much greater than the loans."
On September 30, 1999 The New York Times said, referring to the Fannie Mae Corporation easing credit requirements on loans purchased from lenders: "In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980's."

Deregulation

In 1992, the 102nd Congress weakened regulation of government sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac with the goal of making available more money for the issuance of home loans. The Washington Post wrote: "Congress also wanted to free up money for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy mortgage loans and specified that the pair would be required to keep a much smaller share of their funds on hand than other financial institutions. Where banks that held $100 could spend $90 buying mortgage loans, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac could spend $97.50 buying loans. Finally, Congress ordered that the companies be required to keep more capital as a cushion against losses if they invested in riskier securities. But the rule was never set during the Clinton administration, which came to office that winter, and was only put in place nine years later."
Other deregulation efforts have also been identified as contributing to the collapse. In 1999, the 106th Congress passed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which repealed part of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. This repeal has been criticized for having contributed to the proliferation of the complex and opaque financial instruments which are at the heart of the crisis.
Over-leveraging, credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations
For many months before September 2008, many business journals published commentaries warning about the financial stability and risk management practices of leading U.S. and European investment banks, insurance firms and mortgage banks consequent to the

Subprime mortgage crisis.

This began with failures caused by misapplication of risk controls for bad debts, collateralization of debt insurance and fraud.
Another probable cause of the crisis -- and a factor that unquestionably amplified its magnitude -- was widespread miscalculation by banks and investors of the level of risk inherent in the unregulated collateralized debt obligation and Credit Default Swap markets. Under this theory, banks and investors systematized the risk by taking advantage of low interest rates to borrow tremendous sums of money that they could only pay back if the housing market continued to increase in value.
Boom and collapse of the shadow banking system

In a June 2008 speech, U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, then President and CEO of the NY Federal Reserve Bank, placed significant blame for the freezing of credit markets on a "run" on the entities in the "parallel" banking system, also called the shadow banking system. These entities became critical to the credit markets underpinning the financial system, but were not subject to the same regulatory controls. Further, these entities were vulnerable because they borrowed short-term in liquid markets to purchase long-term, illiquid and risky assets. This meant that disruptions in credit markets would make them subject to rapid deleveraging, selling their long-term assets at depressed prices. He described the significance of these entities: "In early 2007, asset-backed commercial paper conduits, in structured investment vehicles, in auction-rate preferred securities, tender option bonds and variable rate demand notes, had a combined asset size of roughly $2.2 trillion. Assets financed overnight in triparty repo grew to $2.5 trillion. Assets held in hedge funds grew to roughly $1.8 trillion. The combined balance sheets of the then five major investment banks totaled $4 trillion. In comparison, the total assets of the top five bank holding companies in the United States at that point were just over $6 trillion, and total assets of the entire banking system were about $10 trillion." He stated that the "combined effect of these factors was a financial system vulnerable to self-reinforcing asset price and credit cycles."

Nobel laureate Paul Krugman described the run on the shadow banking system as the "core of what happened" to cause the crisis. "As the shadow banking system expanded to rival or even surpass conventional banking in importance, politicians and government officials should have realized that they were re-creating the kind of financial vulnerability that made the Great Depression possible--and they should have responded by extending regulations and the financial safety net to cover these new institutions. Influential figures should have proclaimed a simple rule: anything that does what a bank does, anything that has to be rescued in crises the way banks are, should be regulated like a bank." He referred to this lack of controls as "malign neglect."

Origins and growth of the housing bubble

The housing bubble grew up alongside the stock bubble of the mid-1990s. People who had increased their wealth substantially with the extraordinary run-up of stock prices were spending based on this increased wealth. This led to the consumption boom of the late 1990s, with the savings rate out of disposable income falling from five percent in the mid-90s to two percent by 2000. The stock-wealth induced consumption boom led people to buy bigger and/or better homes, since they sought to spend some of their new stock wealth on housing.
The next phase of the housing bubble was the supply-side effect of the dramatic increase in house prices, as housing starts rose substantially from the mid-1990s onwards. Baker notes that if the course of the bubble in the United States had followed the same pattern as in Japan, the housing bubble would have collapsed along with the collapse of the stock bubble between 2000-2002. Instead, the collapse of the stock bubble helped to feed the US housing bubble. After collectively losing faith in the stock market, millions of people turned to investments in housing as a safe alternative. In addition, the economy was very slow in recovering from the 2001 recession, the weakness of the recovery leading the Federal Reserve Board to continue to cut interest rates - one of numerous occasions where the Fed cut rates in response to a crisis, a pattern of behavior that had, by that time, become known as a Greenspan put. Fixed-rate mortgages and other interest rates hit 50-year lows. To further fuel the housing market, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan suggested that homebuyers were wasting money by buying fixed rate mortgages instead of adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs). This was peculiar advice at a time when fixed rate mortgages were near 50-year lows, but even at the low rates of 2003 homebuyers could still afford larger mortgages with the adjustable rates available at the time.
The bubble began to burst in 2007, as the building boom led to so much over-supply that prices could no longer be supported. Prices nationwide began to head downward, with this process accelerating through the fall of 2007 and into 2008. As prices decline, more homeowners face foreclosure. This increase in foreclosures is in part voluntary and in part involuntary. It can be involuntary, since there are cases where people who would like to keep their homes, who would borrow against equity if they could not meet their monthly mortgage payments. When falling house prices destroy equity, they eliminate this option. The voluntary foreclosures take place when people realize that they owe more than the value of their home, and decide that paying off their mortgage is in effect a bad deal. In cases where a home is valued far lower than the amount of the outstanding mortgage, homeowners may be able to simply walk away from their mortgage.

EFFECTS OF THE FINANCIAL CRISIS

One of the first victims was Northern Rock, a medium-sized British bank. The highly leveraged nature of its business led the bank to request security from the Bank of England. This in turn led to investor panic and a bank run in mid-September 2007. Calls by Liberal Democrat Shadow Chancellor Vince Cable to nationalize the institution were initially ignored; in February 2008, however, the British government (having failed to find a private sector buyer) relented, and the bank was taken into public hands. Northern Rock's problems proved to be an early indication of the troubles that would soon befall other banks and financial institutions.
Initially the companies affected were those directly involved in home construction and mortgage lending such as Northern Rock and Countrywide Financial. Financial institutions which had engaged in the securitization of mortgages such as Bear Stearns then fell prey. Later on, Bear Stearns was acquired by JP Morgan Chase through deliberate assistance from the US government. Its stock price plunged to $3 in reaction to the buyout offer of $2 by JP Morgan Chase, well below its 52 week high of $134. Subsequently, the acquisition price was raised to $10 by JP Morgan. On July 11, 2008, the largest mortgage lender in the US, IndyMac Bank, collapsed, and federal regulators seized its assets after the mortgage lender succumbed to the pressures of tighter credit, tumbling home prices and rising foreclosures. That day the financial markets plunged as investors tried to gauge whether the government would attempt to save mortgage lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which it did by placing the two companies into federal conservatorship on September 7, 2008 after the crisis further accelerated in late summer.

The media have repeatedly argued that the crisis then began to affect the general availability of credit to non-housing related businesses and to larger financial institutions not directly connected with mortgage lending. While this is true, the reasons given in media reporting are usually inaccurate. Dean Baker has repeatedly explained the actual, underlying problem:
"Yes, consumers and businesses can't get credit as easily as they could a year ago. There is a really good reason for tighter credit. Tens of millions of homeowners who had substantial equity in their homes two years ago have little or nothing today. Businesses are facing the worst downturn since the Great Depression. This matters for credit decisions. A homeowner with equity in her home is very unlikely to default on a car loan or credit card debt. They will draw on this equity rather than lose their car and/or have a default placed on their credit record. On the other hand, a homeowner who has no equity is a serious default risk. In the case of businesses, their creditworthiness depends on their future profits. Profit prospects look much worse in November 2008 than they did in November 2007 (of course, to clear-eyed analysts, they didn't look too good a year ago either). While many banks are obviously at the brink, consumers and businesses would be facing a much harder time getting credit right now even if the financial system were rock solid. The problem with the economy is the loss of close to $6 trillion in housing wealth and an even larger amount of stock wealth.

Economists, economic policy makers and economic reporters virtually all missed the housing bubble on the way up. If they still can't notice its impact as the collapse of the bubble throws into the worst recession in the post-war era, then they are in the wrong profession.

At the heart of the portfolios of many of these institutions were investments whose assets had been derived from bundled home mortgages. Exposure to these mortgage-backed securities, or to the credit derivatives used to insure them against failure, threatened an increasing number of firms such as Lehman Brothers, AIG, Merrill Lynch, and HBOS.

Other firms that came under pressure included Washington Mutual, the largest savings and loan association in the United States, and the remaining large investment firms, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs.

The crisis rapidly developed and spread into a global economic shock, resulting in a number of European bank failures, declines in various stock indexes, and large reductions in the market value of equities and commodities. Moreover, the de-leveraging of financial institutions further accelerated the liquidity crisis and caused a decrease in international trade. World political leaders, national ministers of finance and central bank directors coordinated their efforts to reduce fears, but the crisis continued. At the end of October a currency crisis developed, with investors transferring vast capital resources into stronger currencies such as the yen, the dollar and the Swiss franc, leading many emergent economies to seek aid from the International Monetary Fund.

Risks and regulations

As financial assets became more and more complex, and harder and harder to value, investors were reassured by the fact that both the international bond rating agencies and bank regulators, who came to rely on them, accepted as valid some complex mathematical models which theoretically showed the risks were much smaller than they actually proved to be in practice George Soros commented that "The super-boom got out of hand when the new products became so complicated that the authorities could no longer calculate the risks and started relying on the risk management methods of the banks themselves. Similarly, the rating agencies relied on the information provided by the originators of synthetic products. It was a shocking abdication of responsibility.”


REFERENCES

1. Wall Street Journal. "TED Spread spikes in July 2007". Wall Street Journal. http://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/ted-spread-wsj.gif.

2. Norris, Floyd (August 10, 2007), "A New Kind of Bank Run Tests Old Safeguards", The New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/10/business/10liquidity.html, retrieved on 2009-03-08

3. Elliott, Larry (August 5, 2008), "Credit crisis - how it all began", The Guardian, http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/aug/05/northernrock.banking, retrieved on 2009-03-08

4. "3 year chart" TED spread Bloomberg.com "Investment Tools"

5. For this term see: Arrighi, G., & Silver, B. J. (1999). Chaos and governance in the modern world system Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. And: [1] John Bellamy Foster: Monopoly finance capital and the crisis. Interview with John Bellamy Foster for the Norwegian daily "Klassekampen", conducted on October 15, 2008.

6. Whitney, Meredith (2009-03-10). "Credit Cards Are the Next Credit Crunch: Washington shouldn't exacerbate the looming problem in consumer credit lines". Wall Street Journal. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123664459331878113.html.

7. Confer Thomas Philippon: "The future of the financial industry", Finance Department of the New York University Stern School of Business at New York University, link to blog