The crisis had an impact on all countries in some form, but some countries were hit more than others. A picture of financial devastation emerges as currency depreciation, stock market declines, and government bond spreads rise. These three indicators, considered combined, convey the impact of the crisis since they show financial weakness. Ukraine, Argentina, and Jamaica are the countries most hit by the crisis, according to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s International Economics Bulletin. Ireland, Russia, Mexico, Hungary, and the Baltic nations are among the other countries that have been severely affected. China, Japan, Brazil, India, Iran, Peru, and Australia, on the other hand, are “among the least affected.”
Who was the hardest hit by the Great Recession of 2008?
17951), co-authors Hilary Hoynes, Douglas Miller, and Jessamyn Schaller found that the Great Recession (December 2007 to June 2009) had a bigger impact on men, black and Hispanic workers, young workers, and workers with less education than other workers.
What industries were the hardest damaged by the recession of 2008?
The retail, restaurant, and hotel industries aren’t the only ones that suffer during a recession. During periods like these, industries like automotive, oil and gas, sports, real estate, and many more face significant decreases. Although the recession brought on by the coronavirus epidemic is unusual, many of these businesses have had difficulties in the past.
However, as we already stated, not all is doom and gloom. Certain industries have done a good job of riding the wave and adapting.
Which country initiated the Great Recession of 2008?
Between 2007 and 2009, the Great Recession was a period of substantial overall deterioration (recession) in national economies around the world. The severity and timing of the recession differed by country (see map). The International Monetary Fund (IMF) declared it the worst economic and financial crisis since the Great Depression at the time. As a result, normal international ties were severely disrupted.
The Great Recession was triggered by a combination of financial system vulnerabilities and a series of triggering events that began with the implosion of the United States housing bubble in 20052012. In 20072008, when property values collapsed and homeowners began to default on their mortgages, the value of mortgage-backed assets held by investment banks fell, prompting some to fail or be bailed out. The subprime mortgage crisis occurred between 2007 and 2008. The Great Recession began in the United States officially in December 2007 and lasted for 19 months, due to banks’ inability to give financing to businesses and households’ preference for paying off debt rather than borrowing and spending. Except for tiny signs in the sudden rise of forecast probabilities, which were still significantly below 50%, it appears that no known formal theoretical or empirical model was able to effectively foresee the progression of this recession, as with most earlier recessions.
While most of the world’s developed economies, particularly in North America, South America, and Europe, experienced a severe, long-term recession, many more recently developed economies, particularly China, India, and Indonesia, experienced far less impact, with their economies growing significantly during this time. Oceania, meanwhile, was spared the brunt of the damage, thanks to its proximity to Asian markets.
Which country was hardest hit by the economic downturn?
It was milder in Japan and much of Latin America than in Europe. The world economy’s worst depression in history was caused by a variety of factors, which is perhaps unsurprising. Consumer demand declines, financial panics, and misguided government policies all contributed to a drop in economic output in the United States, while the gold standard, which linked nearly all of the world’s countries in a network of fixed currency exchange rates, played a key role in spreading the American downturn to other nations. The abandoning of the gold standard and the subsequent monetary growth were key factors in the recovery from the Great Depression. The Great Depression had a massive economic impact, resulting in both great human suffering and significant changes in economic policy.
What were the three main causes of the 2008 financial crisis?
The Great Recession, which ran from December 2007 to June 2009, was one of the worst economic downturns in US history. The economic crisis was precipitated by the collapse of the housing market, which was fueled by low interest rates, cheap lending, poor regulation, and hazardous subprime mortgages.
What was the solution to the 2008 financial crisis?
1 Congress approved a $700 billion bank bailout in September 2008, which is now known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program. Obama proposed the $787 billion economic stimulus package in February 2009, which helped avert a global depression. The following is a timeline of key events during the Great Recession of 2008.
Who is the hardest hit by the recession?
8 industries with the best job security during a downturn
- Health-care services. People get sick and require medical care regardless of the state of the economy, thus the demand for health-care occupations is fairly stable, even during a downturn.
How long did it take to recover from the financial crisis of 2008?
When the decade-long expansion in US housing market activity peaked in 2006, the Great Moderation came to an end, and residential development began to decline. Losses on mortgage-related financial assets began to burden global financial markets in 2007, and the US economy entered a recession in December 2007. Several prominent financial firms were in financial difficulties that year, and several financial markets were undergoing substantial upheaval. The Federal Reserve responded by providing liquidity and support through a variety of measures aimed at improving the functioning of financial markets and institutions and, as a result, limiting the damage to the US economy. 1 Nonetheless, the economic downturn deteriorated in the fall of 2008, eventually becoming severe and long enough to be dubbed “the Great Recession.” While the US economy reached bottom in the middle of 2009, the recovery in the years that followed was exceptionally slow in certain ways. In response to the severity of the downturn and the slow pace of recovery that followed, the Federal Reserve provided unprecedented monetary accommodation. Furthermore, the financial crisis prompted a slew of important banking and financial regulation reforms, as well as congressional legislation that had a substantial impact on the Federal Reserve.
Rise and Fall of the Housing Market
Following a long period of expansion in US house building, home prices, and housing loans, the recession and crisis struck. This boom began in the 1990s and accelerated in the mid-2000s, continuing unabated through the 2001 recession. Between 1998 and 2006, average home prices in the United States more than doubled, the largest increase in US history, with even bigger advances in other locations. During this time, home ownership increased from 64 percent in 1994 to 69 percent in 2005, while residential investment increased from around 4.5 percent of US GDP to nearly 6.5 percent. Employment in housing-related sectors contributed for almost 40% of net private sector job creation between 2001 and 2005.
The development of the housing market was accompanied by an increase in household mortgage borrowing in the United States. Household debt in the United States increased from 61 percent of GDP in 1998 to 97 percent in 2006. The rise in home mortgage debt appears to have been fueled by a number of causes. The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) maintained a low federal funds rate after the 2001 recession, and some observers believe that by keeping interest rates low for a “long period” and only gradually increasing them after 2004, the Federal Reserve contributed to the expansion of housing market activity (Taylor 2007). Other researchers, on the other hand, believe that such variables can only explain for a small part of the rise in housing activity (Bernanke 2010). Furthermore, historically low interest rates may have been influenced by significant savings accumulations in some developing market economies, which acted to keep interest rates low globally (Bernanke 2005). Others attribute the surge in borrowing to the expansion of the mortgage-backed securities market. Borrowers who were deemed a bad credit risk in the past, maybe due to a poor credit history or an unwillingness to make a big down payment, found it difficult to get mortgages. However, during the early and mid-2000s, lenders offered high-risk, or “subprime,” mortgages, which were bundled into securities. As a result, there was a significant increase in access to housing financing, which helped to drive the ensuing surge in demand that drove up home prices across the country.
Effects on the Financial Sector
The extent to which home prices might eventually fall became a significant question for the pricing of mortgage-related securities after they peaked in early 2007, according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency House Price Index, because large declines in home prices were viewed as likely to lead to an increase in mortgage defaults and higher losses to holders of such securities. Large, nationwide drops in home prices were uncommon in US historical data, but the run-up in home prices was unique in terms of magnitude and extent. Between the first quarter of 2007 and the second quarter of 2011, property values declined by more than a fifth on average across the country. As financial market participants faced significant uncertainty regarding the frequency of losses on mortgage-related assets, this drop in home values contributed to the financial crisis of 2007-08. Money market investors became concerned of subprime mortgage exposures in August 2007, putting pressure on certain financial markets, particularly the market for asset-backed commercial paper (Covitz, Liang, and Suarez 2009). The investment bank Bear Stearns was bought by JPMorgan Chase with the help of the Federal Reserve in the spring of 2008. Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy in September, and the Federal Reserve aided AIG, a significant insurance and financial services firm, the next day. The Federal Reserve, the Treasury, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation were all approached by Citigroup and Bank of America for assistance.
The Federal Reserve’s assistance to specific financial firms was hardly the only instance of central bank credit expansion in reaction to the crisis. The Federal Reserve also launched a slew of new lending programs to help a variety of financial institutions and markets. A credit facility for “primary dealers,” the broker-dealers that act as counterparties to the Fed’s open market operations, as well as lending programs for money market mutual funds and the commercial paper market, were among them. The Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF), which was launched in collaboration with the US Department of Treasury, was aimed to relieve credit conditions for families and enterprises by offering credit to US holders of high-quality asset-backed securities.
To avoid an increase in bank reserves that would drive the federal funds rate below its objective as banks attempted to lend out their excess reserves, the Federal Reserve initially funded the expansion of Federal Reserve credit by selling Treasury securities. The Federal Reserve, on the other hand, got the right to pay banks interest on their excess reserves in October 2008. This encouraged banks to keep their reserves rather than lending them out, reducing the need for the Federal Reserve to offset its increased lending with asset reductions.2
Effects on the Broader Economy
The housing industry was at the forefront of not only the financial crisis, but also the broader economic downturn. Residential construction jobs peaked in 2006, as did residential investment. The total economy peaked in December 2007, the start of the recession, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research. The drop in general economic activity was slow at first, but it accelerated in the fall of 2008 when financial market stress reached a peak. The US GDP plummeted by 4.3 percent from peak to trough, making this the greatest recession since World War II. It was also the most time-consuming, spanning eighteen months. From less than 5% to 10%, the jobless rate has more than doubled.
The FOMC cut its federal funds rate objective from 4.5 percent at the end of 2007 to 2 percent at the start of September 2008 in response to worsening economic conditions. The FOMC hastened its interest rate decreases as the financial crisis and economic contraction worsened in the fall of 2008, bringing the rate to its effective floor a target range of 0 to 25 basis points by the end of the year. The Federal Reserve also launched the first of several large-scale asset purchase (LSAP) programs in November 2008, purchasing mortgage-backed assets and longer-term Treasury securities. These purchases were made with the goal of lowering long-term interest rates and improving financial conditions in general, hence boosting economic activity (Bernanke 2012).
Although the recession ended in June 2009, the economy remained poor. Economic growth was relatively mild in the first four years of the recovery, averaging around 2%, and unemployment, particularly long-term unemployment, remained at historically high levels. In the face of this sustained weakness, the Federal Reserve kept the federal funds rate goal at an unusually low level and looked for new measures to provide extra monetary accommodation. Additional LSAP programs, often known as quantitative easing, or QE, were among them. In its public pronouncements, the FOMC began conveying its goals for future policy settings more fully, including the situations in which very low interest rates were likely to be appropriate. For example, the committee stated in December 2012 that exceptionally low interest rates would likely remain appropriate at least as long as the unemployment rate remained above a threshold of 6.5 percent and inflation remained no more than a half percentage point above the committee’s longer-run goal of 2 percent. This “forward guidance” technique was meant to persuade the public that interest rates would remain low at least until specific economic conditions were met, exerting downward pressure on longer-term rates.
Effects on Financial Regulation
When the financial market upheaval calmed, the focus naturally shifted to financial sector changes, including supervision and regulation, in order to avoid such events in the future. To lessen the risk of financial difficulty, a number of solutions have been proposed or implemented. The amount of needed capital for traditional banks has increased significantly, with bigger increases for so-called “systemically essential” institutions (Bank for International Settlements 2011a;2011b). For the first time, liquidity criteria will legally limit the amount of maturity transformation that banks can perform (Bank for International Settlements 2013). As conditions worsen, regular stress testing will help both banks and regulators recognize risks and will require banks to spend earnings to create capital rather than pay dividends (Board of Governors 2011).
New provisions for the treatment of large financial institutions were included in the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010. The Financial Stability Oversight Council, for example, has the authority to classify unconventional credit intermediaries as “Systemically Important Financial Institutions” (SIFIs), putting them under Federal Reserve supervision. The act also established the Orderly Liquidation Authority (OLA), which authorizes the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to wind down specific institutions if their failure would pose a significant risk to the financial system. Another section of the legislation mandates that large financial institutions develop “living wills,” which are detailed plans outlining how the institution could be resolved under US bankruptcy law without endangering the financial system or requiring government assistance.
The financial crisis of 2008 and the accompanying recession, like the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Great Inflation of the 1970s, are important areas of research for economists and policymakers. While it may be years before the causes and ramifications of these events are fully known, the attempt to unravel them provides a valuable opportunity for the Federal Reserve and other agencies to acquire lessons that can be used to shape future policy.
Who was the most severely affected by the Great Depression?
Millions of people were affected by the Great Depression, from industrial strongholds to the rural Great Plains, from factory employees to farmers. As cities’ industries faltered, then ceased altogether, employees lost their jobs and turned to food banks or other philanthropic endeavors. Because the government’s relief efforts were restricted, private groups stepped in to aid, but they were unable to keep up with the demand. Farmers in rural areas were hit even harder. Crop prices fell so low in some sections of the country that farmers couldn’t afford to pay their mortgages, and their farms were foreclosed on. One of the worst droughts in history ravaged the Great Plains, rendering the region barren and unsuited for even the most basic food production.
The most vulnerable populations in the country, such as children, the elderly, and those who are discriminated against, such as African Americans, were the hardest hit. Most white Americans felt entitled to the limited employment that were available, leaving African Americans jobless, even in jobs that were once considered their domain. Overall, the country’s economic hardship was unmatched in its history.
Which industry is immune to the downturn?
Healthcare, food, consumer staples, and basic transportation are examples of generally inelastic industries that can thrive during economic downturns. During a public health emergency, they may also benefit from being classified as critical industries.