What caused the Great Recession?

Understanding the key factors that led

to one of the worst economic
downturns in US history
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Kicked off by widespread defaults on home mortgages, the Great Recession spread to engulf the banking
industry, the stock market, and eventually the entire US economy. Ariel Skelley/Getty; Alyssa
Powell/Insider
• The Great Recession by the numbers
• 1. Immoderate investments and deregulation
• 2. Loose lending standards in the housing market
• 3. Risky Wall Street behavior
• 4. Weak watchdogs
• 5. The subprime mortgage crisis
• 6. The 2008 stock market crash
• Federal response to the Great Recession
• Aftermath of the Great Recession
• The bottom line
• The Great Recession, one of the worst economic declines in US history,
officially lasted from December 2007 to June 2009.
• The collapse of the housing market — fueled by low interest rates, easy
credit, insufficient regulation, and toxic subprime mortgages — led to
the economic crisis.
• The Great Recession's legacy includes new financial regulations and an
activist Fed.
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Many factors contributed to the Great Recession of 2007 to 2009,

the second-worst economic crisis in US history.

What caused this economic chaos? Economists cite as the main

culprit the collapse of the subprime mortgage market — defaults on
high-risk housing loans — which led to a credit crunch in the global
banking system and a precipitous drop in bank lending.

But, in fact, the reasons are more complex. According to a 2011

report by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, the Great
Recession was an "avoidable" disaster caused by widespread
failures, including in government regulation and risky behavior by
Wall Street.

While the relative impact of each cause is still debated today, the
Great Recession stands as a cautionary tale about risk, investing in
what you know, and the dangers of putting full trust and faith in
financial experts and institutions.

The Great Recession by the numbers

• The downturn lasted 18 months

• The net worth of US households declined, erasing $19.2 trillion in wealth

• Gross domestic product (GDP) fell 4.3%, the largest decline in 60

years

• The unemployment rate reached 10% in October 2009 — rates were

even higher among Black and Hispanic households at about 15% and
12% respectively
 • The US lost $7.4 trillion in stock wealth from July 2008 to March 2009

• Home foreclosures skyrocketed, with nearly three million a year in

2009 and 2010

1. Immoderate investments and

deregulation
The two decades before the Great Recession were largely
prosperous, with rises in GDP, low inflation, and two relatively
mild recessions.

This period — from the mid-1980s up to 2007 — was optimistically

called the Great Moderation. The name refers to the contemporary
belief that the traditional boom-and-bust business cycle had been
overcome in favor of middling but stable economic growth.

However, unbridled optimism led to immoderate spending,

especially for risk-loving investors. Everyone from homeowners to
bankers believed the economy would keep growing. This made
traditionally risky behavior — like aggressive investment and
leveraging strategies, plus taking on excessive debt — seem safe.

Assumptions about economic growth also contributed to a period of

deregulation, most significantly the 1999 rollback of the Glass-
Steagall Act, a landmark Depression-era legislation that separated
commercial and investment banking.

Repealing key provisions of the Glass-Steagall Act allowed banks

and brokerages to become significantly larger, and opened the
floodgates for giant mergers. While just one contributing factor to
the Great Recession, the changes to the Glass-Steagall Act brought a
period of national expansion for corporations and the gobbling up of
small, independent institutions, which created entities that were
"too big to fail" — or so everyone thought.

2. Loose lending standards in the

housing market
In the decade leading up to 2007, real estate and property values
had been rising steadily, encouraging people to invest in property
and buy homes.

By early to mid-2000s, the residential housing market was

booming. To capitalize on the boom, mortgage lenders rushed to
approve as many home loans as they could, including to borrowers
with less-than-deal credit.

These risky loans, called subprime mortgages, would later become

one of the main causes of the Great Recession.

A subprime mortgage is a type of loan issued to borrowers with low

credit ratings. A prospective subprime borrower might have
multiple dings on their credit history or dubious streams of income.
In fact, the loan verification process was so lax at the time that it
drew its own nickname: NINJA loans, which stands for "no income,
no job, and no assets."

Because subprime mortgages were granted to people who previously

couldn't qualify for conventional mortgages, it opened the market to
a flood of new homebuyers. Easy housing credit resulted in the
higher demand for homes. This contributed to the run-up in housing
prices, which led to the rapid formation (and eventual bursting) of
the 2000s housing bubble.
While interest rates at the time were low, subprime mortgages were
adjustable-rate mortgages, which charged low, affordable payments
initially, followed by higher payments in the years thereafter. The
result? Borrowers who were already on shaky financial footing stood
a good chance of not being able to make payments when the interest
rate rose in the years following.

In the rush to take advantage of a hot market and low interest rates,
many homebuyers took on loans without knowing the risks
involved. But the common wisdom held that subprime loans were
safe since real estate prices were sure to keep rising.

3. Risky Wall Street behavior

Along with issuing mortgages, lenders found another way to make
money off of the real estate industry: By packaging subprime
mortgage loans and reselling them in a process called
securitization.

Through securitization, subprime lenders bundled loans together

and sold them to investment banks, which, in turn, sold them to
investors around the world as mortgage-backed securities (MBS).

Eventually, investment banks started repackaging and selling

mortgage-backed securities on the secondary market
as collateralized debt obligations (CDOs). These financial
instruments combined multiple loans of varying quality into one
product, divided into segments, or tranches, each with its own risk
levels suitable for different types of investors.

The theory, backed by elaborate Wall Street mathematical models,

was that the variety of different mortgages reduced the CDOs' risk.
The reality, however, was that a lot of the tranches contained
mortgages of poor quality, which would drag down returns of the
entire portfolio.

Investment banks and institutional investors around the world

borrowed significant sums at low short-term rates to buy CDOs. And
because the financial markets seemed stable on the whole, investors
felt secure about taking on more debt.

To make matters even more complicated, banks used credit default

swaps (CDS), another financial derivative, to insure against defaults
on CDOs. Banks and hedge funds started buying and selling swaps
on CDOs in unregulated transactions. Also, because CDS
transactions didn't show up on institutions' balance sheets,
investors couldn't assess the actual risks these enterprises had
assumed.

Important: The convoluted jumble of financial products that included MBS,

CDOs, and CDSs created a domino-like collapse of the housing market, and
the main reason why the financial crisis was so widespread.

4. Weak watchdogs
Like corporate bonds and other forms of debt, MBS and CDOs
required the blessing of credit rating agencies in order to be
marketed. The "Big Three" credit rating agencies include Moody's,
S&P, and Fitch Group.

These agencies placed AAA ratings — usually reserved for the safest
investments — on many securities, even though they contained a
healthy share of risky mortgages.

It's worth noting that credit rating agencies are supposed to be

independent. But an inherent conflict of interest seems to have
existed since the banks issuing the securities were the ones paying
the agencies to rate them.

5. The subprime mortgage crisis

After staying low throughout the early 2000s, interest rates began to
rise starting in 2004 in response to an overheating economy and
fears of inflation. In mid-2004, the federal funds rate was 1.25%. By
mid-2006, the interest rate was 5.25%.

The rate-hike could not have come at a worse time.

By mid-2006, home prices were peaking and the market was

slowing down. When supply started to outpace demand, home
prices spiraled. The combination of high interest rates and falling
home prices made it extremely difficult for buyers to make
payments on their homes.

As a result, defaults on subprime mortgages shot up. Loan after loan

became worthless. In April 2007, New Century Financial, the largest
independent provider of subprime mortgages, declared Chapter 11
bankruptcy.

The subprime mortgage crisis had begun. And because of CDOs, the
collapse was soon felt beyond the real estate industry.

The defaults meant big CDO investors, like hedge fund managers,
investment banks, and pension funds, saw the value of the
investments nosedive. Since CDOs didn't trade on any exchanges,
there was no way to get rid of them, so those holding them had to
write off a substantial amount of their value.
Those who had committed heavily in CDOs saw their entire balance
sheets decimated. One of the biggest: investment bank Bear Stearns.
After the bank suffered massive CDO-based losses, it lost investors'
confidence — and its ability to borrow money. In March 2008, to
avoid bankruptcy, the venerable firm sold itself to JP. Morgan Chase
for $10 per share.

6. The 2008 stock market crash

Lehman Brothers employees on the day the investment bank went bankrupt. James Leynse/Getty
Images

By the spring of 2008, the CDO debacle turned into a full-blown

credit crisis. Since it was unclear where all these toxic securities
were — given all the packaging and repackaging — and whose
balance sheets were harboring them, banks started charging high
interest rates to lend to other banks and institutions.
It was especially disastrous for investment bank Lehman Brothers.
In fact, of the $600 billion in debt owed by the company, $400
billion was supposed to be covered by CDS. Unfortunately, by that
point, the debt was worth almost nothing.

When Lehman collapsed, declaring bankruptcy on September 15,

panicked banks stopped lending almost completely and the entire
global banking system became short of funds.

The stock market reacted sharply. From September 19 to October

10, 2008, the Dow Jones Industrial Index went into free-fall,
declining 3,600 points.

During that time, big financial institutions started dropping:

• Bank of America (BAC) announced it was buying Merrill Lynch.
• The FDIC seized Washington Mutual, the country's largest savings and loan,
transferring its assets to JPMorgan Chase.
• Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, the last two of the major still-intact
investment banks, converted to bank holding companies, the better to be able
to obtain federal bailout funding.

With the global economy declining, international trade and

industrial production fell at an even a faster rate than during the
Great Depression of the 1930s. As consumer and business
confidence was shattered, companies started massive layoffs and
unemployment skyrocketed globally.

The Great Recession was in full force.

Federal response to the Great

Recession
Decisive action by the Federal Reserve, along with massive
government spending, kept the US economy from total collapse.
Aiming to boost borrowing and capital investment, the Fed reduced
interest rates to zero for the first time ever and launched a
quantitative easing program, whereby it bought financial assets to
add more money into the economy.

As for the federal government, it creating two key programs aimed

to provide emergency assistance:
• Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP): This initiative helped stabilize the
economy by having the government purchase up to $700 billion in toxic assets,
with most of the money used to bail out troubled banks.
• The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA): A stimulus
package enacted in 2009, ARRA implemented a series of tax cuts, government
spending mandates, loan guarantees, and unemployment benefits to help
kickstart the economy.

These measures were effective, preventing the recession from

developing into a decade-long affair, like the Great Depression. The
stock market began to rebound in 2009. Still, other aspects of the
economy took several years to recover — what
economists characterize as an L-shaped recovery.

Aftermath of the Great Recession

President Barack Obama signs the Dodd-Frank Act regulating the financial industry in
2010. Brooks Kraft/Getty Images

The Great Recession officially lasted through June 2009, but its
effects have had a lasting impact.
• GDP didn't regain its pre-recession strength until 2011.
• Unemployment remained above 5% until 2015.
• Real household income didn't increase until 2016.

The policies, reforms, programs and impact of the Great Recession

are still with us today. Among the Great Recession's legacy:

Financial regulation and reform

In 2010, President Obama signed the Dodd-Frank Act into law,
which aimed at reforming regulation of the financial industry. Some
highlights include the ability for the government to take control of
banks seen to be fiscally unsound, regulation of the over-the-counter
derivatives market, including credit default swaps, and a
requirement for banks to set aside more capital reserves as a
cushion. It also included the Volcker Rule, which curbed banks
proprietary trading for their own accounts and limited their dealings
with hedge funds and private equity funds, among other steps.

An activist Fed
Interest rates were at 5.25% in 2007. But by the end of 2008, the
Fed slashed them to zero. Those low interest rates and swift, strong
action to keep the economy moving are still hallmarks of the Fed
today. For example, it moved quickly to lower interest rates in
response to the economic turmoil caused by the COVID-19 crisis.

Hobbling of a generation

The generation that came of age at the worst of the

crisis, Millennials still feel the effects of the Great Recession. They
have decreased savings and heavy student loan debt. They have a
reluctance to buy homes and overall less wealth than previous
generations at a comparable age. A 2019 Country Financial
survey revealed that half (50%) of Millennials rate their level of
financial security as fair or poor, compared to 44% of Americans
overall.

The bottom line

The Great Recession stands as one of the worst economic
meltdowns in US history. Although the subprime mortgage crisis
was the immediate cause, multiple interconnected financial
factors caused the specialized-industry bubble burst to ripple out,
bankrupting firms, crashing the stock market, and hobbling the
whole economy.