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U.S Financial Crisis

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UNITED STATES AND FINANCIAL CRISIS
COM 107
February 13, 2013

The United States has been in a financial crisis which started back in 2008 and unfortunately, the crisis has gotten worst. The U.S. has been in a recession for the past five years . It has resulted in the housing market crashing, people losing their jobs, major banks going bankrupt, and the unemployment rate is at its highest. President Obama was sworn into office January 20, 2009. As our new president, he faces more challenging obstacles than any president who has been in office. When President Bush left office, Obama was left with the “sinking ship”.
It is believed that the origin of the crisis has to go back to the year 2001. During this year, the United States was put on a brink of deflation. When this happened, many banks within the country borrowed billions from the Federal Reserve. The reason many banks took advantage of this offer because they were given low interest rates on the money. Most of the money was dispersed mostly in the housing market. This resulted in many people borrowing money from banks because it had low interest rates on it. Unfortunately, over the next few years the downfall started. At the beginning, the Federal Reserve had put interest rates at 1%, it was done to stimulate the economy. The Federal Reserve changed their interest rates from 1% to above 5% (Rafaschieri 2008). When the low interest rates were raised, many homeowners defaulted on their payments because they could not afford to make their high monthly payments. Millions of Americans have lost their homes due to foreclosure. Also, people have lost their jobs due to their employer going out of business.
Usually banks provided their customers the option to finance their loan in order to buy homes, and they also secured the mortgage on the properties. The banks would retain the customer’s credit until the mortgage was paid in full. This practice changed as a result of clever and tricky financial improvements; in which lenders sold to third parties the rights to receive the mortgage payments and it also unburdened the additional credit risk. This process which was practiced is called securitization. These securities are known as “mortgage backed securities” or “collateralized debt obligations.”

These mortgage backed securities were then embalmed into multi-million dollar shares and sold to, or endorsed by, the investment community which then sold them to investors throughout the world. As a result, even more homeowners defaulted on their loan, which caused the mortgage backed securities to run dry. This resulted in international financial turmoil (Clemmitt 2010 ).

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