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House of Cards Crisis

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Submitted By cranespencer
Words 1000
Pages 4
Spencer Crane
Fin 3351
December 5, 2013

The House of Cards Crisis

The political and economic environment described in the House of Cards video is characterized by events leading up to the financial crisis the United States experienced in in the early 2000s. The crisis is credited to events such as, the burst of the Dot Com Bubble, which lead to a market crash that put the American economy in a recession; and the controversy that surrounded Government Sponsored Enterprises, which lead the American people to lose trust in it’s government’s financial institutes. However, people such as, Ben Bernanke and Alan Greenspan have helped the United States recover from this crisis by implementing new guidelines for the financial market.
According to Cashzilla.com, the Internet bubble described in summary was “a rapid rise in equity markets fueled by investments in Internet-based companies. During the dot com bubble of the late 1990s, the value of equity markets grew exponentially, with the technology-dominated Nasdaq index rising from under 1,000 to 5,000 between 1995 and 2000.” Basically, investors started inserting a vast amount of their money into these internet-based companies, which in turn caused the stock market to rise dramatically. “The approach of rapidly growing customer bases before making any real profit was the first mistake”(Dot-Com Bubble: Explained). These Internet companies were running their businesses off of investor’s money and not from real profit, consequently this in turn caused those companies to fail and claim bankruptcy. There are main factors that are said to have lead to the burst of the bubble such as, stock market regulation and bad business practices by these companies, however, many believe that the burst of the Dot COM Bubble was inevitable. “Some of these companies started with nothing and became hugely popular within a few years but

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