Who Should Be Blamed for the 2008 Crisis?

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to investigate the causes of the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis and an attempt to analyse which factors should be blamed for the outbreak of the global recession in 2009. The first part consists of theoretical research. It begins with a definition of a crisis from various perspectives in the opinion of well-known economics and provides a general historical overview. Later on, papier highlights researchers who have been studying economic crises including their main findings and contribution. The second part of this work is devoted to an empirical analysis. Primarily, it investigates the reasons that had led to the crisis in the Unites States: excessive deregulation and growing inequality among financial market as well as too low interest rates. Secondly, paper provides a brief description on the transmission channels of the crisis to real economy, both in the US and in Europe. These were: involvement of non-US banks in “toxic” assets, declining demand in importing countries and panic among investors in stock exchanges. This resulted not only in the fall of consump-tion and investments but also increased public deficits and public debts in all economies. Finally, paper provides explanation of actions that were undertaken by public institutions including: “The Paulson Plan”, “TARP” – by government and “TALF”, “PPIP”, “QE” – by Federal Reserve System. At the end, paper attempts to evaluate what factors and to what extent where responsible for the outbreak of the recent global recession.