Investment Banking in 200 (B): A Brave New World
1. In the wake of the Great Depression, Congress had enacted the 1993 Glass-Steagall Act to prohibit the combination of depositary institution and investment bank and brokerages. However, following the changes of technological advances, both individual and corporate customers’ desired for a one-stop shop. Citicorp, the second largest commercial bank and Travelers Group, the third largest brokerage house lobbied for merger’s regulatory approval. Because of a Republican Congress and President Clinton the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial Service Modernization Act was passed. To compete in a global market companies, need to make changes in order to be competitive. I don’t believe that the government could have foreseen the crisis of 2008, partly because I think they believed companies would have acted ethical and not taken one such high risk investments.
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I believe that Goldman Sachs could have been competitive without taking large leverage investments. During the 10 years leading up to the 2008 crisis, Goldman never exceeded a leverage above 30x most other investment banks were leveraged up to above 40x. With a lower leverage Goldman would be able to write off its subprime loans more easily.
3. The Fed placed a $29 billion loan against a collection of Bear’s assets thought to be worth $30 billion. With J.P. Morgan absorbing the first billions of bad investments. The Fed believed that Bear’s struggle was due to liquidity problems and in the end would be repaid in full. However, with Lehman the problem was solvency. Lehman had increased their leverage ratio 10x during the years leading up to 2008 and had given Lehman a high debt-to-equity ratio.
4. Yes, with investors requiring greater levels of returns, investment banks were required to take on loans with higher levels of
The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act was the federal government’s reaction to the financial crisis of 2008. The Dodd-Frank act symbolized the government’s regulatory stamp on the banks in the United States . This regulation from the Dodd-Frank Act set the goal to lower dependency on the bank federally by setting up regulations and tampering with companies that are deemed “Too Big to Fail”. Before the enactment of the Dodd Frank act, it took many obstacles to produce the content provided which sparked from the issue at hand with the financial downward spiral and the decisions as well as actions from overseers such as: the Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson and the presiding president George Bush. Two men emerged
The American sub-prime mortgage crisis and asset-backed commercial paper (ABCP) crisis happened in Canada had huge negative impacts on the financial industry. With the bankruptcy of several major banks in North America, investors lost their faith in financial institutions and were not willing to invest their assets to those financial institutions because of extremely high risks. As a competitive player in the industry, Goodwin also faced this threat and had poor performance. Internal Analysis Strength: Goodwin was a well-diversified company with six divisions in different but related market segments.
The FDIC protected the deposits of individuals at banks by insuring up to 2,500 dollars of their deposit. This policy, along with other efforts to mend the faults in the banking system, were established in the banks across the country. By doing this, bank closures that had become extraordinarily prevalent in the early 1930’s were almost nonexistent in 1934 and beyond; many financial institutions during the Roaring 20’s invested money in unstable stocks in hopes of making significant gains, and this played a major role in the bank failures following the stock market crash. By restricting the banks and requiring them to insure the deposits of American citizens, the FDIC was successful in making the banking systems of America safer and more
What happened to all the banks then? Well first off people had complete trust in them, that is until the stock market crashed. Banks had invested a lot of money in the stock market also. But when it crashed they lost it all and
Beginning with bank reform, the New Dealers were able to maintain oversight in the banking industry, which had previously been an unregulated and unpredictable source of capital. The Glass-Steagal Act and the Emergency Banking Act signaled a shift from a lassiez faire approach to the banking industry to one that ensured banks were making responsible loans and not gambling with depositor’s savings in the stock market. By not allowing banks who were considered “irresponsible’ to reopen and separating the savings and investment functions of the banks, a more secure system began to emerge. The impact of this legislation was immediate, as bank failures dropped dramatically. Additionally, major breakdowns in the banking industry were avoided until fairly recently, which came as a result of the repeal of Glass-Steagal.
However, the recession of 2007 was affected largely by the house bubble collapsing. The financial industries had designed complex ways for people to receive lends. There was a larger risk later that neither the investors of firms
The excessive spending came to a breaking point when investors traded about sixteen million shares on the New York Stock Exchange in all but one day. Billions of dollars went down the drain in result of the trades and thousands of investors went bankrupt. Speculators got a rude awakening once they lost all of their money in hopes of gaining more. Harry J. Carmen considers speculation as “the final development that set the stage for the collapse of American prosperity” (Doc 5). So much chaos happened in so little time due to speculation and that was just one reason behind the economy collapsing.
In contrast, supporters argue that protecting consumers and preventing another financial crisis was necessary. In this paper, I will analyze the reasons for the success of the Dodd-Frank
In 2008, economically, we were on our way to another massive depression. It took two years and the creation of new policies to get us out of this. If it weren’t for the Great Depression, people might not be as careful as they are with money and there would not be any New Deal programs that still have an impact today. The FDIC is very important nowadays because it insures your bank account. If there were to be another heroic depression, you would not lose all of your money that you have in the bank
In 1929, the Federal Reserve Board dramatically increased interest rates to slow inflation, which ended up being a huge mistake. This increase heavily impacted Americans’ spending habits, and punished their reliance on credit. This led the US economy into a standstill, where the demand for goods was low, but companies had many things to sell leftover from the period of high consumerism. Unsound Banking and investing practices were also a major cause of the Great Depression. Margin investing was the practice of getting a loan from the stock market to be able to invest more money.
The biggest enemy to the end of the financial crisis and the beginning of an economic recovery is Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson himself. Lets forget for a minute that the decision by Paulson and Bernanke to let Lehman Brothers fail was the precipitating event leading to credit markets freezing up and the first round of financial panic. Since then, the two have been working diligently to correct this collosal mistake. But separating actions from words, we see that words are in fact much more potent. Since the end of September, every time Henry Paulson has opened his month, the Dow has dropped on average 196 points.
In Addition to maldistribution stood the credit structure of the economy, some farmers were in deep land mortgage debt, so they lowered their crop prices in order to regain credit, and because the farmers were no longer accountable for what they owed banks. Across the nation the banking system found themselves in constant trouble. In America both small and large bankers were concerned for their survival, so they began investing recklessly in stock markets and granting unwise loans. These unconscious decisions would lead a large consequence, such as families losing their life savings and their deposits became uninsured. “ More than 9,000 American banks either went bankrupt or closed their doors to avoid bankruptcy between 1930 and 1933.”Although
Instead of laying out the causes of the Great Recession, he states that this recession “provides another watershed moment to reevaluate our core economic beliefs (51)”. Atif provides two reasons as to why financial crises are preceded by a sharp rise in leverage. The first explanation is that credit expansion is associated with positive productivity, which then represents the crisis to come as an “unlucky event (51)”. The second explanation is that credit booms are fueled by shifts in the supply of credit. He examines data about mortgage growth, mortgage default rates, and house price growth and comes up with the conclusion that “if subprime credit growth were driven by expectations of higher house price appreciation in subprime neighborhoods, we should not have seen higher subprime credit growth in elastic cities that experienced no house price appreciation (53).”
By the fourth quarter of 2007, Freddie Mac reported a $2 billion loss. In response, the agency raised $6 billion in new capital through the sale of preferred stock to shore up its reserves. However, this was not enough. Nevertheless, They Did not Cause the Mortgage Crisis Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac did not cause the subprime mortgage crisis.
The only good thing to come out of Lehman’s collapse was that the US regulators had to tighten up regulations and limit the chance of such a crisis happening again. This will bring back investors confidence in Wall Street and keep the economic wheel turning.