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Financial Crisis

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The article titled The End of the Financial World as We Know It provided a very detailed review of what lead up to the 2008 financial crisis. I felt that the author did a very good job being objective and taking a very difficult topic and presenting it in a straight forward manner. thought I did feel a little disheartened after reading the article. How could this have been let to go so far and have we really learned anything from the 2008 financial crisis.

The article titled How to Repair a Broken Financial World was more deliberate in staying on topic and discussing how we repair the financial system. The tone of the article was up beat and optimistic aligned with the naming of a new chief of enforcement Mr. Harry Markopolos. Though reading this article several years after it was published it is hard to look back and say that much has changed.

The New York Times article is titled " Financial Crisis Was Avoidable, Inquiry Finds" (New York Times, 2009). The article provides an overview a U.S. Government inquiry. There are high-level examples of what precipitated the 2008 financial crisis. "By one measure, for about every $40 in assets, the nation’s five largest investment banks had only $1 in capital to cover losses, meaning that a 3 percent drop in asset values could have wiped out the firm. The banks hid their excessive leverage using derivatives, off-balance-sheet entities and other devices, the report found. The speculative binge was abetted by a giant “shadow banking system” in which the banks relied heavily on short-term debt. “When the housing and mortgage markets cratered, the lack of transparency, the extraordinary debt loads, the short-term loans and the risky assets all came home to roost,” the report found. “What resulted was panic. We had reaped what we had sown.” (New York Times, 2009). Overall the article provided a clear and concise version of

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