The Global Financial Crisis of 2008: An Analysis of Contributing Trends, Policies and Failures

More than two years after the worst financial crisis to date, the global economy as well as communities and families across the world continue to experience the aftershocks. Millions of people have lost their jobs and the economies are still struggling to recover. Many of us who lived through the crisis, will remember easily the shocking events that took place: stock prices went down dramatically; investors lost their confidence in the market and pulled their money out; large and famous financial institutions failed or teetered on the brink of bankruptcy; the global credit markets ceased to function and liquidity vanished from the system; governments were scrambling to prevent the collapse of the whole system with massive taxpayer-funded bailouts. In spite of the scale and significance of these events though, the questions remains to be answered as to how things got to this point and ultimately why the crisis happened? These questions are the main focus of this paper, in which the author will seek to share the author's perspective on some of the main themes of the crisis. This paper posits that there were multiple causes for the crisis. Macroeconomic trends and policies, market failures and regulatory failures were all major contributing factors whose interaction was necessary for the crisis to occur.