Subprime Crisis Essay

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A Tentative Study on the Causes and Impacts of the Subprime Financial Crisis on the Global Financial Markets The American subprime crisis is a new-type of financial crisis, which quickly spread to other parts of the world and evolved into the worldwide deflation of credit and loan. In April 2007 the U.S. New Century Financial Corporation filed for bankruptcy, which marked the formal outbreak of the subprime crisis (Hui 2008). With forming the “butterfly effect”, the subprime crisis exerted an enormous shock on global financial markets. This paper aims to analyze the causes of the subprime financial crisis and its impacts on the financial system: from financial institutions, monetary policy, credit derivatives and more. The subprime financial crisis sprang from the subprime mortgage market of real-estate. The U.S. subprime mortgage market can be classified into three levels: prime mortgage loan, Alt-A mortgage loan and subprime mortgage loan (Laurie 2008). The subprime mortgage loan means that some lending institutions provide loans to poor-credit and low-income borrowers, for which it is easy to occur the default phenomenon. Under the circumstance of easing credit policy or rising house prices, lending institutions, even though loans cannot be reimbursed from borrowers, can also make a high profit through refunding or selling mortgage property. However, in the opposite condition, refunding has a real hindrance, and difficult to recoup all loans through the sale of real estate due to falling house prices. If large scales of such incidents happen during the same period, a subprime crisis may erupt. The main causes of the subprime crisis can be analyzed in four aspects: monetary policy, lending institutions, credit rating and financial derivatives. Firstly, the outbreak of the crisis is directly related with the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy, which
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