Book Description

The 2007-2008 financial crises and the Great Recession that followed was a global event that caused great upheaval in the world economy. The crisis, which started in the US with the sub-prime mortgage debacle and the bursting of the housing bubble, triggered a credit crunch that reverberated around the globe and came close to toppling the world's financial infrastructure. The developed countries were particularly hard hit as GDP dropped sharply in all the major Western economies. With demand plunging and job losses mounting, the unemployment rate soared. Compared to their pre-crisis levels, the rate doubled in several countries including Ireland, Spain and the United States and tripled in the Baltic countries of Latvia and Lithuania.Tens of thousands of businesses, both large and small from all economic sectors, went bankrupt. For households, as property prices tanked millions of homeowners found themselves in negative equity, owing more on their mortgages than their homes were worth. When Lehman Brothers, the behemoth Wall Street bank, collapsed in September 2008 it was a watershed moment. Credit markets froze and liquidity virtually vanished as banks were reluctant to lend for fear of not being repaid which gummed up the economic machinery. As panic rippled through the system and investors headed for the exits, global stock markets took a battering. By the end of 2008 trillions of dollars in value had been wiped out. This book brings together a series of essays that the author wrote for his corporate clients over the period from 2009 to 2012. The articles analyzed the impact and fallout that the Great Recession had on the global economy and critically examined the efficacy of the policy responses of governments and central banks as they tried to steady the global economic ship. Also included are a number of posts by the author that were published in the Globe and Mail, Canada's premier national newspaper.