This crisis began with the bursting of the subprime mortgage bubble. Before the crisis, banks lended excessive mortgages because of low interest rates and bundled these high risk mortgages into mortgage backed securities to be sold. Eventually, the accumulation of credit defaults of these mortgage led the nation-wide bank failure. The entire crisis happened so quickly that it was helpful to visualize the sequence of events through Google Trends. I hope that you too have a better understanding of the Great Recession.
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