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ECONOMIC REPORT OF THE PRESIDENT

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Figure 6-1<br />

Household Net Worth in the Great Depression and Great Recession<br />

Index, 1929/2008=100<br />

160<br />

150<br />

2008=100<br />

140<br />

130<br />

120<br />

110<br />

100<br />

90<br />

80<br />

1929=100<br />

70<br />

60<br />

0 12 24 36 48 60 72 84 96<br />

Months from January 1929/2008<br />

Note: Red markers represent annual averages.<br />

Source: Federal Reserve Board of Governors; Mishkin (1978).<br />

This expansion of lending, and the financial system behavior that<br />

encouraged it, both fueled an unsustainable rise in housing prices and filled<br />

the financial system with risky assets that left financial firms over-leveraged<br />

and vulnerable. Publicly traded government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs)<br />

including Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac used leverage as high as 75-to-1 to<br />

build a $5 trillion mortgage exposure. This included the purchase of a growing<br />

fraction non-GSE subprime mortgage-backed securities, rising from<br />

10.5 percent in 2001 to 40 percent in 2004. Trillions of dollars in mortgages<br />

were held directly and indirectly by many different types of market participants<br />

as mortgage-related securities were packaged, repackaged, and sold to<br />

investors around the world. When housing prices collapsed, hundreds of<br />

billions of dollars in losses in mortgages and mortgage-related securities<br />

caused problems for financial institutions that had significant exposures to<br />

those mortgages and had borrowed heavily against them. What had been<br />

excessively loose lending quickly became tight, and impacts started spilling<br />

into other sectors of the economy.<br />

Uncertainty about exposure to losses from mortgage-related securities<br />

as well as derivatives based on those securities led to uncertainty about the<br />

creditworthiness of major financial institutions. Short-term wholesale funding<br />

became more challenging. The crisis intensified in September 2008 with<br />

362 | Chapter 6

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