Looking Back: Wall Street, a Year Later

From the creator

This is the VOA Special English Economics Report, from http://voaspecialenglish.com One year ago, the United States financial system was in danger of collapse. One of Wall Street's oldest investment houses had just sought protection from its creditors. The Lehman Brothers bankruptcy on September fifteenth was a shock to the system, but not the only one. A week earlier, the government had seized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. These companies help finance most American housing loans. And one day after Lehman's failure, the government decided that the huge insurer A.I.G. was too big to fail. The Federal Reserve rescued the American International Group with an eighty-five billion dollar loan. But soon, credit markets around the world slowed to a halt on fears about the health of banks. By early October, Congress passed the Troubled Asset Relief Program, a rescue plan for the financial system. Banks and other financial companies have received more than two hundred billion dollars. But ten banks agreed in June to repay almost seventy billion of that. And so far, the government has earned about four billion on its investments. But taxpayers still own almost eighty percent of A.I.G. They also hold big shares of Citigroup and a number of other banks, as well as sixty percent of General Motors. On the anniversary of the Lehman collapse, President Obama renewed his call for reform of financial supervision. He said in a speech on Wall Street that some of the "old ways" that

Published 2009-10-15 · Watch on YouTube ↗
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