Excessive consumption in the United States and excessive savings in Asian emerging market economies are the deep-seated reasons for this crisis. For a long time, domestic savings in the United States have been at a low level, and the foreign economy has shown a long-term trade deficit. The average annual deficit accounts for 6% of the total GDP, and these deficits are mainly paid by printing dollars. However, residents of China, Japanese and other Asian countries and oil-producing countries are saving excessively, maintaining a trade surplus for a long time and accumulating a large amount of US dollar reserves. These dollar reserves outside the American economy need to find corresponding financial assets to invest, which provides a basis for the emergence of Wall Street financial derivatives and the bubble of domestic asset prices in the United States.

In the Bush era, especially after the IT bubble burst, real estate was identified as a new economic growth point in order to find new vitality of the American economy. The government actively supports Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, providing mortgage loans to low-income families with 60 times leverage.

200 1 by 2006, the real estate market in the United States was booming because of the government's support through mortgage loans. By 2007, the mortgage for Americans to buy a house will be as big as the GDP of the United States. These housing loans to low-income people through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac soon failed to pay back, which led to the subprime mortgage crisis.

At that time, China also encountered the same problem, taking housing as a new economic growth point. Banks and the private sector are also constantly innovating new financial products. I remember that in the previous CCTV dialogue programs, CCB Shanghai Branch recommended our new product "Zero Down Payment" in the program, and I was invited to participate in this program.

The United States is engaged in "zero down payment" for housing mortgage loans.

At the same time, several things have happened in this process: in the past, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) stipulated that short selling was allowed only when the stock market went up, but now it can also be short selling when the stock market fell. This technological change has also become an accelerator for the stock market to fall.

In addition, with the whole process of bubble growth, Greenspan's financial policy kept cutting interest rates, making the funds in the market very cheap.

In this chain, the front is the housing of low-income families, followed by a long list of derivative products such as leverage amplification and CDS.

These are the causes of this once-in-a-century financial storm, which has laid the groundwork for this economic crisis. With these reasons, there will be today's results.

Let's take Morgan Stanley as an example to see how this result is formed. In this process, they borrowed a lot of money because of lowering the minimum requirement of equity capital, and the leverage ratio reached 30 times, which means they can borrow loans from 30 yuan with equity capital of 1 yuan. When the market funds are cheap, the interest rate is very low, only 4%-5%. At that time, Morgan Stanley's stock was as high as $80 per share. After this unsustainable bubble burst, Morgan Stanley's stock fell to more than $8 per share, and their loan interest rate rose from 4-5% to 20%. At the same time, Morgan Stanley also bought many CDs. After the financial crisis, firstly, there was distrust among banks, and loans between banks dropped sharply, as did loans between countries. The crisis of confidence has intensified the crisis in all aspects. There is no money in the financial market, the environment for maintaining this game has changed, and a big crisis has come.

In recent years, the real estate investment in the United States has sprung up suddenly, which should be regarded as a part of the real economy, but the sales targets of these real estates are mainly the low-and middle-income classes in the United States. With the transfer of manufacturing industry in the United States, it is difficult to raise the income of the middle and lower classes, and the rise in real estate prices driven by the financial asset bubble eventually pushed them to the brink of bankruptcy, triggering a world debt crisis. Therefore, the essence of this financial crisis is the financial crisis caused by subprime mortgage, and the innovation of financial derivatives only amplified the subprime mortgage crisis and turned the American subprime mortgage crisis into a global financial storm.

The apparent cause of this crisis is the bursting of the bubble economy. The bubble is caused by global excess liquidity, but the underlying reasons behind the excess liquidity are insufficient global effective aggregate demand and excess global capacity supply, and the overall performance is global savings surplus. In other words, the global economy is actually in a state of dynamic inefficiency: abundant savings funds cannot find matching investment projects.

From the perspective of global regional distribution, developed countries such as the United States over-consume, and Asian emerging market economies, oil exporters and some European countries outside the United States over-save. This asymmetry between regional consumption and savings can only be achieved by one factor, that is, the US dollar acts as an international currency and becomes a representative of hard currency, and countries and residents who save excessively will accumulate the US dollar as wealth for a long time. Therefore, the long-term trade deficit of the United States and the long-term surplus of the above countries can be balanced by the flow of dollars. The United States has long used printed currency to balance the imbalance of the global real economy, and sooner or later there will be problems. Therefore, the prerequisite of this crisis can also be attributed to the lack of the international monetary system. That is, after the elimination of the gold standard, the international monetary system has been fragile and there are hidden dangers. The dollar-centered international monetary system gradually established after World War II can only play a short-term role. With the deepening of globalization and the change of global economic power, it is difficult for the international monetary system to adapt. Therefore, there is an urgent need for a sound global governance structure, including a sound international monetary system.

The above contents hope to help you understand the financial crisis.