Mega Deals Up Against Ticking Clocks

For more on the financial crisis, check out GlobeSt.com’s Webinar , “Wall Street In a Freefall—The Winners and Losers.”

NEW YORK CITY-Last year around this time, what began as a quiet downturn in a once booming US housing market, has now snowballed into what may be the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression. In September 2007, the Federal Reserve first cut interest rates to 4.8%, and although the CMBS were slowing down radically, all and all, most felt pretty positive about the future, however the markets did not have a clue what was in store for them and indeed, we still do not know.

On Friday, after two weeks of debate, Congress has passed, and Pres. George W. Bush has signed a comprehensive financial rescue plan to save the financial industry and the economy at large from free fall. Now the industry is waiting to see if it will work. To understand how we got to this point, it is helpful to examine the path that took us here and where things now stand. Certainly the problem did not start when New Century Financial filed for bankruptcy in April 2007 or when the Fed began its program of reducing interest rates, however that was around the time when the most pessimistic parties began to worry that there might be a serious problem.