The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu The leading online blog in the fields of corporate governance and financial regulation. Sat, 23 May 2026 11:30:35 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.5.8 https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/cropped-photography-4-e1706898544564-1-32x32.png The Financial Panic of 2008 and Financial Regulatory Reform – The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu 32 32 The Financial Panic of 2008 and Financial Regulatory Reform https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2010/11/20/the-financial-panic-of-2008-and-financial-regulatory-reform/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-financial-panic-of-2008-and-financial-regulatory-reform https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2010/11/20/the-financial-panic-of-2008-and-financial-regulatory-reform/#comments Sat, 20 Nov 2010 15:22:54 +0000 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/corpgov/?p=13988?d=20150120095821EST Posted by Randall D. Guynn, Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP, on Saturday, November 20, 2010
Editor's Note:

Randall Guynn is head of the Financial Institutions Group at Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP. This post is based on a report issued by the Task Force on the Financial Crisis of the International Bar Association. Mr. Guynn authored the U.S. chapter of this report, and an abridged version of this chapter appears below; the complete chapter is available here. The full report is available here.

The Financial Panic of 2008

The first signs of an impending financial crisis appeared in the US in 2007, when US real estate prices began to collapse and early delinquencies in recently underwritten sub-prime mortgages began to spike. It culminated in a genuine financial panic during September and October of 2008. The most serious recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s followed. The Federal Reserve and other organs of the US Government responded by flooding the markets with money and other liquidity, reducing interest rates, providing extraordinary assistance to major financial institutions, increasing Government spending, and taking other steps to provide financial assistance to the markets.

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