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Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2008

Brazil’s Economy Minister Fernando Haddad shakes hands with US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen during the G20 economic ministers’ meeting in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on July 26. The G20 summit is scheduled for November 18-19. Photo: AFP

Opinion | Here’s how the G20 can be more than a talk shop

While the grouping did a good job of dealing with the 2008 global financial crisis, in recent years, collective action has been sorely lacking.

13 Nov 2024 - 4:30PMvideocam

Opinion | Can the US overcome its political polarisation, whoever wins the election?

23 Oct 2024 - 2:25AMvideocam

Exclusive | Chinese economist calls for mega stimulus in excess of 2008’s 4 trillion yuan

16 Oct 2024 - 12:06PMvideocam

When will it end? How inexperience is fuelling the fire of China’s economic woes

Economists have ‘never seen anything like this’, and ‘challenges are on a greater scale’ than ever before, so how can China bring the wild ride to an end?

15 Oct 2024 - 3:05PM

Opinion | Reform financial markets now – or be forced into it with the next crash

It’s not just market volatility. We need to understand the deep structural forces sometimes beyond any single national regulator’s power.

12 Oct 2024 - 6:24AMvideocam

Middle Eastern investors set to access Hong Kong shares with 2 ETFs

The SFC has noticed that international investors, who previously were underweight on Hong Kong stocks, have now rushed back into the local market.

7 Oct 2024 - 11:23AM

Opinion | China’s stimulus will fall short without private-sector confidence

While short-term stimulus will help, Beijing must directly address the fears of businesses and households to get them spending again.

7 Oct 2024 - 5:30AMvideocam

Explainer | How China’s 2024 stimulus compares with past packages, and what’s next?

In nominal terms, the massive package has the potential to be China’s biggest ever.

3 Oct 2024 - 5:00PMvideocam

Singapore home sales plunge to lowest level since 2008 financial crisis

The financial hub has been grappling for months with slowing sales of new flats amid a stand-off between developers and homebuyers.

17 Sep 2024 - 5:35PMvideocam

Opinion | China must heed its own lessons in tackling past overcapacities

Overtightening hurt China’s economy in the past. Faced with new overcapacities, China should adopt a more expansionary fiscal and monetary policy.

31 Jul 2024 - 11:43PMvideocam

If policymakers had pursued moderate fiscal and monetary expansion while encouraging the market to play a decisive role in eliminating sectoral overcapacity in 2012, China may well have achieved higher GDP growth rates in the ensuing years. Photo: AP

US House raises alarm over China’s multi-trillion-dollar ‘time bomb’

Ratings agencies S&P Global and Moody’s accused of failing to reflect risk posed by mainland’s local government financing vehicles.

27 Jun 2024 - 11:00PMvideocam

Katie Porter, a California Democrat, speaks during a US House Oversight committee hearing in Washington on Wednesday. Photo: SCMP

Opinion | Era of freewheeling finance leading economic growth may soon be over

In a world of contending powers with greater risks and uncertainties, the free-market model with one dominant hegemon may no longer be suitable, given the urgent need to tackle social and environmental injustices.

31 May 2024 - 8:30PMvideocam

Asian Angle | What China must learn from Japan’s decades-long debt-deflation slowdown

Policymakers can ill afford to dither or send mixed signals in their efforts to rejuvenate the economy. The immediate danger facing China today is systemic contagion.

5 May 2024 - 10:30AM

Macroscope | As private credit warnings grow, the fear is that the horse has bolted

The IMF is warning regulators about the systemic risks of the rapidly growing private credit market, a largely opaque sector involving direct lending to corporations

14 Apr 2024 - 5:30AMvideocam

IMF managing director Kristalina Georgieva speaks at the China Development Forum in Beijing on March 24. The IMF has red-flagged the private credit market, which has the potential to suck much larger chunks of the global financial system into a vortex.
Photo: AFP

The View | Why the IMF must give China and other emerging economies a greater say

The US, Europe and Japan will not gladly sacrifice their IMF quotas to give China and others more voting rights. But a failure to reform the organisation will worsen rifts and weaken its ability to deal with looming global crises.

7 Apr 2024 - 10:00AMvideocam

IMF managing director Kristalina Georgieva and World Bank president Ajay Banga at a press conference in Marrakesh on October 12. Photo: AFP

Opinion | Collaboration is vital if we’re to overcome our health challenges

Pandemic showed global health systems can pull together against an acute shared threat. The momentum must be kept up. Recent UK healthcare education mission to China is a testament to that.

5 Apr 2024 - 6:01AMvideocam

Macroscope | Rate cuts or no, a new financial crisis may be inevitable

Markets and banking systems are stumbling on blindly and greedily towards a repeat of past mistakes both recent and distant. Banks being so big they can lend irresponsibly and ignore those meant to regulate them must change, and the coming crisis could do just that.

30 Mar 2024 - 4:30PM

Opinion | Imagine a world free from the oppression of a US-led global order

It would spell the end of the US ability to impose its will on the international community, shape other countries in its image and shift the burden of its economic crisis onto others.

28 Mar 2024 - 9:30AM

Opinion | In a risky, fragmenting world, we can all forge our own development path

Whether it’s macroeconomic modelling or export-led industrialisation, the game has changed with peak globalisation, technology diffusion and climate change. Development and how to finance it is the question, and brave countries can adopt very different models from the past.

8 Mar 2024 - 9:55PMvideocam

Outside In | Economists made wrong call on 2023 recession. But their alarm is real

2023 ended without the technical recession economists expected, but their warning of stagflation and a potentially crippling debt crisis should not be easily dismissed.

5 Jan 2024 - 3:30PMvideocam

Opinion | Policymakers must stop hiding behind myth of ‘unprecedented changes’

It is time to stop viewing crises as exceptional events and admit how frequently shocks actually occur. The task of forecasters and policymakers is not to predict the next catastrophe but to sharpen their focus on resilience – what it takes to stay the course with politically mandated policies while minimising inevitable dislocations.

23 Dec 2023 - 4:30PM

A trader on the floor at the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2016. Crises seem to be plaguing the global economy on a regular basis these days, but that is no excuse for policymakers to ignore their responsibilities and hide behind the excuse of “unprecedented events”. Photo: Sam Tsang

Opinion | In a broken world, globalisation is dead. Long live globalisation lite

Tight coupling in a global world is breaking and we need a looser macro-management philosophy that allows for decentralised adjustments to different stresses and strains.

1 Dec 2023 - 10:01PMvideocam

Climate activists at the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Marrakech, Morocco, on October 12. The global growth model has seen growing inequality, low productivity and an over-reliance on central bank monetary policy. Photo: Reuters

Asian Angle | What Hong Kong must do to prepare for years of weaker growth in mainland China

Failure to anticipate and prepare for weaker growth would mean the city sleepwalks into stagnation, or worse, lurches from one crisis to another, writes Donald Low – not unlike during the pandemic.

25 Nov 2023 - 10:00AM

Opinion | A booming US economy and a Chinese crash? Think again

China is using its downturn to deflate bubbles and raise productivity while the US is doing the opposite – feeding the Bernanke bubble and hoping for an AI cure for falling productivity

21 Nov 2023 - 7:00PMvideocam

Macroscope | Signs point to another global stock market crash. Somebody tell the Fed

Changes in monetary policy have a lagged effect. The Federal Reserve’s abrupt switch to tightening last year is now resulting in investor confusion. Today’s bond market jitters and monetary squeeze bring to mind the situation leading up to 1987’s global market crash, but the Fed seems oblivious.

4 Nov 2023 - 3:30PMvideocam

Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell speaks during a news conference after a Federal Open Market Committee meeting on November 1. Fed officials are fixated on economic indicators such as labour and consumer prices, and overlooking signs of trouble from the money supply. Photo: AFP

Macroscope | Two lessons for the global economy, from the Fed’s 2007 missteps

The US central bank is expected to maintain higher interest rates for longer, not unlike in the months leading up to the global financial crisis. The trouble is that monetary policy eventually works and central banks can’t really control how that plays out.

19 Oct 2023 - 2:08AMvideocam

US Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell (centre) and Kevin Schreiber (foreground), president of the York County Economic Alliance, walk down the street during a visit to York, Pennsylvania, on October 2, to meet local economic players. Photo: AFP

The View | Is the next subprime crisis brewing in China’s property market?

The slowdown in China’s asset-backed securities is raising fears of a repeat of 2008, when the opaque products triggered a domino effect. China’s potential trouble could start in its beleaguered property sector.

12 Oct 2023 - 3:30PMvideocam

Banks worldwide got US$280 billion boost from rising rates, McKinsey says

Banks globally reaped a US$280 billion profit boost in 2022 thanks to rising rates, in the sector’s best performance since the 2008 global financial crisis, McKinsey & Co said.

11 Oct 2023 - 11:18AMvideocam

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Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2008

The Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2008 was widely blamed on the subprime crisis and its fallout, which led to the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, with the US government forced to bail out AIG, and to rescue both General Motors and Chrysler, while also adding liquidity to avert a severe credit crunch in the banking sector. Banks in Europe, the US and Britain also came under extreme pressure and the GFC contributed to the euro zone sovereign debt crisis.

last updated:

9 September, 2024