比特币诞生于2008年金融危机的系统性崩溃

Bitcoins. Maybe I should get some. Do you have any? Have you ever heard of Bitcoin? It's a digital currency. To me, it smells like Ponzi scheme in the greater fool theory right now, brother. Can you spare a Bitcoin? Bitcoin? You never heard of them a few weeks ago. Now, everybody's talking about him. But is it a is it a currency? I don't know. In 2008, the financial system as we know it was in crisis. Major Wall Street institutions were collapsing while stock markets around the world were in freefall.

Governments were desperately trying to control the damage while the taxpayer footed the bill. And it's out of this chaos that Bitcoin was born. But to understand why Bitcoin emerged when it did, we first need to understand how the crisis itself came about. Because it didn't happen overnight. The wheels had been turning for years as we inched ever closer to the precipice. You see, after the dotcom bubble burst in 2000, the US economy slowed dramatically and the Federal Reserve needed to find a way to prevent a recession.

So, in an act of desperation, they cut interest rates, not once, not twice, but 13 times. The benchmark rate fell from 6.5% in late 2000 to just 1% by June 2003, its lowest level since the 1950s. At the same time, the US government was actively trying to expand home ownership, introducing policies designed to lower some of the barriers to buying a home. mortgage credit became easier to obtain. Demand for housing surged and by 2004, almost 70% of Americans owned their home.

Sounds good, right? Well, not so fast. You see, lenders were increasingly offering mortgages to people with poor credit histories who would otherwise have struggled to borrow at all. These loans became known as subprime mortgages. And at one point, roughly 20% of new mortgages were subprime. Lending standards became so relaxed that some lenders even offered so-called ninja loans where the borrower had no income, no job, and no assets.

What could possibly go wrong? But how did subprime mortgages become so common? Well, a big reason was the rise of the shadow banking system. Mortgage companies, investment banks, and other financial institutions increasingly took on bank-like roles. Whenever a normal bank offered out a mortgage, they basically sold that debt to an investment bank who would bundle that debt and repackage it as a mortgagebacked security or MBS.

And when parts of those bundles became harder to sell, they were repackaged again as collateralized debt obligations or CDOS. Both products were sold to investors who were seeking a yield. Anyway, this created a dangerous incentive because lenders could sell mortgages further up the chain. They had no reason to care anymore if a borrower defaulted. They only cared about selling mortgages in the first place. And to sell more mortgages, lending standards were pushed lower and lower.

In any case, this system became incredibly complex, and that complexity gave a false impression that everything was being handled correctly. To make things worse, credit rating agencies were assessing MBS and CDO products using limited historical data. As such, lots of this debt was given a AAA rating, leading investors to believe it was safe. In reality, though, it wasn't. On the surface, it seemed like nothing could possibly go wrong.

People were getting mortgages, lenders could generate fees before passing on the liabilities, and Wall Street could sell the securities to investors. Everyone, it seemed, was a winner. And with so much money being thrown into the housing market, house prices went up and up. Lenders believed that even if a borrower defaulted, they could just sell the house and still make a profit. Pretty quickly, though, things began to fall apart.

Many subprime borrowers had adjustable rate mortgages with low introductory payments. Once those introductory periods ended, however, monthly payments jumped sharply. At the same time, house prices stopped rising and refinancing became much harder. And after years of increasingly loose lending standards, defaults started to skyrocket. As house prices fell and defaults climbed, the MBS and CDO products built on those mortgages lost value.

Investors backed away. Prices collapsed further and banks, insurers, pension funds, and other institutions holding billions of dollars of mortgage related securities suffered enormous losses. And what's more, Wall Street had another problem, leverage. Institutions had borrowed heavily to make larger bets in the housing market. Now, much of this leverage depended on short-term borrowing. Once confidence faded though and other institutions stopped lending, firms were suddenly bleeding cash.

And that's when the collapse really began. New Century, one of America's biggest subprime lenders, filed for bankruptcy in April 2007, and two Bear Sterns hedge funds collapsed that summer. In fact, Bear Sterns itself came close to failure in March 2008. And by September, the panic had become systemic. Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. AIG was pushed to the brink. Washington Mutual became the largest bank failure in US history.

And financial institutions became too afraid to lend to each other. The fallout was enormous. More than $19 trillion in household wealth disappeared. Unemployment reached 10% and the S&P 500 fell 37% in 2008 alone. But the effects were felt for years after. Between 2000 and 2007, just 25 US banks failed. Between 2008 and 2015 though a massive 515 went bust. Now once the financial system started collapsing, governments and central banks found themselves faced with an ugly choice.

They could stand back and let major institutions fail, risking an even deeper economic collapse. Or they could step in and rescue a system that had helped create the crisis in the first place. And so step in they did. When AIG was pushed to the brink in September 2008, the Federal Reserve authorized an emergency loan of up to $85 billion to keep the company alive. The following month, Congress approved the troubled asset relief program or TAP.

Essentially, TARP allowed the US government to commit up to $700 billion which was earmarked to stabilize the financial system. Within weeks, billions of dollars were being injected directly into major American banks. The Federal Reserve, though, went even further. By December 2008, it had effectively cut interest rates to zero. It then began purchasing financial assets by the bucketload. The program that became known as quantitative easing eventually included purchases of up to $1.25 25 trillion of agency mortgage back securities alongside up to $200 billion of agency debt and $300 billion of longerterm Treasury securities.

Across TAPF funded programs, the government dispersed more than $443 billion. After repayments, asset sales, dividends, interest, and other income, the program's estimated lifetime cost was around $31 billion. From the government's perspective, these measures were designed to stop a financial panic from turning into something even worse. But that didn't make the public any less furious. While the institutions responsible for the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression were being saved, millions of ordinary Americans were losing their jobs.

They could do nothing but watch their savings collapse while many struggled to keep their homes. And that disparity between how the public was treated compared to how institutions were treated left a powerful impression. When ordinary people made bad financial decisions, however minor they may have been, they suffered the consequences. But when institutions considered too big to fail, made catastrophic mistakes, the entire system mobilized to save them.

For many people, this crisis proved that the financial system is fundamentally rigged. Profits had stayed with private companies during the boom, while the risk of total collapse became a problem for the public. But the crisis also exposed something deeper about the financial system. It was

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