Catastrophic Complacency: Unveiling the Economic Ignorance that Ignited the 21st Century American Meltdown | Teen Ink

Catastrophic Complacency: Unveiling the Economic Ignorance that Ignited the 21st Century American Meltdown

March 31, 2024
By dithyae BRONZE, Plano, Texas
dithyae BRONZE, Plano, Texas
1 article 0 photos 0 comments

In the late 1990’s the interest in the internet became something out of a movie, the world went into a “digital frenzy,” the values of equity markets rose exponentially, investors lost their minds with the boom of a new industry.[i] Backtrack about five years, the commercialization of the internet lead to a rapid and remarkable expansion of capital growth, the greatest the country had ever seen.[ii] This frenzy grew into the dot-com bubble of the 1990’s, where investors were splurging and companies, with even the most arbitrary products, began to generate an influx of revenue. Entrepreneurs tapped into the potential that spewed out of the internet industry and companies such as Amazon and Yahoo were born. So began the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s and early 2000s. A speculative economic bubble that held excessive optimism towards all internet companies as well as their stocks. A bubble that would eventually burst, barreling the world of the internet into its existence today, only to be followed by the greatest economic recession the world had seen since the Great Depression. In late 2007 America was hit by another instance of the lack of investor confidence and declines in credit which plummeted stock and commodity prices, just as they were trying to pick up after the dot-com bubble. To make matters even worse, a bubble was forming in the housing market. So, when homeowners began defaulting on home loans with a massive amount of consumer debt, it burst. The unregulated housing market stripped people of their homes, sending the economy into a tailspin. The problem? The watchdogs who were supposed to protect the country from financial harm were actually complicit in blowing up the American economy, in bursting these bubbles. The roles played by executives in the Federal Reserve, Goldman Sachs, and other enablers and players on Wall Street pushed investors to ignore the warning signs of imminent disaster.[iii] The existence of a predatory nature in private mortgages, and lenders that were at fault perpetuated this problem. But, more importantly, U.S government officials and corporate leaders of financial institutions and their lack of transparency instigated this downfall. The complacency within the Federal Reserve, Wall Street, and their finance giants and ignorance and greed of several actors blew up the American economy in the dot-com crisis, and the housing bubble that followed shortly after, preceding the massive 2008 recession, barreling America into its current economic state.

In the prelude of the dot-com bubble, lower interest rates increased the availability of capital, where extreme inflation led to high interest rates to contain inflation.[iv] The 1990’s were a period with significant advancements in technologies, with the invention of the Mosaic in 1993, the world’s first internet browser, allowing individuals to access the World Wide Web from the comfort of their own devices.[1] With the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997, lowering the top marginal capital gains tax in the United States, it increased the incentive for people to make more speculative investments, especially as the internet industry continued its growth.[v] But, it was Alan Greenspan, chairman of the federal reserve and a top financial regulator, that fueled investments into the stock market by putting a positive spin on stock valuations.[vi]  With an expectation of many new technologies, people wanted to profit off them and were eager to invest at any valuation of any dot-com company. With rapidly increasing stock prices and a confidence that companies would have large profits in the future, an environment of investors looking past traditional metrics was created.[vii] 

But it wasn’t just on the investors, someone had to be feeding them a belief that this was a good idea, so in came The Federal Reserve and their cycle of economic collapse. The bank would lower interest rates making it cheap for people to borrow money leading to malinvestment and the existence of a bubble. Then, the economy would overheat forcing the bank to raise its interest rates once again, bursting the bubble. People were then unable to borrow, causing economic downturn, and the only way to recover was if the Fed lowered rates again to boost investment, starting the cycle all over.[viii] So, in 1999, to fend off the impact of Y2K, The Federal Reserve created too much money, “pouring gasoline on the smoldering fire of stock markets.”[ix] Dotcoms turned into the victims of their large economic forces and Greenspan exulted over these technological advancements regardless of the mania, and refused to calm down the euphoria. Instead of heightening scrutiny among the big banks they oversaw, the Federal Reserve backed institutions whose desires were to reduce capital requirements and increase their leverage of profits, loosening financial institutions in areas that could result in losses.[x] So, while the stock market was taking off in the most dangerous and unprecedented fashion, with the risk of collapsing at any minute, the Fed was busy feeding into investor delusions, swelling their appetites. 

Investors were then able to hold all the power, whatever they say, went, and their greed and overhyping led countless people to ignore the warning signs of disaster, as they perpetuated the dot-com bubble crash. As the popularity of the internet grew, so did the enthusiasm for its usage as a tool for commerce as they took to the stock market. Their eyes grew for tech companies with profits deemed limitless, eager to jump into the next “hot stock”.[xi] The issue was investors used old investment tools to pressure startups to follow specific strategies and used reckless speed to implement them. But there was a middleman in between the investors and the Fed. Who? Venture capitalists. Venture capitalists poured money into numerous tech and internet start-ups.[xii] For example, many venture firms pushed start-ups to pour money into advertising and establishing brand names, offering them tens of millions of dollars, more than ninety percent for mass-media advertising, which forced dotcoms to “toss fiscal responsibility out the window.”[xiii] Investors saw the opportunity to make quick profits and jumped at the idea, encouraging others to join, which overhyped the value of dot-com companies. This overconfidence in their profitability and the abundance of venture capital for startups is what ultimately pushed the bubble over the edge. There were no proper plans made regarding businesses, products, or track records of earnings so nothing was remaining after all their cash was utilized, thus these companies crashed.[xiv]

These investors, some of whom were experienced financial analysts, did not fully understand how transformative and “futuristic” the internet was and were overly optimistic about the growth potential of internet-based companies, even the ones with flawed business models. Their overenthusiastic nature led to the ignorance of some, and the complacency of more as their greed seeped into their work, tipping the bubble over the edge, and promise of profit led investors to be ignorant in investing into the bubble. But it was also this fear of missing out (FOMO) in this new rise of the economy. The rise of stocks for these internet business models pushed investors to join the bandwagon so they would not lose out on personal gains. An unexpected amount of people engaged in personal investing during the boom, as stories of people quitting their jobs to engage in full-time trading rose. The media took advantage of this. They capitalized on the public’s desire to invest in the stock market with the same level of suspense networks gave to broadcasting sports events.[xv] Sensationalized headlines like “A new economy” and “wealth creation” made the public believe this was a good idea and contributed to increasing the valuations of poor companies.[xvi] The desire for rapid financial gain created a sense of ignorance among investors who were prepared to ignore warning signs and due diligence when funding businesses with dubious and implausible business models. Around this same period, interest rates and the capital gains tax rates were at an all-time low, giving investors more capital to make speculative investments within these dot-com companies. But all good things must come to an end in the magical world these investors lived in during the dot-com bubble and the self-reinforcing loop of demand inflating stock prices and fueling the bubble burst. 

With the Federal Reserve’s loose monetary policy of lowering interest rates, making cheaper borrowing and encouraging businesses and investors to take more risks, the overhype and overvaluation of dot-com companies blew up the bubble and thus the economy followed it. 

The burst of the dot-com bubble preceded a recession only to be followed by the attack on September 11, 2001. And with the pop of one bubble came upon a second one, this time in the housing market. But to the Federal Reserve, it was not to be feared. As a matter of fact, Alan Greenspan considered home equity extraction to be beneficial to society and the economy, especially after the previous tragedies.[xvii] So rather than leveling a warning that a housing bubble meant owners were draining their savings, he applauded the economic stimulus created by the bubble because central banks, globally, tried to stimulate the economy as a response, and as a result, created capital liquidity through a reduction in interest rates.[xviii] Greenspan wasn't done yet. In fact, he dismissed comparisons between the real-estate and stock markets. He said that house prices reflected a rise in immigration and a shortage in building land, but of course his true intentions were to keep the housing market running.[xix] He continued to tell the world that the housing market was “perfectly fine” and bubbles were reasonable.[xx] He relied on the housing book to offset a precipitate fall in business investment in hopes of succeeding in exploiting the "buoyant housing market to prevent a double-dip recession."[xxi] 

            The Federal Reserve’s “see no bubble” mentality is what pushed the housing bubble over the edge. Fed economists made numerous other miscalculations regarding debt levels in real estate, however. Their calculations ignored crucial changes in the housing market, downplaying risks that a real estate crash would pose to consumers and banks. The Fed reported that it would save tens of thousands of dollars to take adjustable-rate mortgage loans (ARMs) rather than traditional fixed mortgage rates, forcing banks to issue mortgages to uncreditworthy people.[xxii] But the Fed couldn’t keep this up forever so they increased the federal funds rate to 4.25 percent, and people began to miss their mortgage payments because of increased monthly burdens.[xxiii] Many people defaulted on their mortgages due to the adjustable rates their own government encouraged them to take. And so, the government’s complacency crashed the bubble. Ben Bernanke, Alan Greenspan’s successor, even signaled a disinterest in identifying asset bubbles in a speech in his early tenure.[xxiv] The Fed was too busy dismissing the existence of the housing bubble. America’s political system in Washington allowed Wall Street to exercise the enormous influence that it had to push for stripping regulations and the appointment of regulators who didn’t believe in them and Fed economists provided models–based on entirely unrealistic assumptions of a perfect market–in which regulation was unneeded. 

            But, the government’s complacency trickled down to that of lenders. Under the belief that everything was fine, lenders advanced loans to all sorts of people, even ones with a high risk of default (when homeowners fail to uphold an agreement). The flood of money and credit, combined with various government policies designated for the sole purpose of encouraging homeownership, and a host of financial market innovations, increased the liquidity of real estate-related assets. When the central banks flooded with capital liquidity, lenders had ample capital to lend, so just like investors, they too had an increased willingness to undertake additional risk and increase their own investment returns.[xxv] Their greed to hook more subprime borrowers, especially those with tarnished or limited credit histories, pushed them into giving the impression that these mortgages had no risk, and the costs were not high. Just like the Federal Reserve did, both institutions gaslighted borrowers into taking on mortgages they could not afford, which made effects unmanageable. So, when people finally connected the dots that the risk premium was too high for investors, they stopped buying houses and housing prices began to plummet, triggering a massive sell-off in mortgage-backed securities (MBS), an investment that consists of a bundle of home loans bought from the banks that issued them. 

            But in between the government and the lenders and investors were the investment banks. These banks were supposed to be “risk management experts.”[xxvi] But, not only did they fail to manage any risk, they actually created it. Banks engaged in excessive leverage. A thirty-to-one leverage ratio, to be precise. To put things into perspective, a three percent change in asset value is enough to wipe out one’s net worth. These banks adopted incentive strategies designed to induce short-sighted and excessively risky behavior.[xxvii] To give them the benefit of the doubt, maybe investment banks did not understand the risk of securitization. But their only other mechanism of blame, the investors made them do it. Yet, in reality, it was the banks that exploited investor ignorance to push their stock prices up in order to receive higher short-term returns, at the expense of significantly higher risk.[xxviii] Investors' lack of interest preempted mortgage brokers' lack of interest in originating good mortgages, as they were more incentivized in originating more mortgages to appeal to more eager investors. Some mortgage brokers were so enthusiastic that they invented new forms or mortgages like low-or-no documentation loans, an invitation to deception, which became known as liar loans.[xxix] These loans lead to more lending, more buying, and thus, more defaulting as poorer candidates were chosen, which meant a popping bubble.

            Securitization led to investment banks' failure to regulate which not only led to their own downfall, but the downfall of the economy. During the housing bubble, hedge funds sold mortgage-backed securities and bundled one mortgage with several other similar ones and sold it to investors, making new loans with the money they were receiving.[xxx] So while they were "risk-free" investors took all the risk of default, yet there was no worry because they had insurance which allowed them to snap up the derivatives, paving way for everyone to own them. A derivative backed by the combination of real estate and insurance was very profitable, causing banks' demand for more mortgages to back the securities. To meet this demand, banks and mortgage brokers offered home loans to just about anyone. In October of 2004 the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) relaxed the net capital requirements for five investment banks, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, Bear Storms, and Morgan Stanley, allowing them to leverage their initial investments by up to thirty or forty times.[xxxi] So when the housing bubble burst, leaving the most vulnerable subprime borrowers stuck with mortgages they could never afford, one subprime lender after another began to file for bankruptcy. These were the same financial institutions that engaged in widespread securities fraud and predatory lending that began as early as 2003.[xxxii]

The Lehman brothers, specifically, created a huge shock wave. Because they were a global financial services firm, not a bank, it was not overseen by the Fed, so they funded themselves in short-term markets, investing heavily in mortgage-related securities. The Lehman Brothers specifically fell from their own complacency in the bubble. Their poor control of risk management and questionable accounting led to their demise. They were highly leveraged, due to their own adoption of an aggressive growth strategy supported by limited equity. As housing prices fell and delinquencies on mortgages rose, Lehman's financial position declined, hemorrhaging large amounts of funds. Creditors lost their confidence claiming they were "afraid they're not going to be here next week."[xxxiii] Eventually, Lehman turned illiquid and lacked any sufficient collateral to borrow from the Fed or renew the repurchase agreement contracts to avert a collapse.[xxxiv] And so, they filed for bankruptcy, and the commercial paper they issued became worthless and investors scrambled to pull out their money. The Fed and the Treasury had to respond quickly as they gave investors a temporary guarantee that if they did not pull out their money right away, they would get their money back, and the Fed created a backstop liquidity program.[xxxv] The irony? From Wall Street to Washington, the fundamental failure of their own firms perpetuated the financial crisis. Wall Street individuals took irresponsible risks that Washington did not have the ability to constrain. But, it was Washington who started it all and pushed it onto the banks. 

            When securitization failed, asset values collapsed and banks became increasingly hesitant to lend, which meant the lending market froze. Many banks found themselves with impaired balance sheets, facing a situation where their liabilities exceeded their assets.[xxxvi] Like Lehman Brothers, not all banks could bear the brunt of the financial storm and were forced to file for bankruptcy, or like Bear Storms, required government intervention and mergers to survive.[xxxvii] America was pushed into a wave of bank failures, acquisitions, and consolidations. But even after their collapse, the Federal Reserve still showed little recognition that a serious economic downturn was underway. Rather, the committee relied on the framework of macroeconomics to mitigate the seriousness of the crisis, justifying that markets were working rationally. 

            But the crash and recession proved to America that they never should’ve ignored this, never have been so oblivious. But not everybody fell apart. In the wake of the dot-com bubble, tycoons like Amazon made it through. And post-financial recession, Goldman Sachs still survived. The pressing question, how did they do it? Goldman Sachs obtained credit risk insurance from the American International Group (AIG), the financial and insurance corporation. So even though the insurance went bankrupt, they were prepared. AIG received a bailout, and so Goldman received a bailout because of their connections. Goldman made the smart decision to diversify its risks well before the crisis. As for Amazon, while their stock prices rose from $2.50 to $107 in just two years they focused on innovation and expansion, not catering to investor greed.[xxxviii] Companies like eBay, too, adapted through reorganization, new leadership, and redefined business plans.[xxxix] Amazon raised a significant amount of money right before the market crashed, giving it a large cushion to ride out the dot-com bubble turmoil. 

When one domino falls, the rest come crashing down and that is exactly what happened in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The rise of the internet perpetuated a demolition in the American economy as the greed rose in different actors, all looking to make a huge payout in a brand-new system. When the dot com bubble crashed investors were not ready for the hype to end and turned to housing instead, forcing the Fed to raise their rates. But really, the Fed didn’t care, they were too ignorant to the state of the economy to understand that their actions had serious consequences, because to them, the housing market was supposed to always be stable. After all, it was just the housing market. But these consequences caused risk to grow in investment banks and lenders. All of these actions put America into their worst state since the Great Depression. This financial crisis revealed the need to rethink how financial systems are regulated. Following the first crisis a new value of the importance of good customer experience in digital commerce and doing business on the internet was established. No more overvaluations of companies that truly had no purpose other than to support a hype. As for the recession, new laws and promises were made. Banks were bailed out and the government threw lifelines at federally-backed institutions. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act was implemented to enforce new and improved watch dogs onto Wall Street and banks raised their capital requirements, reduced their leverage, and thus were less exposed to subprime leverages.[xl] It is not safe to say that the economy is going to be stable now, because that will never be guaranteed, however, denial and ignorance when dealing with a financial crisis only further perpetuates it. It is not the housing market or the dot-com companies’ faults. It is the fault of everyone who saw it coming and chose to do nothing, or make it worse because of potential gain, that they probably ended up losing anyways. This concept holds true for generative AI today. Y Combinator, a startup accelerator company, has startups that are building applications surrounding artificial intelligence. The number of startups they support has jumped from twenty percent to sixty percent, or more than 134 startups, all dealing with generative AI.[xli] A worry exists that the artificial intelligent market, too, will enter its own bubble, with a demise nobody is prepared for.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



[i] Diana Paluteder, "Dot-com Bubble Explained | the True Story of 1995-2000 Stock Market," Finbold, august 8, 2022, accessed October 19, 2023, finbold.com/guide/dot-com-bubble/.

 
[ii] Paluteder, "Dot-com Bubble.”

 
[iii] Morgenson, Gretchen and Joshua Rosner. Reckless Endangerment. New York, NY: Times Books, 2011.  

 
[iv] Matt Weinberger, "History of the Dot Com Bubble in Photos," Business Insider, businessinsider.com/history-of-the-dot-com-bubble-in-photos-2016-2.

 
[v] Political Calculations Ironman, "Here's Why The Dot Com Bubble Began And Why It Popped," Business Insider, businessinsider.com/heres-why-the-dot-com-bubble-began-and-why-it-popped-2010-12.

 
[vi] Preston Teeter and Jörgen Sandberg, "Cracking the enigma of asset bubbles with narratives," SageJournals, [Page 91-99], journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1476127016629880.

 
[vii] Teeter and Sandberg, "Cracking the enigma," [Page 91-99].

 
[viii] Luka Nikolic, "A Tale of Two Bubbles: How the Fed Crashed the Tech and the Housing Markets," FEE Stories, fee.org/articles/a-tale-of-two-bubbles-how-the-fed-crashed-the-tech-and-the-housing-markets/.

 
[ix] D. Quinn Mills, "Who's to Blame for the Bubble?," Harvard Business Review, hbr.org/2001/05/whos-to-blame-for-the-bubble.

 
[x] Morgenson and Rosner, Reckless Endangerment, [126].

 
[xi] Morgenson and Rosner, Reckless Endangerment, [Page 126].

 
[xii] Mills, "Who's to Blame."

 
[xiii] Mills, "Who's to Blame."

 
[xiv] "Dot-com Bubble," Vaia.
[xv] Roger Lowenstein, Origins of the Crash: The Great Bubble and Its Undoing (n.p.: Penguin

Books, 2004), [Page 115].

 
[xvi] Lowenstein, Origins of the Crash, [Page 115].

 
[xvii] Morgenson and Rosner, Reckless Endangerment, [Page 223].

 
[xviii] Lewis, The Story, [Page 174].

 
[xix] Morgenson and Rosner, Reckless Endangerment, [Page 233].

 
[xx] Michael Lewis, The Big Short (London, England: Norton, 2010), [Page 140].

 
[xxi] Michael Lewis, Panic (London, England: Norton and Co., 2009), [Page 213].

 
[xxii] Nikolic, "A Tale."

 
[xxiii] Nikolic, "A Tale."

 
[xxiv] Lewis, Panic, [Page 284].

 
[xxv] Marius Jurgilas and Kevin J. Lansing, "Housing Bubbles and Homeownership Returns," Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

 
[xxvi] Jeffrey Friedman, ed., What Caused the Financial Crisis (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), [Page 140].

 
[xxvii] Friedman, What Caused, [Page 141].

 
[xxviii] Mills, "Who's to Blame."

 
[xxix] Friedman, What Caused, [Page 142].

 
[xxx] Lewis, Panic, [Page 291].

 
[xxxi] Michael J. Boyle, ed., "2008 Recession: What It Was and What Caused It," Investopedia, investopedia.com/terms/g/great-recession.asp#:~:text=The%20root%20cause%20was%20excessivethe%20risk%20on%20to%20investors.

 
[xxxii] Boyle, "2008 Recession," Investopedia.

 
[xxxiii] Ben S. Bernanke, The Federal Reserve and the Financial Crisis (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013), [Page 81-82].

 
[xxxiv] Bernanke, The Federal, [Page 98].

 
[xxxv] Friedman, What Caused, [Page 184].

 
[xxxvi] Boyle, "2008 Recession," Investopedia.

 
[xxxvii] Kimberly Amadeo, "Causes of the 2008 Financial Crisis," the balance, [Page #], thebalancemoney.com/what-caused-2008-global-financial-crisis-3306176#:~:text=Deregulation%20in%20the%20financial%20industry%20was%20the%20primary%20cause%20of,even%20those%20with%20questionable%20creditworthiness.


[xxxviii] Brad Soo, "The dotcom bubble 20 years on: Lessons learned?," commercetools.com/blog/dotcom-bubble-lessons-learned#:~:text=%E2%80%9CThe%20dot%2Dcom%20crash%20has,their%20market%20and%20mind%20share.

 
[xxxix] Soo, "The dotcom."

 
[xl] Soo, "The dotcom."

 
[xli] Stephanie Palazzolo, "What We Can Learn From AI Startups in Y Combinator's Latest Batch," The Information, theinformation.com/articles/what-we-can-learn-from-ai-startups-in-y-combinators-latest-batch.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The author's comments:

As a part of my Junior Year Research Paper, I explored the causes of the dot-com bubble and housing market crisis and argued how government and Wall Street complacency led to the downfall of the economy and those who bought into the schemes. 


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