Timeline of Housing Bubble

Timeline of Housing Bubble From Wikipedia

Timeline 2007

• February–: 2007 Subprime mortgage financial crisis Subprime industry collapse; more than 25 subprime lenders declaring bankruptcy, announcing significant losses, or putting themselves up for sale.
• April 2: New Century Financial, largest U.S. subprime lender, files for chapter 11 bankruptcy.
• July 19: Dow Jones Industrial Average closes above 14,000 for the first time in its history.^[12]
• August: worldwide "credit crunch" as subprime mortgage backed securities are discovered in portfolios of banks and hedge funds around the world, from BNP Paribas to Bank of China. Many lenders stop offering home equity loans and "stated income" loans. Federal Reserve injects about $100B into the money supply for banks to borrow at a low rate.
• August 6: American Home Mortgage files for chapter 11 bankruptcy.
• August 16: Countrywide Financial Corporation, the biggest U.S. mortgage lender, narrowly avoids bankruptcy by taking out an emergency loan of $11 billion from a group of banks.^[14]
• August 17: Federal Reserve lowers the discount rate by 50 basis points to 5.75% from 6.25%.
• August 31: President Bush announces a limited bailout of U.S. homeowners unable to pay the rising costs of their debts. ^[15] Ameriquest, once the largest subprime lender in the U.S., goes out of business;^[16]
• September 1–3: Fed Economic Symposium in Jackson Hole, WY addressed the housing recession that jeopardizes U.S. growth. Several critics argued that the Fed should use regulation and interest rates to prevent asset-price bubbles,^[17] blamed former Fed-chairman Alan Greenspan's low interest rate policies for stoking the U.S. housing boom and subsequent bust,^[18][19] and Yale University economist Robert Shiller warned of possible home price declines of 50 percent.^[20]
• September 14: A run on the bank forms at the United Kingdom's Northern Rock bank precipitated by liquidity problems related to the subprime crisis.^[21]

Timeline 2008

• 2008: Home sales continue to fall. Fears of a U.S. recession. Global stock market corrections and volatility.
• January 2–21: January 2008 stock market downturn
• March 14–18: Dropping valuations of mortgage securities caused by skyrocketing default and foreclosure rates forces margin calls to the Wall Street bank Bear Stearns for debts the bank used to leverage mortgage issuances, and threatens BSC with bankruptcy and causes worldwide market jitters. In a weekend deal brokered by U.S. Treasury secretary Paulson and Fed chairman Ben Bernanke, JPMorgan bank agrees to purchase BSC for $2 per share, compared to their 2007 high of nearly $170, in exchange for the Federal Reserve Bank agreeing to accept BSC's devalued mortgage back securities as collateral for public loans at the newly created Term Securities Lending Facility (TSLF), effectively providing a mechanism to bail out Wall Street banks threatened with insolvency.^[41]
• March 1–June 18: 406 people were arrested for mortgage fraud in an FBI sting across the U.S., including buyers, sellers and others across the wide-ranging mortgage industry.^[42]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_United_States_housing_bubble