The year 2008 seems an eternity ago, but given what is going on today in Washington, what happened that year is coming into sharp relief. There was a massive stock market crash. A major investment bank, which had been around for more than a century and a half, imploded. The U.S. government, then run by the Democratic president Barack Obama, came to the rescue of an economy in free fall.
New guardrails were put in place to prevent such a thing from ever happening again. Banks that had been massively over-leveraged were required to maintain larger cash reserves. Restrictions were placed on what bankers could do with depositors’ money.
