Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

by Adam Tooze

These were severe shocks, but for sheer scale the US crisis trumped them all. An early IMF estimate in the summer of 2009 put US household wealth losses at $11 trillion.38 By 2012 the US Treasury would raise that to $19.2 trillion.39 Independent estimates put the figure closer to $21–22 trillion—$7 trillion from real estate, $11 trillion in the stock market and $3.4–4 trillion in retirement savings.40 From their peak in 2006, by 2009 US house prices had fallen by a third. At the worst point in the crisis, 10 percent of home loans across the United States would be seriously in arrears and 4.5 percent of all mortgages crashed into foreclosure. More than 9 million families would lose their homes. Millions more suffered years of anxiety as they struggled to make payments on homes that were no longer worth the mortgages secured on them. At the worst point in the crisis more than a quarter of US homes had negative equity.