It is widely accepted and believed that the beginning of the global crisis actually occurred in 2007, with the credit crunch. US investors were no longer confident about subprime mortgage values, and this resulted in a liquidity crisis. To try and fight / counter act this, the US government had to pump extremely large amounts of money into the financial markets, as there was a lot of uncertainty and doubt surrounding them. Once September 2008 came around, stock markets all over the world had crashed and become very unpredictable. They were experiencing very high levels of volatility. Consumers around the world became very nervy due to the unpredictable future, and everyone began to cut back on spending. The credit crunch that I referred to earlier, involves the inflating of the housing bubble, and then the crash after it bursts. Towards the end of my paper I will look at the subprime crisis and housing bubble, as one of the examples of how financial crises are