A pior crise financeira desde a II Guerra Mundial

It is nearly four years since the day, 9 August 2007, which for many of us marks the start of the credit crunch - that in turn precipitated both the worst global banking crisis and recession for at least 70 years.
Banks and financial investors lost confidence that they could any longer value the trillions of dollars of financial products - asset backed securities, collateralised debt obligations - manufactured out of housing loans, especially poor-quality subprime housing loans.
So banks like Northern Rock and HBOS could no longer finance themselves by selling such financial products, which led directly to their respective collapses. And banks in general found it increasingly difficult to raise money, because of a generalised panic that their respective balance sheets were stuffed to the gunnels with near worthless assets.
When banks can't borrow, they can't lend. When businesses and households find it hard to borrow, an economic slowdown is the consequence. So over the subsequent nine months, credit crunch led to recession - which became acute in the autumn of 2008, when financial markets seized up altogether after the failure of Lehman (though all through the summer and early autumn of 2008, there was a steady erosion of confidence in the integrity of the financial system, especially after the collapse of the US state-backed housing-finance providers, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac).
Today's financial crisis can be traced directly to those momentous events.
The response of governments around the world to the financial crisis and recession was to keep or even increase public spending, at a time of falling tax revenues, to compensate for the collapse of household consumption and private-sector investment.
In other words, they ran abnormally high public sector deficits - peaking at deficits in the UK, US and parts of the eurozone at 10% or more of GDP - to prevent a global recession becoming a global depression.
Robert Peston/BBC