Timeline of European debt crisis

Banking » Timeline Of European Debt Crisis

Click through the timeline below to see how Europe's debt crisis began and evolved.

2008

Lehman Brothers collapses; financial crisis spreads

Though the U.S. economy had officially slipped into a recession in 2007, the collapse of the investment bank Lehman Brothers kicked the global financial crisis into high gear. On Friday, Sept. 12, 2008, the Standard & Poor's 500 index closed at 1,251.70. Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy Sept. 15. Over the ensuing months, the S&P 500 index would lose nearly half its value, bottoming out March 9, closing at 676.53.

Everyone from the Federal Reserve, government regulators, mortgage lenders, the shadow banking industry, ratings agencies and millions of American homeowners were implicated in the growth of the housing bubble and the fallout from the pop. Within days, the crisis spread to Europe, where economies in Russia and Pakistan contracted and governments from England to Germany stepped in to bail out banks. Iceland went bankrupt.