-
Northern Rock
After the failure of two private takeover bids, Alistair Darling nationalises Northern Rock in what he claims will be a temporary measure. It will be nearly four years before it returns to the private sector -
JP Morgan
The investment bank Bear Stearns is bought out by JP Morgan. It is the biggest casualty of the crisis so far. -
Analysts announce the largest single-year drop in US home sales
Sandra Michel, a nurse, nearly lost her home in 2008 – until Boston Community Capital stepped in. "The house cost $312,000 and we borrowed the whole amount. Then in 2008 my husband lost his job. It became hard to keep up with the mortgage payments. We were a couple of payments off. We asked them about modifying the loan, but they didn't want to work out anything with us" -
BNP
BNP Paribas freeze three of its funds, indicating that they have no way of valuing the complex assets inside them known as collateralised debt obligations (CDOs), or packages of sub-prime loans. It is the first major bank to acknowledge the risk of exposure to sub-prime mortgage markets. Adam Applegarth (right), Northern Rock's chief executive, later says that it was "the day the world changed" -
Northern Rock
British bank Northern Rock has borrowed large sums of money to fund mortgages for customers and needs to pay off its debt by reselling (or "securitising") those mortgages in the international capital markets. This sparks fears that the bank will shortly go bankrupt – prompting customers to queue around the block to withdraw their savings. It is the first run on a British bank for 150 years. -
TARP
After days of wrangling in Congress, Hank Paulson pushes through the Troubled Asset Relief Program (Tarp), which at that point bought or insured toxic sub-prime mortgage securities from the major banks David Buik, market strategist, and consultant at Cantor Index "We might have been critical of Hank Paulson. But with Tarp, he took a decision. And that has to be right. Markets cope very well with good news. They cope even better with bad news. They do not cope with uncertainty" -
Hank Paulson
Hank Paulson, US Treasury secretary from 2006 to 2009, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal: "I do believe that the worst is likely to be behind us" -
US government bails
The US government bails out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – two huge firms that had guaranteed thousands of sub-prime mortgages. Alex Salmond, leader of the Scottish National Party, at the time "I am very angry that we can have a situation where a bank can be forced into a merger by basically a bunch of short-selling spivs and speculators in the financial markets. All financial regulators have got to wake up to where we are at the present moment" -
US investment banks
US investment banks are pummelled on the stock markets and Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase change their status to banking holding companies, marking the end of the investment banking model dominant during the noughties. -
Recession
Shortly after becoming the first European country to slide into recession, Ireland's government promises to underwrite the entire Irish banking system – a pledge that they were ultimately unable to uphold. -
British government
To avert the collapse of the UK banking sector, the British government bails out several banks, including the Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds TSB, and HBOS. The deal is thrashed out over the weekend, and well into the small hours of Monday morning "RBS, HBOS and Lloyds were experiencing a professional bank run, where the markets were no longer willing to fund the UK banks. That's why we stepped in. We will never appreciate how close we came to a collapse of the banking system