The Global Financial Crisis and Steps of the Fed and the ECB during its Solution in the Period of 2008–2015

This thesis comprehensively summarizes the global financial crisis. Its main causes consist of government support for home ownership, artificially set interest rates, and the conduct of economic actors in the context of financial innovation. Thus, this thesis considers external interventions into the economy as the primary causes of the crisis. Furthermore, chronologically summarized are the steps taken by the Federal Reserve System (Fed) and the European Central Bank (ECB) during the crisis itself. In a short period of time, these central banks exhausted the standard tools of monetary policy, which led to the use of unconventional measures. The Fed mainly used quantitative easing, while the ECB used a set of various tools available to help solve problems on multiple fronts - especially the debt crisis in the Eurozone countries. With the exception of a description of the chain of events leading to the financial and economic crisis, the main contribution of this thesis lies in mediation and confrontation of views by selected economists from various spectrum of opinions in regards to the steps of the Fed and the ECB in their solutions to the crisis. This discussion reveals that the biggest concerns associated with these interventions consist of price bubbles, inflation, distortion in market mechanisms, Europe's unsustainable integration at the monetary level, and the inexorable rise of the another crisis caused by the failure to solve the real causes of the last crisis. Finally, the opinions of the author of this thesis match with the conclusions and recommendations that arise from this discussion.