PL
This paper discusses the financial crisis of 2007–2009, which has been called the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression by leading economists and has contributed to the failure of key businesses, declines in consumer wealth estimated at trillions of U.S. dollars, substantial financial burdens incurred by governments and a significant decline in economic activity. Experts have proposed many causes of this crisis, but both macro- and microeconomic circumstances need to be enumerated. The immediate cause or “trigger” of the crisis was the bursting of the United States housing bubble. The crisis rapidly developed and spread into a global economic shock, resulting in a number of European bank failures, declines in various stock indexes and large reductions in the market value of equities and commodities. Moreover, the de-leveraging of financial institutions, resulting in asset sales to pay back obligations that could not be refinanced in frozen credit markets, further accelerated the liquidity crisis and caused a decrease in international trade. World political leaders, national ministers of finance and central bank directors coordinated their eff orts to reduce fears, but the crisis continued, leading many emergent economies to seek aid from the IMF. During September 2008, the crisis hit its most critical stage. There was the equivalent of a bank run on money market mutual funds, which frequently invest in commercial paper issued by corporations to fund their operations and payrolls. The financial crisis, which has spread across all global markets, has not been without impact on Poland, but our economic foundations are rather stable. A large part of Poland’s comparatively positive outcome is the fact that Polish banks have never dealt in all the sophisticated instruments used by U.S. financial institutions. As indicators showed, Poland wrote down a highest economic growth in EU.