2009

On the evening of January 18, the Danish

Denmark

Denmark is a Scandinavian country in Northern Europe. The countries of Denmark and Greenland, as well as the Faroe Islands, constitute the Kingdom of Denmark . It is the southernmost of the Nordic countries, southwest of Sweden and south of Norway, and bordered to the south by Germany. Denmark...

 Parliament agreed to a financial package worth 100 billion Danish kroner (17.6 billion USD). In response, markets panicked yet again. On January 22, the editorial board of The Christian Science Monitor

The Christian Science Monitor

The Christian Science Monitor is an international newspaper published daily online, Monday to Friday, and weekly in print. It was started in 1908 by Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of the Church of Christ, Scientist. As of 2009, the print circulation was 67,703.The CSM is a newspaper that covers...

wrote that the four largest U.S. banks "have lost half of their value since January 2."

The two month period from January 1-February 27 represented the worst start to a year in the history of the S&P 500

S&P 500

The S&P 500 is a free-float capitalization-weighted index published since 1957 of the prices of 500 large-cap common stocks actively traded in the United States. The stocks included in the S&P 500 are those of large publicly held companies that trade on either of the two largest American stock...

 with a drop in value of 18.62%. By March 2, the Dow Jones Industrial Average Index had dropped more than 50% from its October 2007 peak. The decline has been compared to that of the 1929 Great Depression, which was 53% between September 1929 and March 1931.

On March 6, the Bank of England announced up to 150 billion pounds of quantitative easing

Quantitative easing

Quantitative easing is an unconventional monetary policy used by central banks to stimulate the national economy when conventional monetary policy has become ineffective. A central bank buys financial assets to inject a pre-determined quantity of money into the economy...

, increasing the risk of inflation.

In March 2009, Blackstone Group CEO Stephen Schwarzman said that up to 45% of global wealth had been destroyed by the global financial crisis.

By March 9, 2009, the Dow had fallen to 6440, a percentage decline exceeding the pace of the market's fall during the Great Depression

Great Depression

The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...

 and a level which the index had last seen in 1996. On March 10, 2009, a countertrend bear market rally began, taking the Dow up to 8500 by May 6, 2009. Financial stocks were up more than 150% during this rally. By May 9, financial stocks had rallied more than 150% in just over two months.

On June 22 the World Bank

World Bank

The World Bank is an international financial institution that provides loans to developing countries for capital programmes.The World Bank's official goal is the reduction of poverty...

projected that the global production for 2009 would fall by 2.9%, the first decline since the second world war.