With the increasingly development of internationalisation, global finance and business have been interlinked so strong that the consequences of the financial crisis have been more and more serious and widely spreading. Thus international business is very often affected and attacked under financial crisis.
Two financial crisis
Charles Kindleberger (2011) argued that financial crisis occurs periodically and regularly in the business cycle. It is then documented by Reinhart and Rogoff (2009) as a system of regular boom and bust. During the boom time, fierce competition is raised in the banking industry to maximize own profit from banking activities. Therefore, result in low interest rates, loose credit analysis and rating method and large amount of debt. Two typical financial crises, Wall Street Crash of 1929 and international financial Crisis of 2008, as a part of the business cycle, have huge influence on global economic and international trade, in addition, cause deep and long depression among the whole economic world.
Before 1929, Europe and America economies were recovering from the war. During “the roaring twenties”, economies soared with incredible speed and intense faith on the perspective of it. Investors ignored the risk of speculation and stock market, and expected great performance of the stock market. More and more funds are brought by investors influx into the stock market and push the whole economy into a fever of stocks and shares. The value of stocks bought and sell Wall Street had risen by 250 percent between 1925 and 1929 (Clavin, 2000). However, the strong faith in the stock market disillusioned after Wall Street Crash in October 1929. Some believe that the stock market crash was resulted by the tight monetary policy applied by the Federal Reserve in January 1928 (Hall and Ferguson, 2009). The discounted rate of the government securities they sold was increased from 3.5 percent to 5.0 percent steps by steps. The action was based on the belief that stock market speculation can be controlled under the higher discount rate. Unfortunately, banks were extremely pleased to buy from the Federal Reserve, with the fever of stock market, they can lend out the funds at a higher rate because of the huge demand of funds going into the stock market to purchase stocks. ¬¬Therefore, stock market speculation was pushed into an even deeper mania for investment. And started from the “black Thursday” on 24th October 1929. Stock market collapsed dramatically.
While in 2008, what mostly lead to financial crisis was not the stock market but the housing market and subprime mortgage. Indeed, house mortgages are high-quality assets to banks due to relatively high loan yields and low default rate (Buckley, 2011). However, when banks raise more and more subprime mortgage, more and more bad debts go back to banks because of clients with lower credit rating cannot afford the loan. In the same time, house price decreases strongly since the number of spare houses increases in the housing market after house buyer with subprime mortgage give mortgage back to banks. The real value of the mortgage banks and investors holded thus decreased since the whole value of the house market declined. Moreover, the financial activities and cash flow was locked because of value-decreased mortgage, the mortgage became less and less favoured by investors and other institutions, no body want to take care of the bomb as they had already have so many bad debt on their hand. Banks gradually restricted funds lending out which lead to investors lack of money to run business and have influence back to banks themselves as they cannot receive money back from investors. Thus an infinite negative circle was raised and the capital trade and cash entirely stopped flowing. Bank industry was the first been crashed. Started from Bear Steams’s collapse and being sold to JP Morgan in Mar 2008 (Buckley, 2011), Northern Rock, Lehman Brothers, Bradford &