in September 15, 2008, where the losses was in the upwards of 600 billion U.S. dollars. Companies such as Merrill Lynch, which was one of the world's largest brokerages, was forced to merge with Bank of America, one of the biggest lenders in assets, to protect itself from the similar fate of Lehman Bros. 3 In the process, one of the many leading banks affected by the crisis was the Citigroup. One of the major causes of the collapse of the financial market during the Great Recession was the irresponsible lending of mortgages to "subprime" borrowers in the hopes of them being able to repay them, which could not be more hopeless. The same loans were passed on to the financial engineers, who sold these volatile mortgages in the market confirming them as a low-risk investment by putting large numbers of them in a pool. According to the same people, housing markets were supposed to rise and fall independently in different states, which proved to be wrong, resulting in a house-price slump. These pooled mortgages were used to back securities in the market, which was rated as AAA by the Moody's and Standard and Poor's; that was a huge blunder by these credit rating agencies and led to the big fall. During the same period, interest rates around the world were lower than usual, which made investors to seek securitized loans that provided relatively higher returns. This made investors to take higher risks to amplify their investments by borrowing longer dated and higher yielding securities under the false assumption that the market was less volatile, which caused them to lose billions of dollars later when the crisis came knocking at their doors. 4 .
Citigroup was one of the culprits, who brought this nightmare upon the people. They committed fraud by selling highly volatile securities in the market by confirming that they were safe and stable in the market. After the crisis, Citigroup was offered a federal bailout from the Congress under TARP and an endless credit from the Federal Reserve.
