In both the United States and overseas, there also have been a significant number of bank mergers, some of them very large, arising from these changing financial industry dynamics.
Although that crisis produced a substantial slowdown in U.S. economic growth, initially much of the remainder of the global economy, including the euro area, was largely unaffected. The global economy bent, but it did not break. Financial wounds continued to ferment, however, despite the efforts by policy-makers to sustain market liquidity and capitalization.