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But the biggest story in music was not what people were listening to, but how. Sales of CDs in stores fell as more and more people downloaded songs from the Internet. On iTunes, Fergie's "Big Girls Don't Cry" was the most downloaded song of two thousand seven.
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For the first half of the decade, there seemed to be nothing to cry about in the American housing market.
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Home prices were going up and up, which made sellers happy. And lenders were offering bigger and bigger loans at easy terms and low interest rates, which made buyers happy.
A collapse in the housing market caused huge drops in home sales and prices
The government supported the easing of lending rules as a form of social policy, a way to help more people buy homes. Rates of home ownership -- a part of the American Dream -- reached record highs. In two thousand five nearly seven out of ten Americans owned their own home.
But many home buyers had been given mortgage loans that they could not afford to pay back. And that was not the only problem. Banks had been selling those loans as securities to investors around the world. Everyone thought they were getting a good deal -- the banks, the borrowers, the investors.
But then the price bubble burst and the housing market collapsed.
(MUSIC)
Many borrowers lost their homes because they were unable to make their monthly loan payments. That was the situation Karen Lucas and her husband, of Cleveland, Ohio, found themselves in.
最新
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25