ABSTRACT
This chapter explains financial markets in the context of the United States of America. The USA has the most advanced financial sector in the world, where the latest trends in financial innovation often begin. And it is the country where the financial crisis originated in 2007 with underperforming subprime mortgages, which led to bank and household insolvency (origin at the national level) and in 2008 with the bankruptcy of the Lehman Brothers investment bank, which led to a cascade of insolvency problems in banks worldwide as well as to international macroeconomic effects (transmission of the crisis to the international level).
