9 bear markets and the events that caused them
Dow decline: 53.8%
Cause: Housing market and banking collapse
For a brief time in 2006, all you really needed to buy a $1 million starter castle was a bright smile and a cowboy mortgage broker. Thanks to the miracles of Wall Street engineering, investors found that bundles of bad loans were just as bad as individual bad loans. The mortgage miasma sucked down some of the biggest institutions on Wall Street, from Countrywide bank to Lehman Brothers.