The 2008 Financial Crisis Most teens would rather spend their time scrolling through TikTok or Instagram than scrolling through stock charts or watching finance news, but what happens on Wall Street impacts us more than we might realize. In 2008, risky lending, bad mortgages, and failing banks caused the U.S. stock market to crash. Big companies collapsed, and the government had to bail out banks to keep the economy from fully falling apart. The stock market lost trillions of