Which economic downturn began in 2008 due to housing and banking collapse?

• A. Great Recession
• B. Occupy Wall Street
• C. Bracero Program
• D. Yalta Conference

Answer: (A)

The main idea here is identifying the major economic downturn that began in 2008 when housing prices fell and banks ran into huge losses. That combination of a collapsing housing market and a financial crisis led to a deep, lasting recession—the Great Recession—marked by widespread foreclosures, a credit freeze, and major government interventions to stabilize the economy. The label Great Recession is the standard term historians and economists use for that period of severe economic decline and its global ripple effects.

The other options don’t fit this start date or cause: Occupy Wall Street began in 2011 as a protest movement about inequality, not the onset of the downturn; the Bracero Program was a mid‑20th‑century U.S. guest‑worker program; the Yalta Conference was a 1945 WWII meeting.