Abstract. The economic crisis is now a common reality in most parts of the world, being translated in mass unemployment, collapse of the social system and an impressive number of bankruptcies. The paper focuses on the beginning of the recession in the American real estate sector by analyzing the implications of imperfect information and moral hazard as main factors that contributed to the deterioration of real estate market and also to accentuating the overall poor economic situation. In that context, asymmetric information served the interests of banks and other institutional speculators who made use of it in order to increase their profitability through market manipulation. The central aspect the paper underlines is the international contamination created by disguising toxic real estate actives and spreading them throughout the global economy through transactions with foreign business partners.

Keywords: asymmetric information; moral hazard; adverse selection; real estate market.