To make matters worse, the late 2000s recession, when much of the industrialized world entered a deep recession, led to increased unemployment and a downturn. In December 2009, ratings agency Standard and Poor's lowered its long-term credit assessment of Portugal from "stable" to "negative", voicing pessimism on the country's structural economic weaknesses and poor competitiveness, which would hamper growth and the capacity to strengthen its public finances and reduce debt. Lack of government regulation; easy lending in the housing market, including Spain's and US markets, meant anyone could qualify for a home loan with no government regulations in place, and with key players, including bankers and politicians in several countries, making the wrong financial decisions, saw the world's biggest financial collapse. Portugal had to add a chronic public servant overcapacity problem, a severe sovereign debt crisis and a small, relatively weak, economy to the equation. Notwithstanding the bad macroeconomic environment, modern non-traditional technology-based industries like aerospace, biotechnology and information technology, were developed in several locations across the country. Alverca, Covilhã, Évora, and Ponte de Sor became the main centres of Portuguese aerospace industry, led by Brazil-based company Embraer and the Portuguese company OGMA. Since after the turn of the 21st century, many major biotechnology and information technology industries were founded and proliferated in the metropolitan areas of Lisbon, Porto, Braga, Coimbra and Aveiro. Between 1991 and 2005, the number of public employees in Portugal increased 238,148 employees while the population remained almost unchanged, along with a sharp and rapid increase in average wages and other bonuses paid to them, but productivity remained low comparing to most of the other EU member states, the US and Canada. During the global economic crisis, it was known around the 2008–2009 period that two Portuguese banks (Banco Português de Negócios (BPN) and Banco Privado Português (BPP)) had accumulated losses for numerous years due to bad investments, embezzlement and accounting fraud. The case of BPN, a bank that was nationalised by the government in November 2008 to avoid systemic risk, was particularly serious due to its size, market share and the political implications—Portugal's president at the time Cavaco Silva, as well as some of his political allies, maintained personal and business relationships with the bank and its CEO, José Oliveira e Costa (a former junior minister in the government led by Cavaco Silva) and the latter was eventually charged and arrested for fraud and other crimes.