Events in financial markets before and during the crisis of late 2008 have stimulated renewed interest in modeling trade with asymmetric information. Robert Shimer’s contribution to this volume joins the literature focusing on trade in securities that are claims on mortgages where issuers of the ...

Financial crises have been pervasive for many years. Bordo and others (2001) find that in recent decades their frequency has doubled that of the Bretton Woods period (1945–71) and the gold standard era (1880–1993) becoming comparable only to the period during the Great Depression. Nevertheless the ...

By the mid-2000s both academics and central banks had come to a remarkable consensus on what central banks’ basic strategy should be. However with the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 the world of central banking changed forever. The worldwide financial crisis revealed that some of the ...

The developments that led to the 2008 global financial crisis raised a new awareness amongst central banks and financial regulators in advanced economies about the need to approach financial regulation and surveillance from a macroeconomic (i.e. systemic) and prudential (i.e. pre-emptive) perspective. ...

The global financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath have brought many new challenges for the world’s central banks. These new challenges have in turn resulted in bold experimentation—not simply particularly vigorous use of traditional policy tools but also the use of new tools or if not entirely new ...

The global financial crisis of 2008–09 led to massive interruptions in cross-border financial and trade flows. As a result of the crisis virtually all of the advanced economies and many emerging market countries experienced recessions over the past two years. These recessions coincided with various ...

The slow rate of employment growth relative to that of output is a sticking point in the recovery from the financial crisis episode that started in 2008 in the U.S. and Europe (a phenomenon labeled 'jobless recovery'). The issue is a particularly burning one in Europe where some observers claim that ...

Over five years have passed since the most intense phase of the global financial crisis. As has been widely documented the pre-crisis period was characterized by increased dispersion in current account deficits and surpluses facilitated by a benign global financial environment characterized by low ...

One of the most striking features of the world economy over the last twenty-five years has been the sharp decline in the real interest rate from approximately 4% in the early 1990s to -1.5% in 2013 (figure 1). During this period there have been two waves of large capital inflows into emerging economies ...

The financial crisis that started in 2007 brought the global economy to the brink and in many respects it is still unfolding especially in Europe. How to understand and deal with the crisis has naturally been the subject of fierce debates that continue today. However some consensus appears to be ...