Monetary policy has come under strain since the global financial crisis (GFC) of 2007–09. Once the GFC broke out central banks’ swift and determined response was essential to stabilise markets and to avoid a self-reinforcing downward spiral between the financial system and the real economy. But putting ...

Over the last two decades, both developed and developing countries have endured severe banking crises. The U.S. savings and loans (S&Ls) debacle in the 1980s, the chilean banking crisis in the 1980s, the Argentine and Mexsican crises in the mid-1980s and 1990s, as well as the recent financial turmoil ...

The Global Financial Crisis put to the fore the challenges of managing liquidity and foreign assets at times of heightened volatility. Earlier concerns of some observers regarding the costs of precautionary hoarding notwithstanding the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) validated the buffer value of ...

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 ...

Sudden stops are when capital inflows dry up abruptly. The banker’s aphorism—'It’s not speed that kills but the sudden stop'— has been popularly invoked since at least the Mexican crisis in 1994. Awareness then rose with impetus from the Argentine crisis (1995) the Asian crisis (1997) the Russian ...

The financial crisis that unraveled after the Lehman Brothers collapse affected in different degrees almost all countries around the world independently of the direct exposure of their financial institutions to toxic assets. Most countries saw a sharp drop in demand together with sudden increases in ...

There is likely to be little disagreement with the observation that political interference has exacerbated the problems associated with bank insolvencies. Nevertheless, most ot the analytical attention given to bank crises has focused on technocratic mistakes (inappropriate regulatory choices), exogenous ...

Are financial systems shock absorbers or shock amplifiers? Policymakers and academics have long remained divided over this fundamental question. On the one hand some contend that financial innovation and integration make the financial world a safer place (Greenspan 1999) others argue the opposite by ...

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 ...