The current crisis has centered on borrower defaults on mortgages and the associated effects on banks’ own credit standing (and in several cases their own default), which in turn led to tightened conditions for lending to new (mortgage) borrowers. Any model that does not incorporate all or most of ...

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 ...

On September 2008 Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy and the world became aware that the financial crisis that had been unfolding for months was far more serious than expected. Months later it became clear that the financial crisis of 2008-2009 was the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression ...

The global financial crisis of 2007–09 has illustrated the importance of including funding liquidity feedbacks in any model of systemic risk. This paper illustrates how we have incorporated such channels into a risk assessment model for systemic institutions (RAMSI) and it outlines the Bank of England’s ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 increase in global imbalances in the last decade posed a theoretical challenge for international macroeconomics. Why did some less developed countries with a higher need for capital like China lend to richer countries? The inconsistency of standard dynamic open-economy models with actual global ...

At the heart of the debate on how the 2007–09 global financial crisis spread from the United States to the rest of the world lies the global banks. Using a large sample composed of advanced and emerging economies since the 1980s Abiad and others (2013) show that the effect of financial linkages on ...

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 ...