Over-borrowing and financial stress has recently become an important issue in macroeconomic and policy discussions in the US as well as in the EU. In this paper the authors study two regimes of financial stress. In a regime of high financial stress, stress shocks can have large and persistent...

We investigate the consequences of overleveraging and the potential for destabilizing effects from financial- and real-sector interactions. In a theoretical framework, we model overleveraging and indicate how a highly leveraged banking system can lead to unstable dynamics and downward spirals....