Reform of the mechanisms and procedures through which problems of sovereign debt sustainability are resolved is at the centre of the effort to make the international financial system less crisis prone. The purported difficulty of coordinating creditors holding distinct bond issues provides one...

June 2000 - Collective action clauses raise borrowing costs for low-rated borrowers and lower them for high-rated borrowers. This result holds for all developing country bonds and also for the subset of sovereign bond issuers. It is easy to say that the International Monetary Fund should not...

We review the modern history of financial crises, providing a context for analyses of the world's recent bout of financial instability. Along with indicators of economic performance in the subject countries, we present a comprehensive description of multilateral rescue efforts spanning the last...

How did the Subprime Crisis, a problem in a small corner of U.S. financial markets, affect the entire global banking system? To shed light on this question we use principal components analysis to identify common factors in the movement of banks' credit default swap spreads. We find that fortunes...

We analyze why the Eurozone crisis increasingly resembles Latin America’s lost decade instead of Asia’s phoenix miracle, emphasizing the roles of the real exchange rate, the external environment, and debt restructuring. In addition, we contrast the adjustment to housing bubbles in Ireland,...