In mid-September 2008, following the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, international interbank markets froze and interbank lending beyond very short maturities virtually evaporated. Despite massive central bank support operations and purchases of key assets, many financial markets remained impaired...

The first decade of economic and monetary union in Europe (EMU) has been a huge success. EMU has significantly benefited its member countries and accelerated the European integration process. Imbalances within EMU-differences in growth, inflation, competitiveness, current account and budget...

How much can regional monitoring of financial markets and coordination of financial sector policies contribute to preventing and mitigating financial crises? This paper reviews and compares the experiences of Europe and Asia, which have taken different routes and have achieved different levels...

This paper seeks to add to the current debate about financial development and growth in the emerging world by looking at how different financial systems evolve: how and why financial structures change during various stages of development, how best to measure them, and seeing what practical...

The paper analyzes the financial crisis of 2007–2009 through the lens of market failures and regulatory failures and presents a case that there were four primary failures contributing to the crisis: excessive risk-taking in the financial sector due to mispriced government guarantees;...

This paper surveys studies of the importance of Central Asian small- and medium-sized enterprises (SME) in the economy and their experience during the Russian financial crisis. It also uses survey data from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development’s Business Environment and...

Credit rating agencies (CRAs) bear some responsibility for the financial crisis that started in 2007 and remains ongoing. This is acknowledged by policymakers, market participants, and by the agencies themselves. It soon became clear that, given the depth of the crisis, CRAs would not be able to...

This paper gives an account of the Swedish financial crisis covering the period 1985–2000, dealing with financial deregulation and the boom in the late 1980s, the bust and the financial crisis in the early 1990s, the recovery from the crisis and the bank resolution policy adopted during the...

This paper presents a theoretical framework for policy making based on the “impossible trinity” or the “trilemma” hypothesis. A simple optimization model shows that placing more weight in terms of preference for each of the three open macroeconomic policies—exchange rate stability,...

Several countries have employed countercyclical fiscal policy to ameliorate the impact of the global financial crisis. This study identifies some of the issues and policy implications associated with this policy response in developing countries. Included are case studies of four developing...