We develop a new dynamic factor model that allows us to jointly characterize global macroeconomic and financial cycles and the spillovers between them. The model decomposes macroeconomic cycles into the part driven by global and country-specific macro factors and the part driven by spillovers...

Short-term debt that can serve as a medium of exchange is designed to be information insensitive. No one should be tempted to acquire private information to gain an informational advantage in trading that could destabilize the value of the debt. Short-term debt minimizes the incentive to acquire...

We update Rose and Spiegel (2009a, b) and search for simple quantitative models of macroeconomic and financial indicators of the "Great Recession" of 2008-09. We use a cross-country approach and examine a number of potential causes that have been found to be successful indicators of crisis...

This Chartbook provides a pictorial history, on a country-by-country basis, of public debt and economic crises of various forms. It is a timeline of a country's creditworthiness and financial turmoil. The analysis, narrative, and illustrations in Reinhart and Rogoff (2009), This Time is...

Newly developed long historical time series on public debt, along with modern data on external debts, allow a deeper analysis of the cycles underlying serial debt and banking crises. The evidence confirms a strong link between banking crises and sovereign default across the economic history of...

All bond prices plummeted (spreads rose) during the financial crisis, not just the prices of subprime- related bonds. These price declines were due to a banking panic in which institutional investors and firms refused to renew sale and repurchase agreements (repo) - short-term, collateralized,...

This paper models the causes of the 2008 financial crisis together with its manifestations, using a Multiple Indicator Multiple Cause (MIMIC) model. Our analysis is conducted on a cross-section of 85 countries; we focus on international linkages that may have allowed the crisis to spread across...

This paper models the causes of the 2008 financial crisis together with its manifestations, using a Multiple Indicator Multiple Cause (MIMIC) model. Our analysis is conducted on a cross-section of 107 countries; we focus on national causes and consequences of the crisis, ignoring cross-country...

When "confidence" is lost, "liquidity dries up." We investigate the meaning of "confidence" and "liquidity" in the context of the current financial crisis. The financial crisis is a manifestation of an age-old problem with private money creation, banking panics. We explain this and provide some...

This paper examines the depth and duration of the slump that invariably follows severe financial crises, which tend to be protracted affairs. We find that asset market collapses are deep and prolonged. On a peak-to-trough basis, real housing price declines average 35 percent stretched out over...