This Economic Letter briefly reviews 11 papers that provide analytical perspectives and new empirical evidence on the causes of these crises as well as the appropriate policy responses. These papers, prepared for a conference sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco’s Center for...

This Economic Letter is adapted from a speech delivered by Janet L. Yellen, president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, on October 30, 2008, to the UC Berkeley-UCLA Symposium "The Mortgage Meltdown, the Economy, and Public Policy," at the University of California, Berkeley.

This Economic Letter summarizes the papers presented at the conference on "Emerging Markets and Macroeconomic Volatility: Lessons from a Decade of Financial Debacles" held at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco on June 4-5, 2004, under the joint sponsorship of the Bank's Center for Pacific...

How have U.S. commercial banks responded during the current financial crisis? What was hiding behind the dynamics of aggregate commercial bank loans through the end of 2008? We use balance sheet data for the entire population of commercial banks to construct quarterly gross credit flows (credit...

We study the contraction of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) flows in the United States during the recent financial crisis and show their unusual non-resiliency, which depends in part on the global nature of the economic recession, but also on the increases in the cost of financing FDI in the...

Numerous commentaries have questioned both the legality and appropriateness of Federal Reserve lending to banks during the recent financial crisis. This article addresses two questions motivated by such commentary: 1) Did the Federal Reserve violate either the letter or spirit of the law by...

We investigate the pairwise correlations of 11 U.S. fixed income yield spreads over a sample that includes the Great Financial Crisis of 2007-2009. Using cross-sectional methods and non- parametric bootstrap breakpoint tests, we characterize the crisis as a period in which pairwise correlations...

In the wake of the global financial crisis of 2007–08, Asia has emerged as a pillar of financial stability and economic growth. A recent San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank conference focused on Asia’s changing role in the global economy. Asia’s relative strength is allowing it to play an...