Despite the experience of the ongoing sovereign debt crisis, European banks continue to hold large amounts of bonds from their home governments. This ties the fates of the sovereign and the banks together, leading to the disruptive self-reinforcing feedback loops that brought the euro area to...

From the very beginning of the European Monetary Union the crucial institutions, the European Commission and the European Central Bank, led by mainstream economic thinking, were not up to their task of controlling the core of the system effectively. A huge gap in competitiveness among the member...

At the height of the European sovereign debt crisis, the European Central Bank decided to purchase distressed European government bonds. Even worse, and more importantly, the ECB is providing direct support of several hundred billions of euros to troubled banks via its normal monetary policy...

The sharp widening of yield spreads among EMU sovereign bonds in the course of the economic crisis and concerns that some EMU member countries would encounter difficulties in rolling their existing debt and funding new budget deficits have revived proposals for a common bond issuance by EMU...

The creation of a single currency is deemed to produce further heterogeneity in regional trade, as regions differ in their exposure to trade with other European countries. It is possible to disentangle two separate effects on bilateral trade, namely the “exchange rate volatility effect”...

Applying a t-DCC-GARCH model to daily spread data, four phases of interaction in euro area sovereign bond markets are identified between January 2008 and June 2013. The initial period (January-October 2008) is followed by a general rise in pairwise correlation values between November 2008 and...