Since the beginning of the 2008 financial crisis almost half a trillion euros have been spent to financially assist EU member states in taxpayer-funded bail-outs. These crisis resolutions are often accompanied by austerity programs causing political and social friction on both domestic and...

We propose a double auction mechanism for the exchange of leveraged assets and bonds in an agent based model. In this framework we validate recent results in general equilibrium theory about endogenous leverage and its consequences for asset pricing. We find that the institutional details of...