The recent crisis was characterized by massive illiquidity. This paper reviews what we know and don't know about illiquidity and all its friends: market freezes, fire sales, contagion, and ultimately insolvencies and bailouts. It first explains why liquidity cannot easily be apprehended through...

Using a comprehensive high-frequency foreign exchange dataset, we present evidence of time-of-day effects in foreign exchange returns through a significant tendency for currencies to depreciate during local trading hours. We confirm this pattern across a range of currencies and time zones. We...