In this note, we attempt to place the question of how we got to the global financial crisis that began as the US Subprime debacle in the summer of 2007 in the context of an international and historical comparative setting. It is of some poignancy that the “we” here refers to the wealthiest...

The paper reviews the sources of market failure in financial institutions and markets and what can be done to alleviate them. It examines game-theoretic explanations for financial instability, in particular the role of asymmetric information in generating destabilizing behavior. In the area of...

The financial crisis which erupted in the United States of America in 2007 drove the real economic sector into a crisis that has diminshed the world’s economic growth thereafter. There is no single theory that can explain what has happened in the US. Eventhough there were a few financial...

This is a synthetic analysis of the crisis of the world financial system. The author underlines the absence in the capitalist system of efficient stabilizing market mechanisms and the need to distinguish generic forms of interventism from Keynesism.

The aim of this work is to assess the short and medium term impact of banking crises on developing economies. Using an unbalanced panel of 159 countries from 1970 to 2006, the paper shows that banking crises produce significant output losses, both in the short and in the medium term. The effect...

The main objective of this paper is to detect the existence of financial contagion between the North American and European markets during the recent crises. To accomplish this, the relationships between the US and the Euro zone stock markets are considered, taking the daily equity prices of the...

Savings are allocated over the acquisition of assets like homes, shares and bonds and government debt paper. For a home acquisition an individual household uses own equity provided by the buyer and outside equity provided by banks. Such outside equity can help to increase the volume of new...

This study sheds new light on the question of whether or not sentiment surveys, and the expectations derived from them, are relevant to forecasting economic growth and stock returns, and whether they contain information that is orthogonal to macroeconomic and financial data. I examine 16...

Hong Kong is no stranger to bubbles or crisis. During the Asian Financial Crisis(AFC), the Hong Kong housing price index drops more than 50% in less than a year. The same market then experiences the Internet Bubble, the SARS attack, and recently the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). This paper...

In his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations Adam Smith (1776) considered the phenomenon of division of labor so enormously significant for the creation of a nation’s wealth that he devoted the first three chapters of his book to an investigation of this process. This is...