When 'confidence' is lost, 'liquidity dries up.' We investigate the meaning of 'confidence' and 'liquidity' in the context of the current financial crisis. The financial crisis is a manifestation of an age-old problem with private money creation, banking panics. We explain this and provide some...

We study the basic properties of an equally-weighted index of U.S. commodity futures from the perspective of a Japanese investor. We find that the returns on the U.S. equally-weighted commodity futures index maintain their basic properties, documented in Gorton and Rouwenhorst (2005), when...

This note is a response to a recent paper by Erb and Harvey (2005). We show that diversification returns are mathematical properties of geometric averages of index returns, and not due to rebalancing. We also show how rebalancing affects the performance of the equal-weighted commodity futures...

Modern financial crises are difficult to explain because they do not always involve bank runs, or the bank runs occur late. For this reason, the first year of the Great Depression, 1930, has remained a puzzle. Industrial production dropped by 20.8 percent despite no nationwide bank run. Using...

The Financial Crisis began and accelerated in short-term money markets. One such market is the multi-trillion dollar sale-and-repurchase (repo) market, where prices show strong reactions during the crisis. The academic literature and policy community remain unsettled about the role of repo runs,...

Financial crises are runs on short-term debt. Whatever its form, short-term debt is an inherent feature of a market economy. A run is an information event in which holders of short-term debt no longer want to lend to banks because they receive information leading them to suspect the value of the...

A financial crisis is an event in which the holders of short-term debt come to question the collateral backing that debt. So, the resiliency of the financial system depends on the quality of that collateral. We show that there is a shortage of high-quality collateral by examining the convenience...

Understanding the ongoing credit crisis or panic requires understanding the designs of a number of interlinked securities, special purpose vehicles, and derivatives, all related to subprime mortgages. I describe the relevant securities, derivatives, and vehicles to show: (1) how the chain of...

How did problems with subprime mortgages result in a systemic crisis, a panic? The ongoing Panic of 2007 is due to a loss of information about the location and size of risks of loss due to default on a number of interlinked securities, special purpose vehicles, and derivatives, all related to...

Short-term debt that can serve as a medium of exchange is designed to be information insensitive. No one should be tempted to acquire private information to gain an informational advantage in trading that could destabilize the value of the debt. Short-term debt minimizes the incentive to acquire...