In 2011, Italian businesses and households have faced the Sovereign debt crisis, but savings confirmed its resilience. Since the beginning of the crisis, Italian households’ propensity to save has fallen nearly 1.8 percentage points, although Italy continues to rank above most other...

The continuing statements about the fall in the households’ propensity to save are not based on a deep analysis of the causes, and in particular the tax burden increase, low interest rates, lower protection offered to the workforce. An economic policy aimed to protect savings and to promote...

The crisis has produced its effects on households incomes and on their savings behaviour.The reduction in disposable income and savings is the cost that households pay to compensate delays in the adjustment of public finances and to support businesses investments. A detailed analysis on the...

The massive use of derivatives and securitisation by sovereign States for public debt and deficit management is a growing phenomenon in financial markets. Financial innovation can modify risks effectively run and alter the stability of the public sector finance. The experience of some developed...

After the subprime credit crisis of 2007, the world is no longer what we thought. An unprecedented crisis of confidence was combined with a credit crunch, and the G20 countries had to enact massive public spending programmes to save the economy and at least buffer the inevitable hard landing. In...

The paper deals with the problem of defining money in a system with derivatives. We conclude that derivatives have to be included in the definition of money, and support our conclusions with an econometric test on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and Chicago Board of Trade indexes. We focus on...

Financial derivatives are products whose price is linked with that of an underlying asset. The relationship between these two prices has been studied in depth, and the following conclusions have been reached: (1) the volatility of underlying asset's price decreases after the introduction of...