The current crisis has proven the importance of the national banking system. Sovereign funds will play an important role in reinforcing the position of several emerging countries and markets in the world. The great amount of financing needed in order to fix the problems and the gaps brought by...

This paper deals with the consequences of signing the Treaty on the establishment, coordination and governance in the European Union, also known as the "Tax Treaty". Thus, our article presents some general concepts on the relationship between taxation, fiscal policy and the European Union,...

We revisit the issue of fiscal procyclicality in commodity-rich nations -commodity republics in the nomenclature of this paper. Since commodity prices are plausibly a main driver of fiscal policy outcomes in these countries, we focus on the behavior of fiscal variables across the commodity...

This paper studies the interaction of government debt and financial markets. Both markets are fragile: excessively responsive to fundamentals and prone to strategic uncertainty. This interaction, termed a ʽdiabolic loopʼ, is driven by government willingness to bail out banks and the resulting...

We show that political booms, measured by the rise in governments' popularity, predict financial crises above and beyond other better-known early warning indicators, such as credit booms. This predictive power, however, only holds in emerging economies. We show that governments in emerging...

As reliance on excessively short-term wholesale funding has been one of the major causes for the 2007-2009 financial crisis, recent advances in global liquidity regulation try to curb the excessive reliance on short-term wholesale funding without being clear on how such an approach will affect...

These notes examine the international crisis by analyzing it through Latin American lenses. The exercise consists in interpreting some key facts of the current global crisis in the light of what we know about volatility, crisis and stabilization policies in Latin America. The exercise has an...

The work compares the relative strenghts, in understanding the current crisis, of the Keynesian tradition with those of two non-Keynesian traditions: those which emphasise income inequality and those which emphasise power. In other words, Hobson and Marx.

The brief note introduces the articles collected in the present issue of the journal. It places the various contributions in perspective, critically summarizing the major economic developments since the publication of the last issue.

The article is an introduction to the new issue of the Journal. It provides an overview of the current economic and financial situation and summarises the main topics dealt with by the following articles.