Spain has experienced many financial crises through its history. These financial crises have varied origins. However, they do have common threads. The current recession and subsequent debt crisis follow the same pattern. The fiscal and monetary policies of the Spanish government have played a...

This paper analyses the monetary policy of the Most Serene Republic of Venice in the years of calamities using a modern equivalent of helicopter money, namely an extraordinary issue of (base) money, coupled with capital losses for the issuer. We treat the 1629 famine and the 1630-1631 plague as...

Deciding to undertake a series of tightening actions present unique challenges for Federal Reserve policymakers. These challenges are both political and economic. Using a variety of economic and financial market metrics, this article examines how the economy and financial markets evolved in...

The paper uses quarterly GDP data for some 30 years up to and including 2001, to examine the identity and development of the European business cycle. Cycles are identified by using a band-pass filter version of the Hodrick-Prescott filter and affiliations are examined using clustering techniques...

It is still insufficiently realised, even now, that the US and therefore the rest of the world may be on the brink of a severe and intractable recession. As recently as September 2000, it was commonly held that the US business cycle had been abolished for ever, while the “consensus” forecast...

Modern growth theory derives mostly from Robert Solow's “A Contribution to the Theory of Economic Growth” (1956). Solow's own interpretation locates the origins of his “Contribution” in his view that the growth model of Roy Harrod implied a tendency toward progressive collapse of the...

Dopo la seconda guerra mondiale ci sono stati il regolamento degli aiuti concessi sulla base del Lend-lease, l'istituzione del sistema di Bretton Woods, il prestito alla Gran Bretagna e, infine, il piano Marshall. Riflettendo su quel periodo ho proposto una mia legge delle politiche economiche...

The strategic outlook of the U.S. can be assessed by analyzing the balance sheets of its main sectors, which are mutually linked by a coherent system of accounting. The expansion of the period 1992-2000 was greeted by a wave of complacency in the United States and it was thought that it could...

The U.S. today experiences an expanding financial economy. Investors benefit as common stock prices rise. Moreover, the finance industry grows relative to other industries (called “financialization”). But at the same time, the real economy lags. Workers' pay and job opportunities stagnate as...

Drawing on recent business cycle research on the Great Depression, we return to an argument we advanced in a 1996 article in the Journal of Monetary Economics - the argument that features of the Hawley-Smoot tariffs could have done more to decrease economic activity than is customarily believed,...