The financial crisis of 2008, which started with an initially well-defined epicenter focused on mortgage backed securities (MBS), has been cascading into a global economic recession, whose increasing severity and uncertain duration has led and is continuing to lead to massive losses and damage...

Eleven of fourteen monetary tightening cycles since 1955 were followed by increases in unemployment; three were not. The term spread at the end of these cycles discriminates almost perfectly between subsequent outcomes, but levels of nominal or real interest rates, as well as other interest rate...

We examine the role of macroeconomic fluctuations, asset market liquidity, and network structure in determining contagion and aggregate losses in a financial system. Systemic instability is explored in a financial network comprising three distinct, but interconnected, sets of agents - domestic...

Financial bubbles are subject to debate and controversy. However, they are not well understood and are hardly ever characterised specifically, especially ex ante. We define a bubble as a period of unsustainable growth, when the price of an asset increases ever more quickly, in a series of...

We question the ability of macroeconomic data to predict risk appetite and "flight-to-quality" periods in the European credit market using a model inspired by the Markov Switching (MS) literature. This model allows for a direct mapping of exogenous variables into states probabilities. We find...

I use credit/GDP ratio to construct stylized credit cycles at global and regional levels over 1980-2010. Their average duration is between 12 and 15 years and for all the regions there is “a ceiling” and “a floor” curbing the amplitude of credit cycles. They are also largely...

We study the role of sentiment variables as predictors for US recessions. We combine sentiment variables with either classical recession predictors or common factors based on a large panel of macroeconomic and financial variables. Sentiment variables hold vast predictive power for US recessions...

Ways of extracting financial condition indices (FCI) are explored and alternative FCIs external to the Chinese economy are constructed to model their predictive content. The exploration aims at highlighting the rich and varied dynamic features of financial variables underlying FCIs and the...

This paper examines the usefulness of asset prices in predicting recessions in the G-7 countries. It finds that asset price drops are significantly associated with the beginning of a recession in these countries. In particular, the marginal effect of an equity/house price drop on the likelihood...

The main purpose of this paper is to warn academia and general public about the inevitability of the impending global economic recession. Heuristically paper introduces concept of macroeconomic gambling trap within the wider context of global economic history. Macroeconomic gambling trap is then...