In the fall of 2008, the United States was plunged into a financial crisis more severe than any since the Great Depression. As banks collapsed and the state scrambled to organize one of the largest transfers of wealth in history, manyincluding economists and financial expertswere shocked by the...

An active role of fiscal policy has been rediscovered as a crisis remedy at the beginning of the financial crisis all over Europe. More recently, the Euro Crisis with its mounting governments' funding costs for a number of Southern EU member states and Ireland has called this strategy into...

This paper studies euro area CDS spreads during the financial crisis. We examine the impact of the crisis on both commercial banks and sovereigns, and focus on two questions. First, have the ECB's open market operations reduced market stress? It seems that large repo volumes, especially if...