One of the most often committed mistakes in economic reasoning is the supposition about continuity of economic processes. Yet what dominates in reality is the process of permanent changes which sometimes happen not in a linear but in a cascade way. It must be acknowledged that the capitalist...

Yet another rescue plan for the European Monetary Union (EMU) is making its way through central Europe, but no one is foolish enough to believe that it will be enough. Greece's finance minister reportedly said that his nation cannot continue to service its debt, and hinted that a 50 percent...

Yet another rescue plan for the European Monetary Union (EMU) is making its way through central Europe, but no one is foolish enough to believe that it will be enough. Greece's finance minister reportedly said that his nation cannot continue to service its debt, and hinted that a 50 percent...

Today the global economy is facing down the threat of a multifaceted crisis. Sustained by ultra-low interest rates and unprecedented levels of quantitative easing since the last global financial crisis, the global economy is taking a sharp turn toward tighter monetary policy as it experiences...

The recent financial crisis has highlighted the fragility of the US financial system under several respects. In this paper the properties of a summary index of financial fragility, timely capturing changes in credit and liquidity risk, distress in the mortgage market, and corporate default risk,...

Much has been written about why economists failed to predict the latest financial and real crisis. Reading the recent literature, it seems that the crisis was so obvious that economists must have been blind when looking at data not to see it coming. In this paper, we analyze whether such claims...

We employ a nonlinear VAR framework and a state-of-the-art identification strategy to document the large response of real activity to a financial uncertainty shock during and in the aftermath of the great recession. We replicate this evidence with an estimated DSGE framework featuring a concept...

Do severe recessions associated with financial crises cause permanent reductions in potential GDP, or does the economy return to its trend? If the economy eventually returns to its trend, does the return take longer than the return following recessions not associated with financial crises? We...

This paper develops a new financial stress measure (Cleveland Financial Stress Index, CFSI) that considers the supervisory objective of identifying risks to the stability of the financial system. The index provides a continuous signal of financial stress and broad coverage of the areas that...

This paper develops a financial stress index for the United States, the Cleveland Financial Stress Index (CFSI), which provides a continuous signal of financial stress and broad coverage of the areas that could indicate it. The index is based on daily public-market data collected from four...