Over-borrowing and financial stress has recently become an important issue in macroeconomic and policy discussions in the US as well as in the EU. In this paper the authors study two regimes of financial stress. In a regime of high financial stress, stress shocks can have large and persistent...

From the onset of the 2007-2009 crisis, the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank have aggressively lowered interest rates. Both sets of changes are at odds with an anti-inflationary stance of monetary policy; indeed, as the crisis began in August 2007 inflation expectations were high...