The market crisis of 2007 and 2008 shattered many investors' notions of the efficiency and stability of markets. It also likely shattered a lot of investors' confidence in asset allocation schemes. Some advisors thought they were following sound strategies, only to have severely adverse results....

This paper describes the history of sovereign debt crises and the ways in which sovereign debt crises can spread like a virus from country to country and from the sovereign sector to other sectors of the economy. This latter propagation often has been ignored in the academic literature, though...

Sovereign debt crises do not need to be viral. Whether they are depends on the government's interaction with the private sector. The more open an economy, the less likely it is that a sovereign debt crisis will infect the domestic private sector. More importantly, the larger the government's...

Milton Friedman said that inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. Most people, when they think of inflation, think in terms of the goods and services that they buy. In fact, Friedman’s dictum can be extended to include inflated home prices, stock prices, commodity prices, or...