The conventional discussion of the international financial crisis that erupted in the summer of 2007 is that few professional economists saw it coming, nor anticipated its ferocity in devastating the US and European economies and financial systems, leading to civil unrest and fears of greater...

This paper presents an overview of different models which explain financial crises, with the aim of understanding economic developments during and possibly after the Great Recession. In the first part approaches based on efficient markets and rational expectations hypotheses are analyzed, which...