This paper provides an introduction to the special issue on international lending of last resort. Starting from debates about rescue operations and unconventional policies of major central banks in the contexts of the Global Financial Crisis and the European Debt Crisis, it draws attention to...

Economists in the public are accused of propagating highly professional, but unrealistic theories that mislead market agents and policy makers to place too much confidence in rational behaviour and market equilibrium. The paper analyses to what extent the US banking crisis and the euro crisis...

Tiny changes in the American monetary policy can have dramatic effects on the rest of the world because of dollar's double role of national and international currency. This is the Triffin dilemma. The paper shows how it works through three examples: price of commodities, dollarization, and the...

The paper investigates the Subprime and the European sovereign debt crises through the prism of a novel methodology for portfolio credit derivatives analytics - a dynamic top-down HJM setting. Interestingly, the eurozone resembles a giant CDO in its financial construct which makes such an...

We study determinants of sovereign portfolios of Spanish banks over a long time-span, starting in 2008. Our findings challenge the view that banks engaged in moral hazard strategies to exploit the regulatory treatment of sovereign exposures. In particular, we show that being a weakly capitalized...

We document the mechanism through which the risk of fire sales in the sovereign bond market contributed to the effectiveness of two major central bank interventions designed to restore financial stability during the European sovereign debt crisis. As a lender of last resort via the long-term...

This paper develops a model to interpret the 2012 eurozone crisis and the ECB's policy response. In the model, bank lending is distorted by debt overhang, banks hold sovereign bonds, and the government guarantees the bailout of bank creditors. A self-fulfilling pessimistic view of the economy...

This study attempts to identify and trace inter-linkages between sovereign and banking risk in the euro area. To this end, we use an indicator of banking risk in each country based on the Contingent Claim Analysis literature, and 10-year government yield spreads over Germany as a measure of...

This paper measures credit risk in prime money market funds (MMFs) and studies how such credit risk evolved during the eurozone crisis of 2011-2012. To accomplish this, we estimate the annualized expected loss on each fund's portfolio. We also calculate by Monte Carlo the cost of insuring a fund...

We investigate whether riskier European countries compensate their debtholders properly by paying out sufficiently higher bond yields compared to those of safer European countries, during and after the sovereign debt crisis of 2010-2012. Using the relative pricing between credit default swap...