This paper analyzes the risks that contemporary banks experience. In particular, the trends that the financial sector has undergone during the last few decades with the introduction of derivatives, universalization of the United States banking industry, and globalization of several operations...

We re-assess the view that sovereigns with a history of default are charged only a small and/or short-lived premium on the interest rate warranted by observed fundamentals. Our reassessment uses a metric of such a “default premium” (DP) that is consistent with asymmetric information models...

A PowerPoint presentation, Mortgage Crisis led to Credit and Illiquidity Crisis, delineates the key factors which the author believes enabled the contagious-but-confinable risks of the mortgage crisis to spread to the entire financial market. The prime cause was the weakened health of leveraged...