This paper studies the emergence of sovereign bond yield spreads in the Eurozone prior to the financial crisis. While … cycles deviate most from the average Eurozone cycle. In contrast, spreads did not arise in response to adverse macroeconomic …

sparked an unprecedented sovereign debt crisis that rapidly spread to the Euro-Zone's weakest member states. As the crisis … increasingly drove a wedge between a seemingly resilient Euro-Zone core and its faltering periphery, its first collateral victims … were the private banks of the hardest-hit sovereigns. They were rapidly followed by the rest of the Euro-Zone's banks as a …