A combination of cyclical and structural factors has lead to a situation which could threaten financial stability worldwide. As the current financial turmoil is unfolding it becomes clearer that the effects of the initial sub-prime crisis, which originated in the US, are spreading across other...

Die Vorstellung selbst-stabilisierender, zum Gleichgewicht tendierender Finanzmärkte, lange Zeit als Selbstverständlichkeit angesehen, ist durch die aktuelle Banken- und Kreditkrise in Frage gestellt. Trotz ausgefeilten Risikomanagements der Banken und einer an Basel II orientierten Aufsicht...

The author suggests the 2008 financial crisis was the culmination of an accelerating process of financial market evolution that is inherently unstable. From his viewpoint markets are not well organized to manage the power financial assets have to generate emotion and their wider effect on human...

The author suggests that the 2008 financial crisis was the culmination of an acceleratting and inherently unstable process of financial market evolution. He argues that markets are not well organized to manage the power that financial assets have to generate emotion and their wider effect on...

This paper compares the depth of the Recent Crisis and the Great Depression. We use a new data set to compare the drop in activity in the industrialized countries for seven activity indicators. This is done under the assumption that the Recent Crisis leveled off in mid-2009 for production and...

The recent financial crisis has shown that financial innovation can have devastating systemic impacts. International standard setters' and national regulators' response has been a global concerted effort to overhaul and tighten financial regulations. However, at a time of designing stricter...

We show that previous results suggesting that government ownership of banks is associated with lower long run growth rates are not robust to adding more 'fundamental' determinants of economic growth. We also present new cross-country evidence for 1995-2007 which suggests that, if anything,...

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...

Der vorliegende Beitrag beschäftigt sich mit der Aufarbeitung der Hintergründe der Subprime-Krise sowie der nachfolgenden internationalen Banken- und Finanzkrisen. Auf dieser Basis werden Vorschläge diskutiert, wie die erkannten Schwachstellen im Finanzsystem repariert bzw. behoben werden...

This paper compares the depth of the recent crisis and the Great Depression. We use a new data set to compare the drop in activity in the industrialized countries for seven activity indicators. This is done under the assumption that the recent crisis leveled off in mid-2009 for production and...