This study finds that equity returns in the banking sector in the wake of the Great Recession and the European sovereign debt crisis have been driven mainly by weak growth prospects and heightened sovereign risk and to a lesser extent, by deteriorating funding conditions and investor sentiment....

In this paper, we present the root cause of the American financial crisis in 2007. We show that financial integration and capital flow volatility is the factor that creates a climate conducive to the emergence of the crisis in the USA and led to its spread to the rest of the world. On the...