The author suggests that the 2008 financial crisis was the culmination of an accelerating 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...

The U.S. financial markets faced an unprecedented rapid decline and recovery on May 6, 2010, known as the May 6 flash crash. Roughly one trillion $ market value in less than thirty minutes vanished with the biggest one-day point decline in the history of the DJIA at the time. Since the market...

The extensive harm caused by the financial crisis raises the question of whether policy- makers could have done more to prevent the build-up of financial imbalances. This paper aims to contribute to the field of regulatory impact assessment by taking up the revived debate on whether central...

In the wake of the global financial crisis that erupted in 2008, there has been extensive commentary and regulatory focus on the 'Too Big to Fail' issue. In this paper, we survey the proposed solutions and regulatory initiatives that have been undertaken. We conduct a longitudinal analysis of...

Seit der zweiten Hälfte der 1990er gab es drei gravierende Finanzkrisen, jeweils mit einer erheblichen Beteiligung der Rating-Agenturen (RAs). Im Lichte der erzielten Ergebnisse entsprechen RAs nicht ihren Leistungsversprechen. Sie erweisen sich als fehlbar und überfordert. Das ist angesichts...

There is a growing consensus among both economists-academics and policymakers that there was at least one missing element of the financial safety net during the Global Financial Crisis. This element, which will probably improve financial stability (or protect against financial instability), is...

We analyze the determinants of real estate and credit bubbles using a unique borrower-lender matched dataset on mortgage loans in Spain. The dataset contain real estate credit and price conditions (loan principal and spread, and the appraisal and market price) at the mortgage level, matched with...

In this paper we analyze financial crises, and the interactions of macroprudential policy and credit. Financial crises are recurrent systemic phenomena, often-triggering deep and long-lasting recessions with large reductions in aggregate welfare, output and employment. Importantly for policy,...

To study the impact of macroprudential policy on credit supply cycles and real effects, we analyze dynamic provisioning. Introduced in Spain in 2000, revised four times, and tested in its countercyclicality during the crisis, it affected banks differentially. We find that dynamic provisioning...

Banking crises are recurrent phenomena, often induced by excessive bank risk-taking, which may be due to behavioral reasons (over-optimistic banks neglecting risks) and to agency problems between bank shareholders with debt-holders and taxpayers (banks understand high risk-taking). We test...