A key firm in the recent crisis has been AIG. Its CDS financial intermediation tried to function on too thin layer of capital – high leverage – owing to a misreading of the degree of risk embodied in ever more complex financial products and markets. I explain why the application of...

This article seeks to explain intercountry differences in the debt crises in Europe. Is there a single explanation, cause? Specifically, were the crises due to government budget deficits or to the private sector? The answer will determine the appropriate policies to prevent a recurrence. The...

Alan Greenspan's paper (March 2010) presents his retrospective view of the crisis. His theme has several parts. First, the housing price bubble, its subsequent collapse and the financial crisis were not predicted either by the market, the Fed, the IMF or the regulators in the years leading to...

This paper provides a consistent theoretical framework to explain the fundamental determinants of the evolution in the medium to longer run of the real effective exchange rate of the United States relative to the currencies of the other G-7 countries. The fundamental determinants are...

The standard literature concerning intertemporal optimization in international finance is based upon certainty equivalence, and ignores risk and uncertainty. It therefore is not helpful concerning risk management and evaluation of the risk involved in the holding of international short-term...

Data on the credit rating of bonds issued in the first half of the 1990s suggest that investors in emerging market securities paid little attention to credit risk, or that they were comfortable with the high level of credit risk that they were incurring. The literature in international finance...

First: we explain, within the context of a theoretically consistent model, what are the fundamental external and internal determinants of the real effective exchange rate of Germany. Second: we explain how one should view the real effective exchange rate in evaluating the competitiveness of the...

A healthy financial system encourages the efficient allocation of capital and risk. The collapse of the house price bubble led to the financial crisis that started in 2007. There is a large empirical literature concerning the relation between asset price bubbles and financial crises. I evaluate...

This interdisciplinary paper explains how mathematical techniques of stochastic optimal control can be applied to the recent subprime mortgage crisis. Why did the financial markets fail to anticipate the recent debt crisis, despite the large literature in mathematical finance concerning optimal...

The recent financial crises, especially the debt crisis in Asia, have led to questions su ch as: what are their causes, what is an excessive debt and how vulnerable is an economy to external shocks? We develop an economic model of international finance and debt based upon two sources of...