June 2000 - Collective action clauses raise borrowing costs for low-rated borrowers and lower them for high-rated borrowers. This result holds for all developing country bonds and also for the subset of sovereign bond issuers. It is easy to say that the International Monetary Fund should not...

We review the modern history of financial crises, providing a context for analyses of the world's recent bout of financial instability. Along with indicators of economic performance in the subject countries, we present a comprehensive description of multilateral rescue efforts spanning the last...

How did the Subprime Crisis, a problem in a small corner of U.S. financial markets, affect the entire global banking system? To shed light on this question we use principal components analysis to identify common factors in the movement of banks' credit default swap spreads. We find that fortunes...

The IMF attempts to stabilize private capital flows to emerging markets by providing public monitoring and emergency finance. In analyzing its role we contrast cases where banks and bondholders do the lending. Banks have a natural advantage in monitoring and creditor coordination, while bonds...

We analyze why the Eurozone crisis increasingly resembles Latin America’s lost decade instead of Asia’s phoenix miracle, emphasizing the roles of the real exchange rate, the external environment, and debt restructuring. In addition, we contrast the adjustment to housing bubbles in Ireland,...

At the spring 2003 meetings of the IMF and World Bank it was decided to push ahead with the contractual approach to smoothing the process of sovereign debt restructuring by encouraging the more widespread use of collective action clauses (CACs) in international bonds. This decision was shaped by...

At the spring 2003 meetings of the IMF and World Bank it was decided to push ahead with the contractual approach to smoothing the process of sovereign debt restructuring by encouraging the more widespread use of collective action clauses (CACs) in international bonds. This decision was shaped by...

We provide a synoptic description of financial crises and the multilateral response over the course of the last four decades. We present both indicators of economic performance around crisis dates and a comprehensive description of multilateral rescue efforts. While emergency lending has grown,...

How did the Subprime Crisis, a problem in a small corner of U.S. financial markets, affect the entire global banking system? To shed light on this question we use principal components analysis to identify common factors in the movement of banks.credit default swap spreads. We find that fortunes...