The financial crisis has heightened the awareness of the risk of a sudden shortage of foreign currencies. Governments and central banks are looking for ways to obtain "liquidity assurance", ie the assurance of having access to international liquidity if they need it. This article discusses how...

We identify similarities and differences in the scale and nature of the banking crises in 2008-9 and the Great Depression, and analyse differences in the policy response to the two crises in light of the prevailing international monetary systems. We find that the scale of the banking crisis, as...