Tirole analyzes the current views on financial crises and on the reform of the international financial architecture. Based on the Paolo Baffi Lecture the author delivered at the Bank of Italy, this refreshingly accessible book is teeming with rich insights that researchers, policy makers, and students at all levels will find indispensable.
This paper reviews the literature on financial crises focusing on three specific aspects. First, what are the main factors explaining financial crises? Since many theories on the sources of financial crises highlight the importance of sharp fluctuations in asset and credit markets, the paper briefly reviews theoretical and empirical studies on developments in these markets around financial crises. Second, what are the major types of financial crises? The paper focuses on the main theoretical and empirical explanations of four types of financial crises—currency crises, sudden stops, debt crises, and banking crises—and presents a survey of the literature that attempts to identify these episodes. Third, what are the real and financial sector implications of crises? The paper briefly reviews the short- and medium-run implications of crises for the real economy and financial sector. It concludes with a summary of the main lessons from the literature and future research directions.
The lingering effects of the economic crisis are still visible—this shows a clear need to improve our understanding of financial crises. This book surveys a wide range of crises, including banking, balance of payments, and sovereign debt crises. It begins with an overview of the various types of crises and introduces a comprehensive database of crises. Broad lessons on crisis prevention and management, as well as the short-term economic effects of crises, recessions, and recoveries, are discussed.
Financial crises have been pervasive for many years. Their frequency in recent decades has been double that of the Bretton Woods Period (1945-1971) and the Gold Standard Era (1880-1993), comparable only to the period during the Great Depression. Nevertheless, the financial crisis that started in the summer of 2007 came as a great surprise to most people. What initially was seen as difficulties in the U.S. subprime mortgage market, rapidly escalated and spilled over first to financial markets and then to the real economy. The crisis changed the financial landscape worldwide and its full costs are yet to be evaluated. One important reason for the global impact of the 2007-2009 financial crisis was massive illiquidity in combination with an extreme exposure of many financial institutions to liquidity needs and market conditions. As a consequence, many financial instruments could not be traded anymore, investors ran on a variety of financial institutions particularly in wholesale markets, financial institutions and industrial firms started to sell assets at fire sale prices to raise cash, and central banks all over the world injected huge amounts of liquidity into financial systems. But what is liquidity and why is it so important for firms and financial institutions to command enough liquidity? This book brings together classic articles and recent contributions to this important field of research. It provides comprehensive coverage of the role of liquidity in financial crises and is divided into five parts: (i) liquidity and interbank markets; (ii) the public provision of liquidity and regulation; (iii) money, liquidity and asset prices; (iv) contagion effects; (v) financial crises and currency crises.
An IMF paper reviewing the policy responses of Indonesia, Korea and Thailand to the 1997 Asian crisis, comparing the actions of these three countries with those of Malaysia and the Philippines. Although all judgements are still tentative, important lessons can be learned from the experiences of the last two years.
For 50 years, the International Finance Section at Princeton University has encouraged and published work in international finance. This volume, a semicentennial celebration of the Section's essays in international finance, is comprised of 12 essays.
We update the widely used banking crises database by Laeven and Valencia (2008, 2010) with new information on recent and ongoing crises, including updated information on policy responses and outcomes (i.e. fiscal costs, output losses, and increases in public debt). We also update our dating of sovereign debt and currency crises. The database includes all systemic banking, currency, and sovereign debt crises during the period 1970-2011. The data show some striking differences in policy responses between advanced and emerging economies as well as many similarities between past and ongoing crises.
This paper investigates empirically the drivers of financial imbalances ahead of the global financial crisis. Three factors may have contributed to the build-up of financial imbalances: (i) rising global imbalances (capital flows), (ii) monetary policy that might have been too loose, (iii) inadequate supervision and regulation. Panel data regressions are performed for OECD countries from 1999 to 2007, so as to shed light on the relative importance of these factors, as well as the extent to which these factors might have interacted in fuelling the build-up. We find that the build-up of financial imbalances was driven by capital inflows and an associated compression of the spread between long and short rates. The effect of capital inflows on the build-up is amplified where the supervisory and regulatory environment was relatively weak. We find that, by contrast, differences in monetary policy cannot account for differences across countries in the build-up of financial imbalances ahead of the crisis.
WINNER OF THE LIONEL GELBER PRIZE A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2018 ONE OF THE ECONOMIST'S BOOKS OF THE YEAR A NEW YORK TIMES CRITICS' TOP BOOK "An intelligent explanation of the mechanisms that produced the crisis and the response to it...One of the great strengths of Tooze's book is to demonstrate the deeply intertwined nature of the European and American financial systems."--The New York Times Book Review From the prizewinning economic historian and author of Shutdown and The Deluge, an eye-opening reinterpretation of the 2008 economic crisis (and its ten-year aftermath) as a global event that directly led to the shockwaves being felt around the world today. We live in a world where dramatic shifts in the domestic and global economy command the headlines, from rollbacks in US banking regulations to tariffs that may ignite international trade wars. But current events have deep roots, and the key to navigating today’s roiling policies lies in the events that started it all—the 2008 economic crisis and its aftermath. Despite initial attempts to downplay the crisis as a local incident, what happened on Wall Street beginning in 2008 was, in fact, a dramatic caesura of global significance that spiraled around the world, from the financial markets of the UK and Europe to the factories and dockyards of Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America, forcing a rearrangement of global governance. With a historian’s eye for detail, connection, and consequence, Adam Tooze brings the story right up to today’s negotiations, actions, and threats—a much-needed perspective on a global catastrophe and its long-term consequences.
Warnings of the threat of an impending financial crisis are not new, but do we really know what constitutes an actual episode of crisis and how, once begun, it can be prevented from escalating into a full-blown economic collapse? Using both historical and contemporary episodes of breakdowns in financial trade, contributors to this volume draw insights from theory and empirical data, from the experience of closed and open economies worldwide, and from detailed case studies. They explore the susceptibility of American corporations to economic downturns; the origins of banking panics; and the behavior of financial markets during periods of crisis. Sever papers specifically address the current thrift crisis—including a detailed analysis of the over 500 FSLIC-insured thrifts in the southeast—and seriously challenge the value of recent measures aimed at preventing future collapse in that industry. Government economists and policy makers, scholars of industry and banking, and many in the business community will find these timely papers an invaluable reference.
