We present a theory in which the key driver of short-term debt issued by the financial sector is the portfolio demand for safe and liquid assets by the nonfinancial sector. This demand drives a premium on safe and liquid assets that the financial sector exploits by owning risky and illiquid...

We augment a standard New Keynesian model with a financial accelerator mechanism and show that financial frictions generate large state-dependent amplification effects. We fit the model to US data and show that, when shocks drive the model far away from the steady state, the nonlinear model...