In the decades preceding the Great Crisis of 2007-2009, banking systemsunderwent a profound transformation, progressively moving awayfrom a type of banking centred on personal relationships towards onebased on more standardised and impersonal rapport. It was thought that,through this...

[...]In our view, this apparently surprising immunity of the U.S.economy to the Asia crisis reflects the fact that the original wayof thinking about the crisis was flawed. First, it focused only ondemand-side channels and ignored the supply side. Second, thedepreciation of the Asian currencies...

This paper shows how financial contracts might be redesigned to allow for banks to manage the idiosyncratic component for their own accounts.

Asset market values react to economic news and policychanges, and consumers react to changes in asset marketvalues. The consumption-wealth channel of monetary policyspells out this mechanism: changes in monetary policy affectasset values, which in turn affect consumer spending onnondurable goods...

[...]I will begin with deregulation. Compared with the regulatedEuropean financial systems of the postwar period, mostEuropean countries have been liberalizing their financialservices sectors. This trend began in the mid-1960s andaccelerated in the 1980s and 1990s. At the same time,...

Pan-Asianism in Japanese history has not received much scholarly attention so far. Indeed, as some scholars have pointed out (Beasley 1987a), it is questionable whether the notion of an ideology that only existed as a loose set of ideas and, moreover, had its foundations in European concepts,...

[...]A key observation is that import and export prices roughlytracked each other, with both tracking the behavior of worldtradable goods prices. Indeed, trade prices were fallingthroughout Asia by similar magnitudes, regardless of howmuch each country’s currency depreciated. For both...

Initiated by the seminal work of Diamond/Dybvig (1983) and Diamond (1984), advances in the theory of financial intermediation have sharpened our understanding of the theoretical foundations of banks as special financial institutions. What makes them "unique" is the combination of accepting...