After presenting a brief overview of the recent financial crisis and the European debt crisis that followed in its wake, this paper goes on discuss monetary policy in the United States, the United Kingdom and the Euro bloc prior to and during the course of the two crises. The paper presents...

Recent crises in emerging markets have been heavily driven by balance-sheet or net-worth effects. Episodes in countries as far-flung as Indonesia and Argentina have shown that exchange rate adjustments that would normally help to restore balance can be destabilizing, even catastrophic, for...