Governments face a trade-off between insuring bondholders and taxpayers. If the government fully insures bondholders by manufacturing risk-free zero-beta debt, then it cannot also insure taxpayers against permanent macroeconomic shocks over long horizons. Instead, taxpayers will pay more in...

The entire difference between a mild downturn and a devastating crisis is the occurrence of sharp fire sales of domestic assets and possibly foreign exchange and the ensuing collapse in the balance sheets of both the financial and nonfinancial sector. Why and how do such crises materialize? And...

We introduce convenience yields on dollar bonds into an incomplete-market equilibrium model of exchange rates and interest rates. The convenience yield enters as a stochastic wedge in the Euler equation for exchange rate determination. The model identifies a novel safe-asset convenience yield...