The past 30 years have been witness to an inexorable change in the degree to which economies are connected internationally. At the same time, the 2007-2008 recession was the first ‘global recession' in decades. This article explores how international trade and cross-border holdings financial...

In advanced economies, a century-long near-stable ratio of credit to GDP gave way to rapid financialization and surging leverage in the last forty years. This “financial hockey stick” coincides with shifts in foundational macroeconomic relationships beyond the widely-noted return of...

This paper studies the synchronization of financial cycles across 17 advanced economies over the past 150 years. The comovement in credit, house prices, and equity prices has reached historical highs in the past three decades. The sharp increase in the comovement of global equity markets is...