In fighting a financial crisis, opacity (keeping the names of banks borrowing at emergency lending facilities secret) and stigma (the cost of having a bank's name revealed) are desirable to restore confidence. Lending facilities raise the perceived average quality of all banks' assets. Opacity...

Short-term collateralized debt, such as demand deposits and money market instruments - private money, is efficient if agents are willing to lend without producing costly information about the collateral backing the debt. When the economy relies on such informationally-insensitive debt, firms...

All economists should be conversant with "what happened?" during the financial crisis of 2007-2009. We select and summarize 16 documents, including academic papers and reports from regulatory and international agencies. This reading list covers the key facts and mechanisms in the build-up of...

Credit booms are not rare and usually precede financial crises. However, some end in a crisis (bad booms) while others do not (good booms). We document that credit booms start with an increase in productivity, which subsequently falls much faster during bad booms. We develop a model in which...

In the last forty or so years the U.S. financial system has morphed from a mostly insured retail deposit-based system into a system with significant amounts of wholesale short-term debt that relies on collateral, and in particular Treasuries, which have a convenience yield. In the new economy...

Understanding the ongoing credit crisis or panic requires understanding the designs of a number of interlinked securities, special purpose vehicles, and derivatives, all related to subprime mortgages. I describe the relevant securities, derivatives, and vehicles to show: (1) how the chain of...

The Financial Crisis began and accelerated in short-term money markets. One such market is the multi-trillion dollar sale-and-repurchase (“repo”) market, where prices show strong reactions during the crisis. The academic literature and policy community remain unsettled about the role of repo...

Economic growth is persistently low following a financial crisis, possibly because of a continuing weal banking system. In a financial crisis bank health is significantly damaged. Post-crisis regulatory changes have aimed at restoring bank health, but measuring bank health by Tobin's Q, we find...

Safe assets play a critical role in an(y) economy. A “safe asset” is an asset that is (almost always) valued at face value without expensive and prolonged analysis. That is, by design there is no benefit to producing (private) information about its value. And this is common knowledge....