Economic Logic

During the last financial crisis, it was quite obvious that at least some banks were taking excessive risks. What do economists usually advo...

The Second Basel Accord was put in place to more effectively prevent bank failures. The first one imposed some rather rigid rules that wher...

Bank runs occur when depositors believe a bank is insolvent. They rush to withdraw their deposits before everyone else as funds dry up. Who ...

If you look at economic and especially fiscal policy in the US and in Europe these days, it can be characterized as hesitant. And this despi...

China has been growing at a very rapid pace, and many have studied how this has happened and why. Yet, when you look at the economy now, it ...

While we worry about the unbanked population that faces significant costs for trivial transactions, there is also a not insignificant share ...

With the Occupy X movement, discussion about the unequal distribution of income has flared up. At the same time, we are still not over the b...

Many countries have state operated banks that support local development or other objectives that deviate somewhat from those of usual for-pr...

Should banks be allowed to do business across borders? The answer is not obvious. For one, it is beneficial that they have the opportunity t...

There has been and there still is much outrage about the large bonus payments bankers get. What the public does not understand is that bonus...

You know the feeling, it is only once you lost something that you realize how much you cared about it. Nowadays that we are affected by inst...

Are financial crises costly? To answer this question, one should not look at the cost of a bailout, a drop in GDP or missing tax revenue, bu...

The recent financial crisis saw bank runs of a new kind. Instead of depositors running banks, banks were running each other. I do not think...

As everybody is well aware of, there are plenty of delinquent mortgages in the United States. It is also quite obvious that a home loses sub...

With the current financial crisis, the question of the optimality of bank deposit insurance has flared up again. Figuring out how much depos...

Various people have argued that the current crisis has been the result of a lock of regulatory oversight, that basically allowed banks to do...

One of the roles of the IMF is to make assessments of economic policies in member countries and forcing them to adopt sounder ones. The impo...

What is the role of a bank? It takes deposits and lends them to borrowers, typically on business loans or mortgages. The latter have rather ...

The Fed has done lately a few moves that were out of the ordinary lately, and has been heavily criticized for it. It seems to start acknowle...

Grameen Bank of Bangladesh, champion of micro-credit without collateral to the poor, has opened two branches in the United States, one in Ne...