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AbstractAmerican families have become less economically secure in recent decades, and this process accelerated during the 2008 financial crisis and its immediate aftermath. This study investigates how the crisis apportioned income precarity among families compared to pre-crisis years. We use the Survey of Consumer Finances and find that working families suffered the preponderance of income losses from the crisis, although the crisis shifted income losses towards more privileged working families. In fact, middle-income working families now have the same level of income precarity as the working poor, and families in the top income quintile continue to have elevated precarity levels. This result indicates that the middle class continues to bear a growing share of economic risk and that all working families are experiencing heightened insecurity in the post-crisis era.

Starting in mid-2007, the global financial crisis quickly metamorphosed from the bursting of the housing bubble in the US to the worst recession the world has witnessed for over six decades. Through an in-depth review of the crisis in terms of the causes, consequences and policy responses, this paper identifies four key messages. Firstly, contrary to widely-held perceptions during the boom years before the crisis, the paper underscores that the global economy was by no means as stable as suggested, while at the same time the majority of the world's poor had benefited insufficiently from stronger economic growth. Secondly, there were complex and interlinked factors behind the emergence of the crisis in 2007, namely loose monetary policy, global imbalances, misperception of risk and lax financial regulation. Thirdly, beyond the aggregate picture of economic collapse and rising unemployment, this paper stresses that the impact of the crisis is rather diverse, reflecting differences in initial conditions, transmission channels and vulnerabilities of economies, along with the role of government policy in mitigating the downturn. Fourthly, while the recovery phase has commenced, a number of risks remain that could derail improvements in economies and hinder efforts to ensure that the recovery is accompanied by job creation. These risks pertain in particular to the challenges of dealing with public debt and continuing global imbalances.

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to analyse the effect of financial integration on several macroeconomic variables from a global perspective.Design/methodology/approach– The authors apply a cointegrated vector autoregression model using quarterly data for 1980-2009. Analysing the interactions of globally aggregated measures capturing cross-border financial transactions, monetary liquidity, output, consumer and commodity prices, the authors focus on the dissection of short-run and long-run dynamics.Findings– The authors find that increasing financial integration has a positive impact driving GDP. The authors also find evidence of two-way causality between commodity prices and financial flows. The results suggest that commodity prices are driven by financial integration and the gap between the dynamics of commodity prices and financial flows is closed by global liquidity injected by central banks.Originality/value– The paper contributes to the empirical literature by analysing the overall impact of global financial integration and of global liquidity on global macroeconomic variables in a unified framework.