Mortgage markets arguably spawned the post-Lehman crises – think subprime, Ireland, and Spain. This column argues that asymmetric information between competing lenders is an important feature in the financing of newly developed homes. Interestingly, lenders differ significantly in their information about true underlying housing collateral values. It is the identification of asymmetric information that allows policymakers to develop proposals that would improve how the market works and, with the right policies, how governments can limit the negative impact of asymmetry.

Did the Federal Reserve act as ‘lender of last resort’ during the worst of the crisis? This column contributes to the current debate on the appropriateness and effectiveness of non-standard measures that have been taken by the Fed. Quantitatively measuring the effect of the Term Auction Facility on participating banks’ liquidity risk, it seems that, because the Term Auction Facility programme provided banks with enough time to adjust exposures on their balance sheets, the Fed did act as ‘lender of last resort’.

In the years leading up to the global crisis, the US focused on subsidising home ownership, whereas Germany placed much more emphasis on education and vocational training. While it is easy to think that this explains the subsequent performance of the two economies, this column provides some much needed economic analysis.

As financial markets take another turn, this column explores lessons from the global crisis of 2007-2009 and discusses the source and determinants of contagion. It argues that real and financial linkages to the US or the global economy played a relatively minor role. Instead the crisis was a “wake-up call” to investors to pay more attention to countries’ policies and fundamentals.

Did anti-regulation lobbying fuel the subprime crisis? This column shows that there is a strong relationship between financial industry lobbying and favourable financial regulation legislation. It argues that the financial industry fought, and defeated, measures that might have curbed some of the reckless lending practices that many think played a pivotal role in igniting the crisis.

Several academics, policymakers, and regulators emphasise the role of foreclosures in the Great Recession and subsequent global crisis. This column provides one of the first attempts to show this empirically. Using micro-level data from all US states, it shows that foreclosures had a significant negative effect on house prices, residential investment, durable consumption – and consequently the real economy.

Vox takes its annual break between 25 December 2010 and 2 January 2011. This column documents the coevolution of VoxEU and the global economic crisis since June 2007. It also highlights a few columns that readers should read (or re-read) in preparation for the Eurozone’s next crisis.

Autumn 2008 was calamitous for global equities. This column presents data on stock returns from over 17,000 firms in 44 countries suggesting that the decline in share prices was associated with three separate and identifiable “shock factors”: the fall in global demand, the contraction of credit supply, and the selling pressure on equity as investors were forced to unload some of their holdings.

CEPR Policy Insight No.52 highlights how the 2005 bankruptcy changes created a negative externality for all intermediaries in liquidity runs, the leading cause of shock propagation in the credit crisis

How did the bank-funding system get so fragile to mletdown and lead to the worst crisis since WWII? In a new CEPR Policy Insight, Enrico Perotti argues that an important part of the answer lies in the bankruptcy privileges granted in 2005 to overnight secured credit and derivatives by the US authorities. These privileges made such lending safe for the lenders and thus cheap for the borrowers. The result was fantastic growth in this market to the detriment of stability.