ABSTRACT
The global economy in 2011 is still experiencing the consequences of the recent near meltdown in the international financial system. In September 2008 the crash of Lehman Brothers ushered in the equivalent of a nuclear winter in financial markets, producing an environment in which banks were not only reluctant to lend to their customers, but, more importantly, refused to lend to one another. Financial contagion spread from Wall Street through the global monetary system. The dislocations in financial markets produced in turn sizeable negative feedbacks to the global real economy as the emerging Great Recession started to correspond in many ways with the stark habitat produced by the Great Depression of the 1930s.
