Macro developments leading up to the 2008 crisis displayed an unprecedented degree of international synchronization. Before the crisis, all G7 countries experienced credit growth and, around the time of the Lehman bankruptcy, they all faced sharp and large contractions in both real and financial activity. Using a two-country model with financial frictions, we show that a global liquidity shortage induced by pessimistic self-fulfilling expectations can quantitatively generate patterns like those observed in the data. The model also suggests that crises are less frequent with more international financial integration but, when they hit, they are larger and more synchronized across countries. (JEL E23, E32, E44, F44, G01)

Between 2007 and 2013, U.S. households experienced a large and persistent decline in net worth. The objective of this article is to study the business cycle implications of such a decline. We first develop a tractable monetary model in which households face idiosyncratic unemployment risk that they can partially self-insure using savings. A low level of liquid household wealth opens the door to self-fulfilling fluctuations: if wealth-poor households expect high unemployment, they have a strong precautionary incentive to cut spending, which can make the expectation of high unemployment a reality. Monetary policy, because of the zero lower bound, cannot rule out such expectations-driven recessions. In contrast, when wealth is sufficiently high, an aggressive monetary policy can keep the economy at full employment. Finally, we document that during the U.S. Great Recession wealth-poor households increased saving more sharply than richer households, pointing towards the importance of the precautionary channel over this period.