What is of most concern is the crisis has spread to Italy and Spain, and even the French banks have trouble funding themselves. This isn’t just the European periphery. It’s the heart of the European banking system and the whole European experiment.

Judging by the financial market's renewed unease about Italy and Spain over the past week it would seem that all that the European Central Bank's €1 trillion liquidity injection in the European banking system bought was around four months of relative market calm.

Read this with charts as a PDF 

In the months ahead, there will be a renewed intensification of the European debt crisis that could have major implications for the US economy.

A potential European banking crisis would spill over to the US financial system, which has very close links to the European banking system.

These days, billions of dollars is spoken of as pocket change. A by-product of massive government debt burdens and decades of cheap cash from central banks is the notion that, while solvency might be important, liquidity should be easy to find. Particularly for financial institutions, the official state position appears...

AEI Resident fellow Alex Pollock examines past sovereign debt crises, especially the European crisis of the 1920s, in the context of the current economic situation for a piece in the latest Financial Services Outlook and the Wall Street Journal.

Instead of placing undue reliance on all-too-fallible bank supervisors and regulators, should we not now be considering doing something serious about the perverse incentives to overly risky bank lending, as well as to the ‘too big to fail’ problem in the US and global banking systems.

The Shadow Financial Regulatory Committee (SFRC) is a group of publicly recognized independent experts on the financial services industry—including banking, insurance and securities—who meet regularly to study and critique regulatory policies affecting this sector of the economy.