Debt levels are rising significantly in America. More and more people are accumulating debt in the forms of mortgages, student loans, credit cards, and car loans. Basic financial principles such as saving, budgeting, investing, and paying bills are not being utilized consistently by the average individual. This is because of financial illiteracy. The vast majority of Americans do not have the basic knowledge and understanding of these financial concepts to adequately put them into practice in their daily lives. This study focuses on the levels of college students’ financial literacy, how that pertains to the rising debt crisis, and explores potential solutions to these problems.

In 2009 the sovereign debt crisis started in the European Union. Every member state was involved in the financial turmoil, in particular Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain. Why were these countries effected more so? Were they still committed to core ideas of the European Union? This paper will review this topic through the perspective of Portugal. Being a former colonial power, once having an authoritative government, and now a full-fledged member of the European Union, Portugal has a unique story to tell about the crisis at hand. This paper will evaluate different European Union principles involving gender equality, tertiary education, politics, and economics while comparing how Portugal ranks in Europeanization to the European Union specifically during the sovereign debt crisis. This paper will conclude by summarizing these topics, analyzing triumphs and setbacks, and hypothesizing Portugal's future in regard to their Europeanization of European Union standards and the current sovereign debt crisis the country faces today.

Part I examines the global rise of both public and private debt and its recent manifestations in the US housing bubble and the financial panic of 2007-8. A review of the most popular theories of the debt crisis is provided, including an explication of securitized banking and economic theory. The underlying condition of increasing ecological and energetic scarcity is accorded central significance in the broad trajectory of world growth and debt, Part II explicates systems theories of social order and the social significance of markets. The theories of Niklas Luhmann, Talcott Parsons, Mario Bunge, Anthony Giddens, and Jürgen Habermas are evaluated with respect to their theories of social order and crisis. A central finding is that, although declining rates of exergy production inhibit the global economic recovery as measured by conventional economic tools, this fact is not likely to be widely recognized. A central theme of Part II is how social systems handle uncertainty, risk, and to what extent complex social systems can be regulated normatively by the public sphere. As global society becomes increasingly interconnected and dependent upon the depletion of material and energy resources, the communication channels that facilitate the self-understanding of modern society at the same time proliferate, becoming increasingly disconnected and self-referential. Luhmann’s systems theory is used to explain why collective recognition and action is at once rendered more necessary and increasingly unlikely given the complexity of global society that Earth’s terrestrial stock of nonrenewable energy resources has engendered.

This paper focuses on stock markets, including Portugal¡BItaly¡BIreland¡BGreece and Spain, and these are named PIGS by economists. Furthermore, we add the other three countries, U.S.A.¡BU.K. and Germany in this paper for investigating the dependence structure in the stock markets between these countries during the period 2001-2011. We implement a regime-switching copula model based on Gaussian copula, which uses a GARCH specification for the marginal distributions and the Gaussian copula for the joint distribution. Our method combines copulas and regime-switching models to demonstrate dependence sructures in stock markets between these countries. Based on this paper, we have two reports for international investors. First, if the dependency changes over time, the returns of portfolio diversification may be prone to diversification disasters, and the international investors' degrees of diversification can cause higher systemic risk in the period of financial crisis. Second, the phonomenon of the asymmetric dependence exists in financial markets, and we conclude that non-diversification may be better than diversification in the period of financial crisis.

Previous research regarding the European debt crisis has mostly focused on the purely economic aspects of the crisis. However, there is a strong “Protestant-Catholic” dimension in Europe, where historically Protestant countries are more prosperous than their Catholic and Orthodox counterparts. This has especially been a fact since early 2010, when several countries within the European Union had their credit ratings downgraded. Is this phenomenon merely a coincidence? Or could the roots of the recent troubles in Europe have a basis in historic religions? To tackle this question, Max Webers ́s 110 year old study The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is brought back into light and used as a tool for analysis of the crisis. The results show that not only are Protestant countries in general more prosperous, but they also have lower corruption and their citizens have a higher level of trust towards the government. These results are in line with what Weber called the “bureaucratization” and the “rationalization” of the society from a traditional one into a rationalized one. According to Weber, the “protestant work ethic” had certain features that helped create propitious preconditions for rationalization, which were extremely benign for the rise of capitalism in the Western world. Furthermore, the results in this studies show that the historic religions have had a lasting impact on national politics within Europe and that they remain a driving force behind european culture. Historically Protestant countries are therefore in less risk of getting in debt and capitalism still have a better chance of success in these countries.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the effects of macroeconomic  indicators on the government debt of Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain (PIIGS), based on the data from 1990 to 2010 and employed a panel data model. The research finds that the macroeconomc conditions of the PIIGS are all deteriorated to some extent, and these deteriorations lead the accumulation of government debt. The expansionary fiscal policy is an important factor that accounts for the high debt ratio of the PIIGS. On the other hand, the discrepancy between the unified monetary policy and the separated fiscal policy obstructs the adjustment mechanism by the individual government, and leads the exchange rate and interest rate instruments not efficient.

[pt] Este trabalho se propõe a explicar as causas da moratória decretada pelo governo brasileiro, em 20 de fevereiro de 1987, analisando este evento através da contribuição teórica pertencente a economia política internacional. O presente trabalho conclui que as causas da moratória residiam nos planos internacional e doméstico. No plano internacional, o esquema convencional de renegociação da dívida externa dos países em desenvolvimento foi montado tendo como principal objetivo evitar uma crise no sistema financeiro internacional, por interesse e articulação dos governos dos países credores. No plano doméstico, o governo Sarney, especialmente durante a gestão de Dilson Funaro, Ministro da Fazenda, não aceitava os custos da solução imposta pelos credores; em especial, o sacrifício das metas de crescimento econômico. A rigidez do esquema convencional não ofereceu outra alternativa à posição brasileira senão a decretação da moratória. O realismo é a corrente da economia política internacional que mais pode contribuir para a explicação do evento enfocado; contudo, a premissa do ator unitário deve ser posta de lado em virtude da importância da política doméstica para a decretacão da moratória. / [en] This work aims at explaining the causes of the Brazilian default, decrelared on February 20 th 1987, analyzing it through the existing theoretical contribution in the field of international political economy. This work concludes that the causes of default lay in both international and domestic areas. Considering the international area, the conventional framework for external debt restructuring of developing countries was devised by creditor countries, in their behalf, to avoid an international financial crisis. Contemplating the domestic area, the Sarneys administration did not agree to bear the costs of the solution imposed bycreditors, especially during the time Dilson Funaro was a minister. Dilson stood up for Brazils economic growth, which would have to be reduced if the creditors solution were carried out. Default was the only alternative in face of creditors intransigence. Realism is the perspective in international political economy that explains better the focused outcome. However, the rational unified actors premise must be put aside in order to consider properly the importance of domestic politics.

The main goal of this paper is to provide complete view about financial crises. Paper is di-vided into the six chapters whereas we explore the definition of crises, than history, causes, indicators and anti-crisis precautions. In last chapter we apply all theoretical observations to case study of Nordic banking crises from the beginning of the 90s in last century. We can't expect the crises to vanish completely because they are natural part of both finan-cial system and whole economy but for which they are extremely dangerous too and that's why the crisis, when it breaks out, must be at every moment managed and under control.

This work analyses fiscal sustainability and position of old and new members of EU and offers some fiscal policy implications to deal with debt reduction in the aftermath of the current fiscal crisis in the EU. Fiscal policy of Old European countries is different from fiscal policy of the new members. Due to different historical development New European members have lower debt and lower GDP per capita. Many policymakers in New Europe tried to increase GDP of their countries by generating government deficits. On the other hand Old European countries are already having large debts and current fiscal crisis is one result of this fact. The recent fiscal crisis in Europe raised the question what is sustainable fiscal policy and how to achieve it. Sustainability of the policy can be divided into three groups: short term, medium term, and long term. In short term, fiscal policy is sustainable, when government is able to issue and sell government bonds. Otherwise it defaults. In medium term, fiscal policy is sustainable when debt to GDP ratio is constant or decreasing. Situation in long term is very similar to situation in medium term. The difference is in time. Long term fiscal policy is sustainable if debt to GDP ratio converges to some finite number. All the definitions are problematic and problem arises basically from fact that variables that are part of the definitions are volatile. Fiscal policy that might seem to be sustainable in times of economic expansion may become unsustainable even in short time. Exactly this thing happened in Ireland. Ireland shows another problem of sustainability definitions. The problem is that private debt can increase public debt and even threaten its sustainability. Many countries were saving their financial sector which was very expensive and this practice is increased the debt in those countries very fast. Probably the most important indicator of fiscal sustainability is interest rate on government bonds. Reason is that price of the bonds is based on different risks that are in the assets. Countries with sustainable fiscal policy are paying lower interests than countries with unsustainable. This is reason why we tried to explain variation of interest rate on 10 years government bonds by empirical models. Two models were based on fixed effects panel data estimations and one model was based on ordinary least squares model. The panel data model showed that there was and still is huge difference between Old European and New European countries. Old Europe was viewed by markets as one segment which is relatively risk free. This lead to situation, that most important factor driving interest rates in Old Europe is the risk free rate on the German bonds. On the other hand, interest rates in New European countries are influenced by many more indicators. Most important indicator in New Europe is GDP growth and sustainability of foreign exchange reserves. Based on results of the model we came to conclusion that there is high chance that markets will start to differ among Old European countries and this could lead to increase of interest rates in some Old EU members, a conclusion which is to some degree being verified by the increased spreads between German government bonds on one hand, and Italian and Spanish bonds on the other hand in the first few weeks of August 2011. Our conclusions also suggest that the position of New Europe may stand similar in current situation. If it is true policymakers may try to adapt policy of New European countries to increase its sustainability and improve the key variables. The conclusions from this work bring several policy recommendations for improving the fiscal sustainability in Europe. First and probably the most important recommendation to fiscal policy is that policymakers should not underestimate the indicators of fiscal sustainability, which was a common practice in recent history. Countries with high GDP growth were generating large deficits and debt to GDP ratio was constant. Problem is that in recession indicators that were influencing interest rate changed and fiscal policy become unsustainable in many cases. Conclusion for fiscal policy is that policymakers should run responsible fiscal policy in good times to avoid troubles in bad times. Governments should also understand full price of deficits, because increased deficits also increase interest rate that governments have to pay on existing debt.

This master thesis deals with the impact of the debt crisis on the financial system in Germany. The aim is to prepare an analysis of the impact of the debt crisis on the stability of German financial system, assess individual consequences in the comparison with other world economies and give a prediction of possible future developments in the banking and capital market in Germany. The first chapter defines the financial system in general and describes the theory of the individual components within the financial system. The second chapter focuses on a specific definition of the financial system in Germany and analyzes in detail the various financial markets from a historical perspective. In the third chapter there is an analysis of the development of debt and banking crisis in Germany. The last chapter deals with clearing payment system TARGET2, describes the impacts of the debt crisis, evaluate current state of the German financial system and predicts the future development as well.