During my high school years, I had been an exchange student in Yeshivah of Flatbush in Brooklyn, New York. Then a tall man in the audience stood up and asked: “Do you remember me, I was the captain of the basketball team?” Of course: he was Ed Offenbach, now a senior economist at the Bank of Israel.
Dangerous feedback effects between local banking systems and sovereigns which emerged after the start of the financial crisis also served to weaken the fiscal accounts. Where did the financing come from for the explosion of private debt? A particular aspect of the process of financial integration in Europe after the introduction of the euro was a major increase in cross-border bank activity.