The aim of this paper is twofold. On the one hand to explain the institutional, economic and political foundations of the Portuguese bailout in April 2011. On the other hand, to clarify the impact of the global financial crisis (GFC) in Portuguese public finances, and the interaction between domestic fiscal policy and monitoring and recommendations from the European Commission (EC) and the European Council (ECo). A long run perspective (1974-2011) on management of public finances shows that Portugal has some institutional and constitutional problems that should be sorted out in order to achieve sound public finances. Moreover, in the second half of the 90s fiscal policy was expansionary and the high conversion rate of the former currency (escudo) to the euro still hampers economic growth and competitiveness. With weak growth in the first decade of XXI century and persistent public and external deficits, Portugal came to the frontline of the negative impacts of the GFC. The total absence of political cooperation and the existence of some minority governments only made things worst. We conclude, with a brief overview of the bailout, its prospects of success, and some structural institutional measures that should be taken.

A Work Project, presented as part of the requirements for the Award of a Masters Degree in Economics from the NOVA – School of Business and Economics; The bailout of the American Auto Industry is considered the largest government intervention in industrial America since the Second World War. Almost 80 billion dollars were injected in an industry that in 2007 represented 1 million manufacturing jobs, and 3.7% of the American GDP. This work project intends to study the impact of such an occurrence in other economic Sectors of the American Economy, by looking at how the Share Price Returns of the major American firms react to the Auto Bailout Events. Some Sectors seem more tightly connected to the Auto Industry than others. The perception of the Bailout Events is also different according to the Sector and to the spectrum of time considered.

This paper studies the credit market implications and real effects of one the largest borrower bailout programs in history, enacted by the government of India against the backdrop of the 2008-2009 financial crisis. The study finds that the stimulus program had no effect on productivity, wages, or consumption, but led to significant changes in credit allocation and an increase in defaults. Post-program loan performance declines faster in districts with greater exposure to the program, an effect that is not driven by greater risk-taking of banks. Loan defaults become significantly more sensitive to the electoral cycle after the program, suggesting the anticipation of future credit market interventions as an important channel through which moral hazard in loan repayment is intensified.

Both the academic literature and the policy debate on systematic bailout guarantees and Government subsidies have ignored an important effect: in industries where firms may go out of business due to idiosyncratic shocks, Governments may increase the likelihood of (tacit) coordination if they set up schemes that rescue failing firms. In a repeated-game setting, we show that a systematic bailout regime increases the expected profits from coordination and simultaneously raises the probability that competitors will remain in business and will thus be able to “punish” firms that deviate from coordinated behaviour. These effects make tacit coordination easier to sustain and have a detrimental impact on welfare. While the key insight holds across any industry, we study this question with an application to the banking sector, in light of the recent financial crisis and the extensive use of bailout schemes.; Published Online: 2014-12-02

Approved for public release, distribution unlimited; This thesis seeks to explain why the U.S. government came to the assistance of the Mexican and Brazilian governments in 1995 and 1998 respectively, but refused to do so during Argentina's economic crisis in 2001. At first glance, all three countries appeared to be attractive candidates for U.S. assistance - they had simiarly enacted U.S.-backed neoliberal reformist agendas prior to their crises. The study argues that the decision by the U.S. government and the International Monetary Fund to issue a bailout to a country enduring an economic crisis is a carefully considered policy choice that results from a combination of that country's geopolitical significance, as well as the ability of U.S. policymakers to learn and apply lessons from past policy experiences.; US Navy (USN) author.

Published online : 26 January 2015; European Union's ‘social constitution’ and bailout measures – Are the bailout measures EU law? – Do the bailout measures create legal obligations? – Legal nature of Memoranda of Understanding – Avenues for challenge – Call for recognition of the EU law nature of bailouts and the costs of such non-recognition

Did the U.S. government's intervention in the Chrysler reorganization overturn bankruptcy law? Critics argue that the government-sponsored reorganization impermissibly elevated claims of the auto union over those of Chrysler's other creditors. If the critics are correct, businesses might suffer an increase in their cost of debt because creditors will perceive a new risk, that organized labor might leap-frog them in bankruptcy. This paper examines the financial market where this effect would be most detectible, the market for bonds of highly unionized companies. The authors find no evidence of a negative reaction to the Chrysler bailout by bondholders of unionized firms. They thus reject the notion that investors perceived a distortion of bankruptcy priorities. To the contrary, bondholders of unionized firms reacted positively to the Chrysler bailout. This evidence suggests that bondholders interpreted the Chrysler bailout as a signal that the government will stand behind unionized firms. The results are consistent with the notion that too-big-to-fail government policies generate moral hazard in the credit markets.

This paper studies the impact of a large debt relief program, intended to attenuate investment constraints among highly-indebted households in rural India. It isolates the causal effect of bankruptcy-like debt relief settlements using a natural experiment arising from India's Debt Relief Program for Small and Marginal Farmers -- one of the largest debt relief initiatives in history. The analysis shows that debt relief has a persistent effect on the level of household debt, but does not increase investment and productivity as predicted by theories of debt overhang. Instead, the anticipation of future credit constraints leads to a greater reliance on informal financing, lower investment and a decline in productivity among bailout recipients. The results suggest that one-time settlements may be insufficient to incentivize new investment, but can have significant real effects through their impact on borrower expectations.

Russia had more-or-less completed the privatization of its manufacturing and natural resource sectors by the end of 1997. And in February 1998, the annual inflation rate at last dipped into the single digits. Privatization should have helped with stronger micro-foundations for growth. The conquest of inflation should have cemented macroeconomic credibility, lowered real interest rates, and spurred investment. Instead, Russia suffered a massive public debt-exchange rate-banking crisis just six months later, in August 1998. In showing how this turn of events unfolded, the authors focus on the interaction among Russia's deteriorating fiscal fundamentals, its weak micro-foundations of growth and financial globalization. They argue that the expectation of a large official bailout in the final 10 weeks before the meltdown played an important role, with Russia's external debt increasing by $16 billion or 8 percent of post-crisis gross domestic product during this time. The lessons and insights extracted from the 1998 Russian crisis are of general applicability...

At the end of 2011, the Indian power sector found itself in financial crisis, just a decade after the 2001 bailout of state electricity boards (SEBs) by the central government. Bankrupt state power distribution utilities in several states were unable to pay their bills or repay their debts. Despite the passage of the landmark 2003 Electricity Act and implementation of a broad set of reforms over the past decade, the sector today is looking at another rescue from the center, four times larger than before. This financial rescue scheme amounts to about Rs 1.9 trillion ($42 billion) and was instigated by the nonperforming assets of the banks and other financial institutions. The Electricity Act was envisaged to create independent companies functioning on commercial principles, but they are still far away from that goal. This report presents a diagnostic of the financial and operational performance of segments in the power sector value chain between adoption of the Electricity Act, 2003, and 2011, including analysis of the factors that contributed to the recent crisis. The report focuses on efficiency and productivity...

peer-reviewed; When extending the bailout facility availed of by Ireland , the IMF, ECB and Commission of the EU (“the troika”) insisted that a number of measures be taken in respect of the Irish economy. While many of these related to reducing the costs of the public sector and the reduction of the country’s social welfare costs, some related directly to Irish competition law.; ACCEPTED; peer reviewed

This paper explains the causes leading to the Mexican crisis of 1994-1995 (known as "The Tequila Crisis"), and its short- and long-term consequences. It argues that excessive enthusiasm on the part of foreign investors, not based on Mexico's fundamentals, and weak regulation of the banking system built the vulnerabilities that left Mexico exposed to a sudden change in investor appetite for Mexican securities in 1994. Political violence in Mexico and changes in monetary policy in the United States then led to radical changes in investor perceptions of the future of the country and to a balance of payments and banking crisis. The paper then explains how the crisis unraveled and describes the US bailout of the Mexican government in 1995. Since the exchange rate crisis of December of 1994 then translated into a banking crisis in 1995, the chapter ends examining the subsequent development of the Mexican banking system.

We study the dynamics of inertial particles in two dimensional incompressible flows. The particle dynamics is modelled by four dimensional dissipative bailout embedding maps of the base flow which is represented by 2-d area preserving maps. The phase diagram of the embedded map is rich and interesting both in the aerosol regime, where the density of the particle is larger than that of the base flow, as well as the bubble regime, where the particle density is less than that of the base flow. The embedding map shows three types of dynamic behaviour, periodic orbits, chaotic structures and mixed regions. Thus, the embedding map can target periodic orbits as well as chaotic structures in both the aerosol and bubble regimes at certain values of the dissipation parameter. The bifurcation diagram of the 4-d map is useful for the identification of regimes where such structures can be found. An attractor merging and widening crisis is seen for a special region for the aerosols. At the crisis, two period-10 attractors merge and widen simultaneously into a single chaotic attractor. Crisis induced intermittency is seen at some points in the phase diagram. The characteristic times before bursts at the crisis show power law behaviour as functions of the dissipation parameter. Although the bifurcation diagram for the bubbles looks similar to that of aerosols...

We present a novel technique, which we term bailout embedding, that can be used to target orbits having particular properties out of all orbits in a flow or map. We explicitly construct a bailout embedding for Hamiltonian systems so as to target KAM orbits. We show how the bailout dynamics is able to lock onto extremely small KAM islands in an ergodic sea.; Comment: 3 figures, 9 subpanels

We use the bailout embeddings of three-dimensional volume-preserving maps to study qualitatively the dy- namics of small spherical neutrally buoyant impurities suspended in a time-periodic incompressible fluid flow. The accumulation of impurities in tubular vortical structures, the detachment of particles from fluid trajectories near hyperbolic invariant lines, and the formation of nontrivial three-dimensional structures in the distribution of particles are predicted.; Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures

The events of the last few years revealed an acute need for tools to systematically model and analyze large financial networks. Many applications of such tools include the forecasting of systemic failures and analyzing probable effects of economic policy decisions. We consider optimizing the amount and structure of a bailout in a borrower-lender network: Given a fixed amount of cash to be injected into the system, how should it be distributed among the nodes in order to achieve the smallest overall amount of unpaid liabilities or the smallest number of nodes in default? We develop an exact algorithm for the problem of minimizing the amount of unpaid liabilities, by showing that it is equivalent to a linear program. For the problem of minimizing the number of defaults, we develop an approximate algorithm using a reweighted l1 minimization approach. We illustrate this algorithm using an example with synthetic data for which the optimal solution can be calculated exactly, and show through numerical simulation that the solutions calculated by our algorithm are close to optimal.

7 pages, 6 figures.-- PACS nr.: 05.45.Gg.; We establish and investigate the conceptual connection between the dynamics of the bailout embedding of a Hamiltonian system and the dynamical regimes associated with the occurrence of bubbling and blowout bifurcations. The roles of the invariant manifold and the dynamics restricted to it, required in bubbling and blowout bifurcating systems, are played in the bailout embedding by the embedded Hamiltonian dynamical system. The Hamiltonian nature of the dynamics is precisely the distinctive feature of this instance of a bubbling or blowout bifurcation. The detachment of the embedding trajectories from the original ones can thus be thought of as transient on-off intermittency, and noise-induced avoidance of some regions of the embedded phase space can be recognized as Hamiltonian bubbling.; J.H.E.C. acknowledges the financial support of the Spanish CSIC, Plan Nacional del Espacio Contract No. PNE-007/2000-C, M.O.M. acknowledges the support of the Meyer Foundation, and O.P. and I.T. acknowledge the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnologia, Proyecto CONOCE, Contract No. BFM2000-1108 and Proyecto IMAGEN, Contract No. REN2001-0802-C02-01.; Peer reviewed

14 pages, 5 figures.-- Full-text version available Open Access at: http://www.ifisc.uib.es/publications/downfile.php?fid=3206; We review the concept of bailout embedding; a general process for obtaining order from chaotic dynamics by embedding the system within another larger one. Such an embedding can target islands of order and hence control chaos. Moreover, a small amount of noise enhances this process.; JHEC acknowledges the financial support of the Spanish CSIC, Plan Nacional del Espacio contract ESP98-1347. MOM acknowledges the support of the Meyer Foundation. OP and IT acknowledge the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnologia, Proyecto CONOCE, contract BFM2000-1108.; Peer reviewed

4 pages, 3 figures.-- PACS number(s): 05.45.Gg; We introduce a technique, which we term bailout embedding, that can be used to target orbits having particular properties out of all orbits in a flow or map. We explicitly construct a bailout embedding for Hamiltonian systems so as to target invariant tori. We show how the bailout dynamics are able to lock onto extremely small regular islands in a chaotic sea.; J.H.E.C. acknowledges the financial support of the Spanish CSIC, Plan Nacional del Espacio Contract No. ESP98-1347. M.O.M. acknowledges the support of the Meyer Foundation. O.P. acknowledges the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnologia, Proyecto CONOCE, Contract No. BFM2000-1108.; Peer reviewed

In 2008 politicians in the UK and the U.S. put in place massive bailout programs worth billions of dollars to save their ailing financial institutions. Six years on, U.S. taxpayers have made nearly $10 billion on their bailout investment, while those in the UK have lost around $14 billion. Pepper D. Culpepper writes that this difference is down to a combination of regulatory power and policy design. Regulators in the U.S. were able to require even those banks that were financially fit to accept money in exchange for stock because those banks earned the majority of their revenue locally. UK regulators on the other hand, were constrained by the vast market power of HSBC, which has only 20 percent of its business in the country, meaning that the bank was able to reject proposals that it take public money.