The 2007-2010 economic crisis has profoundly shaken the foundations of mainstream financial economics. The apparent falsification of core concepts such as risk diversification, informational efficiency and valuation efficiency by an unexpected course of events has revealed the need to redefine the objectives and direction of research today. In a context where global public opinion has begun to doubt the merits of a deregulated economy, a conceptual void has been opened up, thereby rendering more complex the elaboration of appropriate policy responses. This book illustrates new paths in economic research by examining the crisis from perspectives which fall outside the conventional theoretical paradigm and which, by virtue of their non-conformity, are in a position to provide a refreshed gaze on former ways of thinking.

"There is still no consensus on who or what caused the financial crisis which engulfed the world, beginning in the summer of 2007. A huge number of suspects have been identified, from greedy investment bankers, through feckless borrowers, dilatory regulators and myopic central bankers to violent video games and high levels of testosterone among the denizens of trading floors. There is not even agreement on whether the crisis shows a need for more government intervention in markets, or less: some maintain that government encouragement of home ownership lay at the heart of the problem in the US, in particular. In The Financial Crisis Howard Davies charts a course through these arguments, and the evidence advanced for each of them. The reader can thereby assess the weight to be attached to each, and the likely effectiveness of the remedies under development."--Description viewed from website on 21 Sept. 2010.

Canada's social, economic, political, and environmental impacts on the Western Hemisphere have been largely overlooked by historians and other social scientists. Most narratives of the relationships between North America and the emerging markets of the south disproportionately focus on the United States. By downplaying Canada's role, these narratives have fallen short in reconstructing the history of the region. Opportunism and Goodwill fills in these historical gaps, looking at the dynamics of the relationship between Canada and Colombia as they were spearheaded by Canada's private sector. Stefano Tijerina argues that since the first era of globalization during the second half of the nineteenth century, Canada's private sector has carved out niche markets across Latin America, sometimes working independently and in other instances working on behalf of foreign interests. In his historical analysis of these temporal and spatial dimensions, Tijerina shows that the long-term economic development of Canada and Colombia was intertwined and interdependent, ultimately stressing the importance of transnational approaches to the study of history. Contributing to questions about Canada's "goodwill" and other benevolent constructs, Opportunism and Goodwill sets the historical foundation for current debates about Canadian industries across the world.

Former Prime Minister and the country's longest-serving Chancellor, Gordon Brown has been a guiding force for Britain and the world over three decades. This is his candid, poignant and deeply relevant story. In describing his upbringing in Scotland as the son of a minister, the near loss of his eyesight as a student and the death of his daughter within days of her birth, he shares the passionately-held principles that have shaped and driven him, reminding us that politics can and should be a calling to serve. Reflecting on the personal and ideological tensions within Labour and its successes and failures in power, he describes how to meet the challenge of pursuing a radical agenda within a credible party of government. He explains how as Chancellor he equipped Britain for a globalised economy while swimming against the neoliberal tide and shows what more must be done to halt rising inequality. In his behind-the-scenes account of the financial crisis and his leading role in saving the world economy from collapse, he addresses the question of who was to blame for the crash and why its causes and consequences still beset us. From the invasion of Iraq to the tragedy of Afghanistan, from the coalition negotiations of 2010 to the referendums on Scottish independence and Europe, Gordon Brown draws on his unique experiences to explain Britain's current fractured condition. And by showing us what progressive politics has achieved in recent decades, he inspires us with a vision of what it might yet achieve today. Riveting, expert and highly personal, this historic memoir is an invaluable insight into our times.

In 1914, the Ford Motor Company opened its Motion Picture Laboratory, an in-house operation that produced motion pictures to educate its workforce and promote its products. Just six years later, Ford films had found their way into schools and newsreels, travelogues, and even feature films in theaters across the country. It is estimated that by 1961, the company's movies had captured an audience of sixty-four million people. This study of Ford's corporate film program traces its growth and rise in prominence in corporate America. Drawing on nearly three hundred hours of material produced between 1914 and 1954, Timothy Johnson chronicles the history of Ford's filmmaking campaign and analyzes selected films, visual and narrative techniques, and genres. He shows how what began as a narrow educational initiative grew into a global marketing strategy that presented a vision not just of Ford or corporate culture but of American life more broadly. In these films, Johnson uncovers a powerful rhetoric that Ford used to influence American labor, corporate style, production practices, road building, suburbanization, and consumer culture. The company's early and continued success led other corporations to adopt similar programs. Persuasive and thoroughly researched, Rhetoric, Inc. documents the role that imagery and messaging played in the formation of the modern American corporation and provides a glimpse into the cultural turn to the economy as a source of entertainment, value, and meaning.

Since the end of the Cold War, the world has been shaken to its core three times. 11 September 2001, the financial collapse of 2008 and - most of all - Covid-19. Each was an asymmetric threat, set in motion by something seemingly small, and different from anything the world had experienced before. Lenin is supposed to have said, 'There are decades when nothing happens and weeks when decades happen.' This is one of those times when history has sped up. In this urgent and timely book, Fareed Zakaria, one of the 'top ten global thinkers of the last decade' (Foreign Policy), foresees the nature of a post-pandemic world: the political, social, technological and economic consequences that may take years to unfold. In ten surprising, hopeful 'lessons', he writes about the acceleration of natural and biological risks, the obsolescence of the old political categories of right and left, the rise of 'digital life', the future of globalization and an emerging world order split between the United States and China. He invites us to think about how we are truly social animals with community embedded in our nature, and, above all, the degree to which nothing is written - the future is truly in our own hands. Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World speaks to past, present and future, and will become an enduring reflection on life in the early twenty-first century.

John Lanchester's Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay is the unbelievable true story of the economic crisis. We are, to use a technical economic term, screwed. The cowboy capitalists had a party with everyone's money and now we're all paying for it. What went wrong? And will we learn our lesson - or just carry on as before, like celebrating surviving a heart attack with a packet of Rothmans? John Lanchester travels with a cast of characters - including reckless banksters, snoozing regulators, complacent politicians, predatory lenders, credit-drunk spendthrifts, and innocent bystanders to understand deeply and genuinely what is happening and why we feel the way we do. 'Devastatingly funny ... the route map to the crazed world of contemporary finance we have all been waiting for' Will Self 'Bang on the money' Independent 'Explains the crisis in a way that actually sticks ... to my amazement, I finally grasp it' Janice Turner, The Times 'Endlessly witty ... will turn any reader into an expert within the space of 200 pages' Jonathan Coe 'Terrific ... there is no better guide to the crazy world of high finance' GQ John Lanchester is a journalist, novelist and winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award. His fiction includes Mr Philips, The Debt to Pleasure and Capital. He is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books and the New Yorker, with a monthly column in Esquire.

The Global Financial Stability Report provides an assessment of the global financial system and markets, and addresses emerging market financing in a global context. It focuses on current market conditions, highlighting systemic issues that could pose a risk to financial stability and sustained market access by emerging market borrowers. The Report draws out the financial ramifications of economic imbalances highlighted by the IMF's World Economic Outlook. It contains, as special features, analytical chapters or essays on structural or systemic issues relevant to international financial stability.

During the Great Depression, young radicals centered in New York City developed a vision of and for America, molded by their understanding of recent historical events, in particular the Great War and the global economic collapse, as well as by the events unfolding both at home and abroad. They worked to make their vision of a free, equal, democratic society based on peaceful coexistence a reality. Their attempts were ultimately unsuccessful but their voices were heard on a number of important issues, including free speech, racial justice, and peace. A major contribution to the historiography of the era of the Great Depression, Fighting Authoritarianism provides a new and important examination of U.S. youth activism of the 1930s, including the limits of the New Deal and how youth activists continually pushed FDR, Eleanor Roosevelt, and other New Dealers to do more to address economic distress, more inclusionary politics, and social inequality. In this study, author Britt Haas questions the interventionist versus isolationist paradigm in that young people sought to focus on both domestic and international affairs. Haas also explores the era not as a precursor to WWII, but as a moment of hope when the prospect of institutionalizing progress in freedom, equality, and democracy seemed possible. Fighting Authoritarianism corrects misconceptions about these young activists' vision for their country, heavily influenced by the American Dream they had been brought up to revere: they wanted a truly free, truly democratic, and truly equal society. That meant embracing radical ideologies, especially socialism and communism, which were widely discussed, debated, and promoted on New York City college campuses. They believed that in embracing these ideologies, they were not turning their backs on American values. Instead, they believed that such ideologies were the only way to make America live up to its promises. This study also outlines the careers of Molly Yard, Joseph Lash, and James Wechsler, how they retracted (and for Yard and Lash, reclaimed) their radical past, and how New York continued to hold a prominent platform in their careers. Lash and Wechsler both worked for the New York Post, the latter as editor until 1980. Examining the Depression decade from the perspective of young activists highlights the promise of America as young people understood it: a historic moment when anything seemed possible.

Two Crises, Different Outcomes examines East Asian policy reactions to the two major crises of the last fifteen years: the global financial crisis of 2008 9 and the Asian financial crisis of 1997 98. The calamity of the late 1990s saw a massive meltdown concentrated in East Asia. In stark contrast, East Asia avoided the worst effects of the Lehman Brothers collapse, incurring relatively little damage when compared to the financial devastation unleashed on North America and Europe. Much had changed across the intervening decade, not least that China rather than Japan had become the locomotive of regional growth, and that the East Asian economies had taken numerous steps to buffer their financial structures and regulatory regimes. This time, Asia avoided disaster; it bounced back quickly after the initial hit and has been growing in a resilient fashion ever since.

The authors of this book explain how the earlier financial crisis affected Asian economies, why government reactions differed so widely during that crisis, and how Asian economies weathered the Great Recession. Drawing on a mixture of single-country expertise and comparative analysis, they conclude by assessing the long-term prospects that Asian countries will continue their recent success.

Contributors: Muhamad Chatib Basri, Minister of Finance of the Republic of Indonesia and Professor of Economics at the University of Indonesia; Yun-han Chu, Institute of Political Science, Academia Sinica; Richard Doner, Emory University; Barry Naughton, University of California, San Diego; Yasunobu Okabe, Japan International Cooperation Agency Research Institute; T. J. Pempel, University of California, Berkeley; Tom Pepinsky, Cornell University; Keiichi Tsunekawa, National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, Tokyo"

Financialization is one of the most innovative concepts to emerge in the field of political economy in the last three decades, although there is no agreement on what exactly it is. Profiting Without Producing defines financialization in terms of the fundamental conduct of non-financial enterprises, banks and households. Its most prominent feature is the rise of financial profit, in part extracted directly from households through financial expropriation. Financialized capitalism is prone to crises, none greater than the gigantic turmoil that began in 2007. Using abundant empirical data, the book establishes the causes of the crisis and discusses the options broadly available for controlling finance.

We have just experienced the worst financial crash the world has seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s. While real economies in general did not crash as they did in the 1930s, the financial parts of the economy certainly did, or, at least, came very close to doing so. Hundreds of banks in the United States and Europe have been closed by their supervisory authorities, forcibly merged with stronger partners, nationalized or recapitalized with the tax payers' money. Banks and insurance companies had, by mid 2010, already written off some 2000 billion dollars in credit write-downs on loans and securities. In this book, Johan Lybeck draws on his experience as both an academic economist and a professional banker to present a detailed yet non-technical analysis of the crash. He describes how the crisis began in early 2007, explains why it happened and shows how it compares to earlier financial crises.

The deflation of the subprime mortgage bubble in 2006-7 is widely agreed to have been the immediate cause of the collapse of the financial sector in 2008. Consequently, one might think that uncovering the origins of subprime lending would make the root causes of the crisis obvious. That is essentially where public debate about the causes of the crisis began-and ended-in the month following the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers and the 502-point fall in the Dow Jones Industrial Average in mid-September 2008. However, the subprime housing bubble is just one piece of the puzzle. Asset bubbles inflate and burst frequently, but severe worldwide recessions are rare. What was different this time? In What Caused the Financial Crisis leading economists and scholars delve into the major causes of the worst financial collapse since the Great Depression and, together, present a comprehensive picture of the factors that led to it. One essay examines the role of government regulation in expanding home ownership through mortgage subsidies for impoverished borrowers, encouraging the subprime housing bubble. Another explores how banks were able to securitize mortgages by manipulating criteria used for bond ratings. How this led to inaccurate risk assessments that could not be covered by sufficient capital reserves mandated under the Basel accords is made clear in a third essay. Other essays identify monetary policy in the United States and Europe, corporate pay structures, credit-default swaps, banks' leverage, and financial deregulation as possible causes of the crisis. With contributions from Richard A. Posner, Vernon L. Smith, Joseph E. Stiglitz, and John B. Taylor, among others, What Caused the Financial Crisis provides a cogent, comprehensive, and credible explanation of why the crisis happened. It will be an essential resource for scholars and students of finance, economics, history, law, political science, and sociology, as well as others interested in the financial crisis and the nature of modern capitalism and regulation.

Listen to a short interview with Philip T. Hoffman Host: Chris Gondek - Producer: Heron & Crane

Financial disasters often have long-range institutional consequences. When financial institutions--banks, insurance companies, brokerage firms, stock exchanges--collapse, new ones take their place, and these changes shape markets for decades or even generations. "Surviving Large Losses" explains why such financial crises occur, why their effects last so long, and what political and economic conditions can help countries both rich and poor survive--and even prosper--in the aftermath. Looking at past and more recent financial disasters through the lens of political economy, the authors identify three factors critical to the development of financial institutions: the level of government debt, the size of the middle class, and the quality of information that is available to participants in financial transactions. They seek to find out when these factors promote financial development and mitigate the effects of financial crises and when they exacerbate them. Although there is no panacea for crises--no one set of institutions that will resolve them--it is possible, the authors argue, to strengthen existing financial institutions, to encourage economic growth, and to limit the harm that future catastrophes can do.

Early in 2007 Leigh Skene warned of the danger of a meltdown in global markets. Now, while governments spend furiously to rescue the global economy, he again challenges received wisdom. In The Impoverishment of Nations, he prescribes a different solution, outlining a plan to deal with a very different economic future, following the financial crisis that ended the longest period of prosperity for some five hundred years.
We have entered a period of uncertainty, which has placed a huge burden on public finances. Governments have spent $10 trillion on bailing out financial institutions and other firms, including General Motors. We are at a tipping point and the future will be unlike the past - one of the most dangerous economic stages any generation can face.
In his penetrating analysis, Leigh Skene traces how we got here and what has to happen for the global economy to recover the ground it has lost in less than two years. He looks at the shift of economic power to emerging nations, the inevitability of deflation, the unfitness for purpose of the financial markets, how governments' share of output must shrink, how solvency not liquidity caused the current crisis, and how it is wrong to think you can borrow your way to growth.

Taking a closer look at the industrialized world, this revealing study claims that Canada is in the midst of an economic crisis of global proportions--and that Nobel Prize-winning economists failed to see it coming. This accessible survey tackles the roots of this monetary disaster with a collection of in-depth essays, showing how the global capitalist economy--dependent on hyper-extended credit, fueled by systematic deregulation, and rooted in the contradictions of a mad drive for unlimited profitability--must inevitably end up in such a predicament. From recession to depression and market adjustment to billion-dollar stimulus plans, this reference also proves that there are ways out of this economic conundrum that do not involve saving those responsible.

In his exceedingly timely and innovative look at the ramifications of the collapse of the U.S. housing market, Herman M. Schwartz makes the case that worldwide, U.S. growth and power over the last twenty years has depended in large part on domestic housing markets. Mortgage-based securities attracted a cascade of overseas capital into the U.S. economy. High levels of private home ownership, particularly in the United States and the United Kingdom, have helped pull in a disproportionately large share of world capital flows.

As events since mid-2008 have made clear, mortgage lenders became ever more eager to extend housing loans, for the more mortgage packages they securitized, the higher their profits. As a result, they were dangerously inventive in creating new mortgage products, notably adjustable-rate and subprime mortgages, to attract new, mainly first-time, buyers into the housing market. However, mortgage-based instruments work only when confidence in the mortgage system is maintained. Regulatory failures in the American S&L sector, the accounting crisis that led to the extinction of Arthur Andersen, and the subprime crisis that destroyed Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch and damaged many other big financial institutions have jeopardized a significant engine of economic growth.

Schwartz concentrates on the impact of U.S. regulatory failure on the international economy. He argues that the "local" problem of the housing crisis carries substantial and ongoing risks for U.S. economic health, the continuing primacy of the U.S. dollar in international financial circles, and U.S. hegemony in the world system.

The crisis of global capitalism that has unfolded since 2008 is more than an economic crisis. It is structural and multidimensional. The sequence of events that have taken place in its aftermath show that we are entering a world that is very different from the social and economic conditions that characterized the rise of global, informational capitalism in the preceding three decades. The policies and strategies that were intended to manage the crisis-with mixed results depending on the country-may usher in a distinctly different economic and institutional system, as the New Deal, the construction of the European Welfare State, and the Bretton Woods global financial architecture all gave rise to a new form of capitalism in the aftermath of the 1930s Depression, and World War II. This volume examines the cultures and institutions at the root of the crisis, as well as the conflicts and debates that may lead to a new social landscape, including the rise of alternative economic cultures in the social movements that have sprung up around the world. This collection of essays presents the results of a shared project of reflection by a group of international sociologists and social scientists, led by Manuel Castells. They conclude that to address life beyond the crisis, we need nothing less than a complete transformation of the mind-set that led to bankruptcy and despair, and to economies and societies based on an unsustainable model of speculative finance and political irresponsibility.

Some members of the European Union (EU) initially viewed the financial crisis as a purely American phenomenon. That view has changed as economic activity in the EU has declined at a fast pace over a short period of time. The authors of this book discuss the European Economic Recovery Plan, designed to exploit synergies and avoid negative spill-over effects through co-ordinated action, draw on all available policy levels, fiscal policies, structural and financial market reforms and external action and ensure full coherence between immediate actions and the EU's medium- to longer term objectives. This book provides an overview of the Swedish banking crisis and an explanation of the measures Sweden used to restore its banking system to health. Moreover, the recent experiences of Switzerland and other European countries (including Iceland, the UK, Sweden and Austria) raise questions about how national governments can effectively supervise large financial firms that operate across national borders. This book focuses on the development of organisational structures within national economies that can provide oversight of the different segments of the highly financial system. This book consists of public documents which have been located, gathered, combined, reformatted, and enhanced with a subject index, selectively edited and bound to provide easy access.

The 2007-08 credit crisis and the long recession that followed brutally exposed the economic and social costs of financialization. Understanding what lay behind these events, the rise of "fictitious capital" and its opaque logic, is crucial to grasping the social and political conditions under which we live. Yet, for most people, the operations of the financial system remain shrouded in mystery. In this lucid and compelling book, economist Cedric Durand offers a concise and critical introduction to the world of finance, unveiling the truth behind the credit crunch. Fictitious Capital moves beyond moralizing tales about greedy bankers, short-sighted experts and compromised regulators to look at the big picture. Using comparative data covering the last four decades, Durand examines the relationship between trends such as the rise in private and public debt and the proliferation of financial products; norms such as our habitual assumptions about the production of value and financial stability; and the relationship of all this to political power. Fictitious Capital offers a stark warning about the direction that the international economy is taking. Durand argues that the accelerated expansion of financial operations is a sign of the declining power of the economies of the Global North. The City, Wall Street and other centres of the power of money, he suggests, may already be caked with the frosts of winter.

One of the biggest questions of the financial crisis has not been answered until now. What happened at Lehman Brothers and why was it allowed to fail, with aftershocks that rocked the global economy? In this news-making, often astonishing book, a former Lehman Brothers Vice President gives us the straight answers--right from the belly of the beast.
In "A Colossal Failure of Common Sense," Larry McDonald, a Wall Street insider, reveals, the culture and unspoken rules of the game like no book has ever done. The book is couched in the very human story of Larry McDonald's Horatio Alger-like rise from a Massachusetts "gateway to nowhere" housing project to the New York headquarters of Lehman Brothers, home of one of the world's toughest trading floors.
We get a close-up view of the participants in the Lehman collapse, especially those who saw it coming with a helpless, angry certainty. We meet the Brahmins at the top, whose reckless, pedal-to-the-floor addiction to growth finally demolished the nation's oldest investment bank. The Wall Street we encounter here is a ruthless place, where brilliance, arrogance, ambition, greed, capacity for relentless toil, and other human traits combine in a potent mix that sometimes fuels prosperity but occasionally destroys it.
The full significance of the dissolution of Lehman Brothers remains to be measured. But this much is certain: it was a devastating blow to America's--and the world's--financial system. And it need not have happened. This is the story of why it did.

"From the Hardcover edition."

Killing Bugs for Business and Beauty examines the beginning of Canada's aerial war against forest insects and how a tiny handful of officials came to lead the world with a made-in-Canada solution to the problem. Shedding light on a largely forgotten chapter in Canadian environmental history, Mark Kuhlberg explores the theme of nature and its agency. The book highlights the shared impulses that often drove both the harvesters and the preservers of trees, and the acute dangers inherent in allowing emotional appeals instead of logic to drive environmental policy-making. It addresses both inter-governmental and intra-governmental relations, as well as pressure politics and lobbying. Including fascinating tales from Cape Breton Island, Muskoka, and Stanley Park, Killing Bugs for Business and Beauty clearly demonstrates how class, region, and commercial interests intersected to determine the location and timing of aerial bombings. At the core of this book about killing bugs is a story, infused with innovation and heroism, of the various conflicts that complicate how we worship wilderness.

From Black Monday to the Asian financial crisis, from the internet bubble to mortgage meltdown, our lives are ruled by crazy cycles of euphoria and hysteria that manage to grip the world but are all-too-soon forgotten. In this unique collection of articles Michael Lewis - ex-trader and bestselling chronicler of greed and frenzy in the markets - casts a sceptical eye back over the most panicked-about panics of recent decades. He tells a story of boom and bust, deranged greed, outsized egos and over-inflated salaries, where the only thing that can ever be predicted is our constant inability to predict anything. Using contemporary accounts from commentators such as Joseph Stiglitz, Jeffrey Sachs and Paul Krugman, plus many of his own best writings, Lewis conveys the mood before each catastrophe, what it was like in the heat of the moment, how, afterwards, we tried to explain away the chaos - and then failed to learn from it before the whole process started all over again.

In this intimate account of one of the world's most productive inland fisheries, Troubling the Water explores how the rapid destruction of a single lake in Cambodia is upending the lives of millions. The abundance of Cambodia's Tonle Sap Lake helped grow the country for millenia and gave rise to the Kingdom of Angkor. Fed by the rich, mud-colored waters of the powerful Mekong River, the lake owes its vast bounty to an ecological miracle that has captivated poets, artisans, and explorers throughout history. But today, the lake is dying. Hydropower dams hold back billions of gallons of water and disrupt critical fish migration paths. On the lake, illegal fishing abetted by corruption is now unstoppable. A fast-changing climate, meanwhile, has seen a string of devastating droughts. Troubling the Water follows ordinary Cambodians coping with the rapid erasure of a long-held way of life. Drawing on years of reporting in Cambodia, Abby Seiff traces the changes on the Tonle Sap - weaving together vivid stories of those most affected with sharp insight into the one of the most threatened lakes in the world. For the millions who depend on it, the stakes couldn't be higher.

A better policy framework for preventing, managing, and helping people recover from crises is crucial to lifting long-term growth and livelihoods in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). The need for this policy framework has never been more urgent as the region faces the monumental task of recovery from the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic. Whether specific policy responses will deliver the expected growth dividends will depend on the underlying vision of how labor markets adjust to crises and the quality of the policies enacted. This report estimates how crises change labor market flows, assesses how these changes affect people, and discusses the key policy responses.The key findings are threefold. First, crises have significant impacts on employment dynamics and structure in Latin America. Different labor market dynamics hide behind similar reductions in labor demand. Crises increase unemployment. This is the principal margin of adjustment despite highly informal labor markets. Across the region, the biggest employment losses are in the formal sector, driven by a reduction in job-finding rates rather than higher job-loss rates. Adjustment through reduction in hours worked does not seem to be an important factor in most countries' formal or informal sectors. Crises do not just shape worker flows temporarily-they have significant after-crisis effects on the structure of employment that last for several years. These effects are such that good job opportunities are gradually shrinking. Whereas in some countries the whole economy shrinks, in others informality serves as a partial buffer.Second, crises leave scars. Some workers recover from displacement and other livelihood shocks, while others are permanently scarred. For lower-skilled workers, earnings losses are persistent. Workers with higher education suffer no impacts of the crisis on their wages and very short-lived impacts on their employment. The responses are similar across male and female workers and workers with high and low previous participation in the formal labor market. New entrants to the labor market during a crisis face a worse career start - one from which it is difficult to recover. Yet, crises also bring efficiency gains, as detailed in this report.This study finds that both the structure of product markets and the conditions in local labor markets matter for the severity of crisis-induced employment and earnings losses across localities and sectors. Workers in more protected sectors that enjoy rents are sheltered from adjustment, while workers in localities with more informality cope better. This suggests the need for integrated responses at the worker, sector, and locality levels.Third, this study considers how the region's policy frameworks can more effectively respond to crises-mitigating scarring, speeding adjustment, and promoting long-term growth. It proposes a three-pronged strategy, including (i) creating a more stable macroeconomic environment at the aggregate level to smooth the impacts of crises, including "automatic stabilizers" such as countercyclical, publicly-financed income support that is lacking in LAC; (ii) increasing the capacity of social protection and labor policies to provide income support as well prepare workers for change through reemployment assistance; and (iii) tackling structural issues, including addressing product market competition, contestability issues, and the spatial dimension behind poor labor market adjustment.