The newly released Misery Index, compiled by the Instituto Juan de Mariana, provides a detailed analysis of economic hardship across the European Union, focusing on unemployment and inflation as its key indicators.
Financial firms serve many useful functions which individuals and households could scarcely undertake on their own. These functions include maturity transformation, matching lenders and borrowers at low cost, facilitating the transfer of risk and consumption across time and between people, monitoring, and diversification of investments.
One of the main objectives of post-crisis financial regulation has been the severing of the nexus between large banks and national sovereigns, such that private losses do not lead to taxpayer bailouts.